Should we print pictures of the Prophet Muhammad?

Should we print pictures of the Prophet Muhammad?  This for me is the thorniest issue to come out of the recent terrible events in Paris.  What’s more important – free speech or respecting the religious beliefs of others?  The question comes down to a clash between two different kinds of rights, where believers tend to emphasise one value, and liberal secularists the opposing one. 

We might assume that freedom of speech inevitably trumps some ill-defined right not to be offended – or to respond to offence.  But the situation is complicated by the fact that it’s clearly legitimate to oppose racist hate speech, and criticisms of Islam can never by entirely disconnected from prejudice against Muslims who are not only a religious group but, in most western countries, a vulnerable ethnic minority too.  As Jews, this sensitivity should be particularly clear to us.

Jewish tradition has two other important contributions to make to this debate.

One is Judaism’s radical monotheism, articulated most powerfully by Maimonides, the 13^th century legal authority and philosopher whose most important intellectual influences were the Islamised versions of Aristotelian thought he learned from Arabic writers like Al Farabi, Avicenna and Averroes.  Maimonides teaches that the fight against idolatry is no longer about combatting the worship of physical images.  Idolatry in his day manifested itself in people’s internalised, anthropomorphic, mental images of God.  For Maimonides, God cannot be conceptualised, known, or spoken about in any way.  God is beyond the grasp of the human intellect and imagination.  Any image of God is by definition human, not divine.  So too, revelation is a purely intellectual process and any anthropomorphic account (which has God speaking or writing, for example) must be understood allegorically.

Maimonides’ theology should make clear to any remotely sophisticated monotheist that blasphemy does not affect God, only the feelings of believers who incorrectly assume that God needs their protection.

The second contribution stems from the fact that unlike western legal systems, Jewish law focuses on obligations, not rights.  This distinction dissolves much of the tension between freedom of speech and freedom from religious offence in which we try, problematically, to defend the absolute right to offend the religious sensibilities of people who we want to avoid upsetting or indirectly harming. 

Rather than rights to speak and respond to offence, Judaism posits two relevant duties: the obligation to avoid harming others through speech (unless specific circumstances mean refraining from speaking out will cause more harm) and the primary obligation not to inflict injury or death.  Every individual has to weigh up whether and how to speak, write and draw in light of the harm likely to be caused by action or inaction.  But if someone steps over the line, we all have an absolute, unconditional obligation to refrain from violence.

Yesterday I met with a Muslim colleague who is keen to initiate serious dialogue between the Jewish and Muslim communities in an effort to create a nuanced, non-fundamentalist theological discourse which will lend support to the values of peace and co-existence.  In the present climate, I believe the role of religious people of faith has never been more important.