Blasphemy law is repealed in Ireland, enforced in Pakistan

The citizens of Ireland voted recently, in a nationwide referendum, to remove a clause from their constitution that had made blasphemy a criminal offense.

Ireland’s now-defunct Defamation Act of 2009 prohibited the “publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.” Just last year, in fact, Irish police opened a brief investigation into whether comedian Stephen Fry had broken the law when he described God as “capricious, mean-minded, stupid” and “an utter maniac” during a televised interview.

The overturning of Ireland’s blasphemy law stands in stark contrast to recent news out of Pakistan — where the release from prison of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, accused of blasphemy, has led to widespread protests.

Despite its recent defeat, Ireland’s 2009 blasphemy law is an important reminder that laws against blasphemy have hardly been unique to the Muslim world — even in the 21st century.

As of 2014, according to the Pew Research Center, nearly one-fifth of European countries and a third of countries in the Americas, notably Canada, have laws against blasphemy.

In my research for a literary study of blasphemy, I found that these laws may differ in many respects from their more wellknown counterparts in Muslim nations, but they also share some common features with them.

In particular, they’re all united in regarding blasphemy as a form of “injury” — even as they disagree about what, exactly, blasphemy injures.

In the Muslim world, such injured parties are often a lot easier to find. Cultural anthropologist Saba Mahmood said that many devout Muslims perceive blasphemy as an almost physical injury: an intolerable offense that hurts both God himself and the whole community of the faithful.

For Mahmood that perception was brought powerfully home in 2005, when a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Interviewing a number of Muslims at the time, Mahmood was “struck,” she wrote, “by the sense of personal loss” they conveyed. People she interviewed were very clear on this point:

“The idea that we should just get over this hurt makes me so mad.”

“I would have felt less wounded if the object of ridicule were my own parents.”

The intensity of this “hurt,” “wounding” and “ridicule” helps to explain how blasphemy can remain a capital offense in a theocratic state like Pakistan. The punishment is tailored to the enormity of the perceived crime.