Blasphemy and Heresy: The Modernist Challenge.A Review Article

Abstract

The word blasphemy, once considered a relic of the benighted middle ages, is enjoying something of a popular revival especially in the west. This is not because it has its own particular currency as an ongoing practice but because it has usefulness in providing an index to the uneven development of world societies, as well as establishing the status of their laws in guaranteeing fundamental liberties of speech and the degree of tolerance that their civil societies are inclined to show. It is no accident that two recent, identically titled books on blasphemy, albeit written from quite different perspectives, culminate in the Rushdie as an exemplary case study to explicate the cultural meanings of blasphemy. Thefatwa against Rushdie is the ostensible starting point for a retrospective view of the stages through which European history has passed, as well as the end point for the dangers posed to western society by religious fundamentalism, particularly militant Islamic fundamentalism.' David Lawton specifically states at the outset that his interest in blasphemy [was] re-awakened by the Rushdie affair and proclaims that he does not address this book to anyone who supports killing writers, as if all those who took offense with Rushdie's novel also endorsed his death penalty. Lawton's is a voice that speaks for an enlightened multiculturalism against the perverted and already transcultured monoculturalism of militant Muslims like Yusuf Islam and Doctor Siddiqi.2 The terms of the debate are clear and unambiguous, firmly establishing that blasphemy prosecution and a tolerant society are incompatible propositions. If blasphemy as a concept denotes the past of the European world, it is also put to use to mark the present of the non-European world. The narrative organization of both works views blasphemy as helping to demarcate the west from the Islamic world far more usefully than any other signifier-cultural, geographical, or political. Leonard Levy's Blasphemy: Verbal Offense against