Freedom of Speech in Universities

Islam, Charities and Counter-terrorism

Alison Scott-Baumann, Simon Perfect

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367724566
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000359619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia islamica

Freedom of speech and extremism in university campuses are major sources of debate and moral panic in the United Kingdom today. In 2018, the Joint Committee on Human Rights in Parliament undertook an inquiry into freedom of speech on campus. It found that much of the public concern is exaggerated, but identified a number of factors that require attention, including the impact of government counter-terrorism measures (the Prevent Duty) and regulatory bodies (including the Charity Commission for England and Wales) on freedom of speech.

This book combines empirical research and philosophical analysis to explore these issues, with a particular focus on the impact upon Muslim students and staff. It offers a new conceptual paradigm for thinking about freedom of speech, based on deliberative democracy, and practical suggestions for universities in handling it.

Topics covered include:

• The enduring legacy of key thinkers who have shaped the debate about freedom of speech
• The role of right-wing populism in driving moral panic about universities
• The impact of the Prevent Duty and the Charity Commission upon Muslim students, students' unions and university managers
• Students' and staff views about freedom of speech
• Alternative approaches to handling freedom of speech on campus, including the Community of Inquiry

This highly engaging and topical text will be of interest to those working within public policy, religion and education or religion and politics and Islamic Studies.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.

1 Freedom of speech

Understanding the ideas

Too often, we tend to see freedom of speech as a binary – you either support more of it or want to restrict it. This simplistic view obscures centuries of intellectual debate about what it means to speak freely, why it is important and where the boundaries of speech should lie. We cannot hope to change the polarised state of debate about speech today if we do not grapple with the ideas of key theorists.

This chapter begins with a brief consideration of thinking about freedom of speech in religious traditions, including Islam. It examines the ideas of key thinkers who have driven the intellectual debate about this freedom. Finally, it offers a new paradigm for thinking about how to handle freedom of speech practically, in universities and elsewhere. This fourfold model is summarised in Table 1.1.

The state, religions and the risks of freedom of speech

Debates about freedom of speech appear right at the beginning of Western philosophy. As the ‘grandfather’ of freedom of speech, Socrates believed that parrhesia, ‘free speech’, is a privilege with immense value. Through speaking freely, one ends up revealing one’s own ignorance to oneself and to others and, most importantly, learns from that experience. Yet Plato, Socrates’ pupil, saw freedom of speech as a potential risk – and as particularly dangerous when women speak (Beard, 2017: 3–43). Plato feared that in a fully democratic society, unrestricted speech could lead to ordinary people challenging the existing order and thus fracturing the state. This worry that freedom of speech can challenge a state is a recurrent theme in philosophy. It re-emerges today in government concern about ‘extreme’ speech on campus, which focuses upon religion, especially Islam.

Religious traditions have much to say about freedom of speech, as something that is both risky and to be defended. It is important to take account of historical religious thought here: today religions are often accused of wanting to curtail freedom of speech, which is imagined as a purely ‘secular’ principle. These are gross generalisations. In reality, the principles or rights seen as core to democracy in the West today (including religious liberty, freedom of speech and the concept of secularism itself) have roots in religious as well as freethinking ideas and historically were advocated by committed religious people as well as freethinkers, often against the religious and temporal authorities of their day. After the Second World War, moreover, Christian-inspired politicians in Europe were responsible for promoting the discourse of human rights, drawing on language like the dignity of the human ‘person’ which had origins in Catholic Social Teaching (Spencer, 2016: 134).¹

That said, the limitations on freedom of speech within religious traditions should not be downplayed because they remain with us despite increasing secularisation. Many religions contain prohibitions against blasphemy – verbal or written expressions that attack religious tenets or structures that expert religious authorities view as orthodox. Many traditions regard such expressions as offensive and even harmful to individuals, the community, the state and/or to God. In the Abrahamic religions there are many moral exhortations and legal prohibitions against certain expressions viewed as religiously injurious, in both the foundational scriptures and subsequent jurisprudence. In the Torah, for example, taking the name of the Lord in vain and worshipping false gods or graven images are considered deeply harmful actions, breaking the covenant between God and his people. In Christian Europe, ecclesiastical and temporal authorities took steps to limit religious freedom and harshly punish blasphemy and heresy. In medieval and early modern Christian states, offences against orthodox religious beliefs were often regarded as offences against the temporal state and tantamount to treason, as was the case with Catholics and Protestant Dissenters in England in the 16th and 17th centuries (Nash, 2007: 2–4).

Islamic ideas on freedom of speech

More than any other group, Muslims and Islam are currently often perceived as being ‘Other’, hostile to freedom of speech and promoting views incompatible with supposed ‘Western’ values more widely. Thus it is particularly important to pay attention to Islamic thought on freedom of speech.

Millions of Muslims worldwide rely on varying interpretations of Islamic law to guide their conduct. Islamic law consists of a vast corpus of different, often competing, scholarly interpretations of the Islamic scriptures (the Qu’ran and the Hadith). Through analysing these sources, jurists seek to understand how God wants humans to behave in different situations. There is no single ‘law book’ for Islamic law, and the interpretations of a particular scholar (issued as fatwas, nonbinding legal opinions) are simply that – interpretations, which some Muslims take as authoritative and enforceable, and which others dismiss (Hendrickson, 2013: 173–174). Some Muslim-majority countries today enforce particular understandings of Islamic law through the courts, whereas in Britain, Muslims may follow any interpretation they wish, within the boundaries of the civil law. These points are poorly understood in British media outlets, some of which publish sensationalist stories about Muslim scholars issuing illiberal or restrictive fatwas without making clear that such interpretations have little relevance to most British Muslims (for example Thornhill, 2015).

Two strands of Isla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and table
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Freedom of speech: Understanding the ideas
• Chapter 2: Populism, freedom of speech and human rights
• Chapter 3: The Prevent Duty and the views of university Prevent Leads
• Chapter 4: External agitators and students’ views about freedom of speech and Prevent
• Chapter 5: Charity law, political activism and speaking freely in students’ unions
• Chapter 6: The Charity Commission’s interventions in students’ unions
• Chapter 7: Improving conversations about difficult topics
• Appendix
• Index