The shape of free speech: rethinking liberal free speech theory

Noting the apparent inconsistency in attitudes towards free speech with respect to anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in western liberal democracies, this article works through the problem of inconsistency within liberal free speech theory, arguing that this symptomatically reveals an aporia that exposes the inability of liberal free speech theory to account for the ways in which free speech actually operates in liberal social orders. Liberal free speech theory conceptualizes liberty as smooth, continuous, homogeneous, indivisible and extendable without interruption until it reaches the outer limits. This makes it difficult for liberal free speech theory to account for restrictions that lie within those outer limits, and therefore for the ways in which restraints, restrictions and closures are always already at work within the lived experience of liberty, for it is these – and the inconsistencies they give rise to – that give freedom its particular texture and timbre in any given social and cultural context. The article concludes with an alternative ‘liquid’ theory of free speech, which accounts for the ‘shaping’ of liberty by social forces, culture and institutional practices

Articles of Faith: Freedom of Expression and Religious Freedom in Contemporary Multiculture

This article examines the relationship between freedom of religion and freedom of speech and expression within contemporary multicultural liberal democracies. These two fundamental human rights have increasingly been seen, in public and political discourse, in terms of tension if not outright opposition, a view reinforced by the Charlie Hebdo killings in January 2015. And yet in every human rights charter they are proximate to one another. This essay argues that this adjacency is not coincidental, that it has a history and that, in illuminating this history, it is possible to explore how the contemporary framing of these two rights as being in opposition has come about. Looking back to the framing of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, the essay offers an historical perspective that, in turn, facilitates a reappraisal and re-evaluation of these two liberties that is the necessary, albeit insufficient, predicate to the task of addressing the problematic of multicultural ‘crisis' in the contemporary liberal democracies of Western Europe, North America and Australasia, in which the presence of certain religious communities (Muslims, in particular) and the role of religion in public and political life more generally (and, conversely, of secularism) has assumed a central importance

Amitav Ghosh

This is a critical introduction to the fictional and non-fictional writings of one of the most celebrated and significant literary voices to have emerged from India in recent decades. Encompassing all of Amitav Ghosh's writings to date, it takes a thematic approach that enables in-depth analysis of the cluster of themes, ideas and issues that Ghosh has steadily built up into a substantial intellectual project. This project overlaps significantly with many of the key debates in postcolonial studies and so this book is both an introduction to Ghosh's writing and a contribution to the development of ideas on the ‘postcolonial’ — in particular, its relation to postmodernism

Bad faith:The construction of Muslim extremism in Ed Husain’s The Islamist

Fiction by writers of Muslim background forms one of the most diverse, vibrant and high-profile corpora of work being produced today - from the trail-blazing writing of Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi, which challenged political and racial orthodoxies in the 1980s, to that of a new generation including Mohsin Hamid, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie. This collection reflects the variety of those fictions. Experts in English, South Asian, and postcolonial literatures address the nature of Muslim identity: its response to political realignments since the 1980s, its tensions between religious and secular models of citizenship, and its manifestation of these tensions as conflict between generations. In considering the perceptions of Muslims, contributors also explore the roles of immigration, class, gender, and national identity, as well as the impact of 9/11. This volume includes essays on contemporary fiction by writers of Muslim origin and non-Muslims writing about Muslims. It aims to push beyond the habitual populist 'framing' of Muslims as strangers or interlopers whose ways and beliefs are at odds with those of modernity, exposing the hide-bound, conservative assumptions that underpin such perspectives. While returning to themes that are of particular significance to diasporic Muslim cultures, such as secularism, modernity, multiculturalism and citizenship, the essays reveal that 'Muslim writing' grapples with the same big questions as serve to exercise all writers and intellectuals at the present time: How does one reconcile the impulses of the individual with the requirements of community? How can one 'belong' in the modern world? What is the role of art in making sense of chaotic contemporary experience

Between Turban and Tarbush: Modernity and the Anxieties of Transition in Hadith 'Isa ibn Hisham

[تحلل وتقيم هذه المقالة أثر التحولات الاجتماعية في القرن التاسع عشر في مصر، بما في ذلك مناورات الانتقال من بنية تقليدية إلى مجتمع حديث، على نص حديث عيسى بن هشام للمويلحي ويمكن اعتبار هذا النص عملاﹰ انتقالياﹰ أو جسراﹰ بين جنسين أدبيين غير متزامنين: المقامة كما عرفها التراث القديم، والرواية كما عرفها العصر الحديث، فهو نص يحمل ملامح الاثنين معاﹰ٠ ويجد الباحث بصمات النقلة من بنية القديم إلى بنية الحديث متواجدة على مستوى الشكل والمضمون في هذا العمل٠ إن ازدواجية الهوية في النص والموقف الملتبس للعمل من الزمن والمال والقانون يكشف عن تأرجحه بين مفاهيم التقدم الخطي للتاريخ والفردية الاقتصادية والقوانين العلمانية من جهة، وقيم تقليدية لهذه المفاهيم الثلاثة من جهة أخرى٠ كما أن شكل العمل يعكس كلا من خاتمة المقامة باعتبارها جنساﹰ أدبياﹰ معقداﹰ ومبهماﹰ لا يتمكن من التعبير عن تجرية الحداثة، وبداية نشوء أجناس أدبية ستقوم باستيعاب متغيرات العصر فيما بعد٠ إنه عمل يحمل في صميمه نقطة التحول من نهج إلى آخر٠

‘Representing the very ethic he battled’: secularism, Islam(ism) and self-transgression in The Satanic Verses

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ 2013 The Author. Non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly attributed, cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way, is permitted. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.This essay examines the ethics of historical representation in Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses in order to probe his claim that the novel explores religious belief from a secular point of view, and is undertaken ‘in good faith’. In so doing, the essay attempts to traffic between the discrepant secular and Islamic readings of the novel using a contrapuntal methodology which brings these perspectives into a productive crisis that opens up a space for other readings of the text that do justice to both its secular and literary dimensions, as well as the Islamic materials on which the novel draws heavily. The essay subsequently addresses one of the central objections articulated by the novel's Muslim critics – that it is a work of ‘bad history’ – in order to evaluate whether or not it was indeed written ‘in good faith’. The reading of the novel that emerges suggests that it is ethically problematic in this respect because its violations of the historical record pertaining to the Prophet Muhammad and early Islam deliver an interpretation of Islamic history that is complicit with the very Islamist understandings that Rushdie professes to be challenging