Blasphemy and the Rushdie case

This entry describes law and history. It advocates nothing, and a reader weighing what follows should know that Muslim scholars argue about it openly and that the argument is unfinished.

The Rushdie pronouncement was not what it is presented as

The 1989 pronouncement issued from one man holding state office in a Twelver Shi’i republic, and it was not the finding of Sunni Islam. Scholars at al-Azhar rejected it, and the Islamic Conference declined to endorse it, on grounds internal to the law: no court had sat, no charge had been answered, the accused was outside the jurisdiction, and no individual anywhere has standing to carry out a sentence nobody has pronounced. That last point is the one the polemic never registers. Even where classical law penalises an offence, it reserves execution of penalties to constituted authority, and treats the private avenger as a criminal himself.

What the classical law did hold

It held that sabb al-rasul, reviling the Prophet, was an offence, and the schools differed on its treatment: some assimilated it to apostasy, the Hanafis treated it distinctly, and the conditions, evidence, and openings for repentance varied considerably between them. This was confessional-state law, in a world where every polity treated attacks on its constitutive creed as a public offence. Blasphemy was capital in England into the seventeenth century and remained an offence on the statute book until 2008.

What the Qur’an says about the encounter

Its own instruction to the believer who meets mockery of the revelation is to withdraw from that gathering until the subject changes (4:140, 6:68). The response prescribed is to leave the room. It is not to pursue the speaker, and a tradition whose scripture answers ridicule with departure has an internal argument against those who answer it with a hunt.

The verdict

The case that made this famous was a political act by a state, rejected by much of the Muslim world at the time and misdescribed ever since as the verdict of a religion. The wider historical question, how confessional-state provisions relate to the modern state, is genuinely contested among Muslim scholars now, and anyone who tells you that conversation is settled, in either direction, is selling a conclusion rather than reporting one.