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Islam in the Secular Nomos of the European Court of Human Rights Michigan Journal of International Law Volume 32 Issue 4 2011 Islam in the Secular Nomos of the European Court of Human Rights Peter G. Danchin University of Maryland School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Courts Commons, European Law Commons, and the Religion Law Commons Recommended Citation Peter G. Danchin, Islam in the Secular Nomos of the European Court of Human Rights, 32 MICH. J. INT'L L. 663 (2011). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol32/iss4/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Michigan Journal of International Law at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Journal of International Law by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ISLAM IN THE SECULAR NOMOS OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS Peter G. Danchin* INTRODUCTION ..................................................... 664 I. THE CONCEPT OF THE SECULAR PUBLIC SPHERE....................673 A. The Antinomies of Secularism ........................674 1. The Right to Freedom of Religion and Belief ............ 675 2. Public Reason and Private Faith ...... ......... 682 3. The Authority of Public Reason....... ............... 683 B. Rethinking the Secular .................... .... 685 C. Between Rationality and Reason. ........... ..... 690 II. RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN ECHR JURISPRUDENCE ........ ..... 692 A. The Rights of Religious Minorities........... ..... 692 B. Freedomfrom Injury to Religious Feelings.... ...... 693 C. The Claims of Muslim Communities ......... ........ 696 III. ISLAM IN ARTICLE 9 JURISPRUDENCE........................705 A. The Scope of the Right to Religious Freedom....................707 1. Enlightenment Rationalism......................709 2. Value Pluralism........................715 3. Pluralism and Islam ...............................723 B. Public Order and the Rights of Others.............728 1. Rival Enlightenments ..............................731 2. From Blasphemy to Incitement to Religious Hatred .. 735 C. Is "Secularism" Necessary in a Democratic Society?......741 CONCLUSION ............................................... ........ 744 * Associate Professor of Law and Director of the International and Comparative Law Program, University of Maryland School of Law. B.A., LL.B. (Hons.), University of Melbourne; LL.M., J.S.D., Columbia University. An early version of this Article was pre- sented at the 2010 Association of American Law Schools symposium on The Freedom of Religion and Belief Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights: Legal, Moral, Political and Religious Perspectives. I am grateful to Zachary Calo, Cole Durham, Carolyn Evans, Mark Modak-Truran, Gerhard Robbers, Brett Scharffs, and the other participants for their insights. Later versions were presented at workshops at the University of Maryland School of Law, Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley. I wish to thank Martha Ertman, Silvio Ferrari, Michelle Harner, Leslie Meltzer Henry, Elizabeth Shak- man Hurd, Saba Mahmood, and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan for their comments and criticisms. All errors and omissions are my own. 663 664 Michigan Journal of InternationalLaw [Vol. 32:663 We inhabit a nomos-a normative universe. We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlaw- ful, of valid and void. The student of law may come to identify the normative world with the professional paraphernaliaof so- cial control. The rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention. No set of legal institutions or prescriptionsexists apartfrom the narrativesthat locate it and give it meaning. -Robert Cover' INTRODUCTION In 1990, Mr. Choudhury, a British Muslim, sought to bring a private prosecution in the United Kingdom for what he regarded as blasphemous attacks on Islam in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate refused, however, to issue a summons for blas- phemy against Rushdie and his publisher on the grounds that the offense could not be committed where the religion concerned is not Christianity.2 Mr. Choudhury sought review of the decision in the Queen's Bench Di- visional Court.' There, Lord Watkins confirmed that "as the law now stands it does not extend to religions other than Christianity,"A and the application was refused. Having exhausted his domestic remedies, Mr. Choudhury took his complaint to the European Commission on Human Rights where he claimed that the inability to prosecute Rushdie and his publisher in Eng- land for blasphemy violated his right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion under Article 9 and constituted discrimination on the basis of religion under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).' The nature of the complaint was not without precedent I. Robert M. Cover, The Supreme Court: 1982 Term: Foreword: Nomos and Narra- tive, 97 HARV. L. REv. 4, 4 (1983) (footnotes omitted). 2. R v. Chief Metro. Stipendiary Magistrate (Er Parte Choudhury), [1991] 1 All E.R. 306 (Q.B) at 306; see also Robert McCorquodale, Blasphemous Verses, 50 CAMBRIDGE L.J. 22 (1991). 3. Ex Parte Choudhury, [1991] 1 All E.R. 306 (Q.B) at 308. 4. Id. at 318. 5. Id. at 308-09, 318, 323 (declining to extend the common law offense of blasphe- mous libel to cover religions other than Anglicanism and, in certain respects, to Christianity as a whole). 6. Choudhury v. United Kingdom, App. No. 17439/90, 12 HUM. RTs. L.J. 172 (1991); see also Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, arts. 9, 14, Mar. 20, 1952, 213 U.N.T.S. 222 [hereinafter ECHR]. Summer 201l]1 Islam in the Secular Nomos 665 in ECHR jurisprudence. Eight years previously, the Commission had upheld the successful prosecution of a British magazine for publishing a poem found to be blasphemous to Christians partly on the basis that the "main purpose" of the English common law offense of blasphemous li- bel is "to protect the rights of citizens not to be offended in their religious feelings by publications."7 In following the reasoning of the U.K. Divisional Court,' however, the Commission determined that the British government had not interfered with Mr. Choudhury's right to freedom of religion and belief because there was no positive obligation on states under the ECHR to protect all religious sensibilities.! The fact that the English law of blasphemy extended only to the Church of Eng- land was not, accordingly, discrimination on the basis of religion.'o The Commission's decision infuriated the Islamic community in Britain." It was soon followed in 1994 by a decision of the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) upholding the Austrian government's seizure of the film Das Liebeskonzil (Council in Heaven) on the basis that it constituted an attack on the Christian religion-Roman Catholi- cism in particular-by violating "[t]he respect for the religious feelings of believers as guaranteed in Article 9 . .. by provocative portrayals of objects of religious veneration." 2 Then, in 1996, the Court upheld again a refusal by the British government to permit circulation of a film, Vi- sions of Ecstasy, on the basis that the government had the legitimate aim to "protect 'the rights of others' " and to protect "against seriously offen- sive attacks on matters regarded as sacred by Christians."" 7. Gay News Ltd. v. United Kingdom, App. No. 8710/79, 5 Eur. H.R. Rep. 123, 130, 11(1982). 8. In considering the ECHR, the Divisional Court decided that "the provisions of the Convention concerning the right to freedom of religion and to protection from discrimination on the ground of religion did not require an English law of blasphemy to protect the beliefs of Islam." McCorquodale, supra note 2, at 23; cf infra text accompanying note 282 (discussing how the Select Committee on Religious Offenses in England and Wales considered that the law of blasphemy is discriminatory). 9. R v. Chief Metro. Stipendiary Magistrate (Ex Parte Choudhury), [1991] 1 All E.R. 306 (Q.B) at 308. 10. Choudhury v. United Kingdom, App. No. 17439/90, 12 HuM. RTs. L.J. 172, 172-73 (1991); see also STEPHEN H. BAILEY, DAVID J. HARRIS & DAVID C. ORMEROD, CIVIL LIBER- TIES: CASES AND MATERIALS 1050-53 (5th ed. 2001); Paul Kearns, The Uncultured God: Blasphemy Law's Reprieve and the Art Matrix, 5 EUR. HUM. RTs. L. REv. 512, 515 (2000). 11. Javaid Rehman, Religion, Minority Rights and Muslims of the United Kingdom, in RELIGION, HUMAN RIGHTS AND INTERNATIONAL LAw: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF MUSLIM STATE PRACTICES 521, 531-32 (Javaid Rehman & Susan C. Breau eds., 2007). 12. Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria, 295 Eur. Ct. H.R. (ser. A) at 1, 17-18 (1994). 13. Wingrove v. United Kingdom, 23 Eur. Ct. H.R. 1937, 1957 (1996); see also infra note 105 and accompanying text (discussing the Court's analysis in Otto-Preminger-Institut v. Austria, 295 Eur. Ct. H.R. (ser. A) at 1 (1994)). 666 Michigan Journal of InternationalLaw [Vol. 32:663 As scholars have noted, these early cases in the Court's Article 9 ju- risprudence provide evidence of a disparity in the treatment of the claims of majority and minority religious groups.14 Ghandhi and James thus ob- serve: The publication in September 1988 of Salman Rushdie's book The Satanic Verses, as is very well known, caused outrage among both British and non-British Muslims. Copies of the book were burned publicly across the world. Riots on the Indian sub-continent resulted in deaths. The Ayatollah Khomeini issued his notorious fatwa, which is still in existence. Yet the Divisional Court concluded that, inter alia, the blasphemous libel of Allah (Almighty God), the prophet Ibrahim, Muhammad the Holy Prophet of Islam and the religion of Islam was not an offence known to English law.
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