Sacred and Secular Blasphemies

Abstract

Mass migration and other features of globalisation make easy distinctions between East and West difficult to maintain. Homi Bhabha views Western societies as incorporating increasing elements of hybridity in which the crossing of cultural frontiers and the creation of hybrid identities challenge the crude opposition between East and West. This analysis has its attractions, but becomes flawed when applied to law. When British Muslims sought to use the English law of blasphemy against the publication of The Satanic Verses, English legal discourse found recourse to representations of Islamic law that essentialised it. The English courts’ reaction to the claims of Muslims, compounded by decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, exposes the polarisation of those antagonistic binarisms that Bhabha was so quick to jettison in his celebration of hybridity and also the sharpening of moral oppositions between Islam and the West. This interpretation reveals the limits of cultural hybridity and how essentialising discourses which emphasise cultural boundedness are produced in the name of a subversive aesthetic hybridity. In utilising Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, this article focuses on the lack of hybridity in the interaction between English and Islamic law in the case of blasphemy and the limited extent of any legal pluralism. In addition, the analysis shows how English postcolonial legal discourse owes much to its colonial past in representing Islamic law as ‘Other’ and, in so doing, monopolises legal culture for itself.