Muslims, Incitement to Hatred and the Law

Abstract

There are many ways of considering the Muslim anger and protests against Salman Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses . One of the most direct is to use the occasion to ask in what way the Muslim demand for the withdrawal of the book compares and connects with existing limits to free speech and why these were not adequate to resolve the crisis. Most of the discussion in this respect has focused on the law of blasphemy, and many people, including the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, have argued that the privileged position that law gives to Christianity (or perhaps to the Anglican Church only) is incompatible with racial equality and that law should be abolished or extended to cover other religions. 1 . The law of blasphemy, however, is not the only law which in principle might protect Muslims but in fact fails to cover them. The Race Relations Act of 1976, including the offence of incitement to racial hatred, does not include religion as a component of the multiform concept of race consisting of differences and inferior treatment perceived to be based on ‘colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins’. The definition of a racial or ethnic group is wide but not without limits and this has meant that some minority religious groups such as Sikhs, Jews and Rastafarians enjoy some legal protection against discrimination and incitement to hatred (because they are deemed to meet the criteria of what constitutes an ethnic group) but Muslims do not. 2 . This is a significant exclusion for Muslims, for not only does it weaken their rights in employment, housing and so on, but it deprives them of a further opportunity of protection against offensive literature. The sense that Muslims have that the existing laws do not adequately recognise them as a group and fail to meet their needs on the issue of group defamation has, therefore, some justification and needs to be considered in terms of the purpose and nature of incitement to group hatred legislation. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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