The West Continues to Live Under an Islamic Blasphemy Law
The West Continues to Live Under an Islamic Blasphemy Law
A version of this article was published in QPosts (in Arabic)
In Britain, on 7 June, it was announced by the Cineworld cinema chain that they would not be showing screenings of The Lady of Heaven, due to fears for the safety of their staff, after Muslim protesters in several cities declared it “blasphemous”.
The Lady of Heaven is based on a retelling of the story of Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad and his first wife, Khadija. The film, which cost $15 million to make, was the directorial debut of Eli King, and it was written by Yasser al-Habib, a Kuwaiti Shi’a cleric, who is the spiritual leader of Hay’at Khaddam al-Mahdi or the Mahdi Servants Union (MSU), a religious group based in London. Though MSU is Shi’a, it follows the Shirazi line and is therefore opposed to the Iranian government and its state theology, wilayat al-faqih (guardianship of the jurist). Critics have accused the MSU of anti-Sunni sectarianism and of being cultic in nature.
Though Fatima is theoretically the main character, she does not appear until some way into the film, and her face does not actually appear on screen; she only appears shrouded in a veil. This is all the more surprising because the film does (sort of) show the face of the Prophet Muhammad, the first film to do so, albeit the actor is uncredited, and the film’s creators are at pains to say they have stayed within the bounds of the Islamic taboo against humans representing the Prophet. As the film’s website puts it: “In accordance with Islamic tradition, during the making of this film no individual represented a Holy Personality. The performances of the Holy Personalities were achieved through a unique synthesis of actors, in-camera effects, lighting, and visual effects.”
The film clearly has a Shi’a slant, and a lot of its focus is on Fatima’s husband, Ali ibn Abi Talib, a cousin of the Prophet Muhammad’s. Shi’is believe Ali, as the closest male blood relative of the Prophet’s, should have succeeded Muhammad at the head of the nascent Arab Empire. Ali did later become Caliph, but three others held the office first: Shi’is reject the legitimacy of these three men, while Sunnis accept them. This dispute about the successor to Muhammad is the origin of the Sunni-Shi’a split.
As such, the film is much more about the origins of Islam, from a Shi’a perspective, than a biographical flick about Fatima. The device used for telling this story is that a young boy from Mosul, Laith, whose mother was killed by the Islamic State (IS) in Mosul, is adopted by an Iraqi soldier from Baghdad and the soldier’s mother tells Laith the story. The film attempts to draw a contrast between Shi’ism’s apparent devotion to religious tolerance, and the intolerance of IS, while drawing a parallel between the repressive nature of IS’s rule and the regime of the first (Sunni) Caliph, Abu Bakr.
In terms of the film’s quality, one reviewer credited the “decent” production values, but was unimpressed with the acting, remarking on “some half-baked performances, and the odd tinge of cockney creeping in, … [which makes it] a bit too apparent that the cast hail from closer to Mile End [in London] than Medina.”
There were delays in the filming—which started in 2019—because of the coronavirus pandemic. It was finally shown for the first time at the July 2021 Cannes Film Festival, and was supposed to be released in Britain on 3 June.
Protests against the film began in Blackburn on 2 June, with about twenty-five people staging a silent protest outside the Vue. Over the next four days, the protests would become more raucous, much larger (comprising hundreds of people), and spread across the country to cities like Birmingham, Bradford, Bolton, and Sheffield.
The chairman of the Bolton Council of Mosques, Asif Patel, straightforwardly condemned the film as “blasphemous”, affronting Muslim “notions of sacredness dearly held by them”, and added that the film “misrepresents orthodox historical narratives” and is “underpinned with a sectarian ideology”. The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), a Muslim Brotherhood-linked organization that claims to be a diverse and representative body for Britain’s Muslims, was more circumspect, saying that its objection to the film was that it would “fuel hatred” and was “engaging in sectarianism”, while the MCB had “always advocated for respectful dialogue of intra-faith relations”. Which is, as they say, one view.
Among the protesters, some signs were overt in wanting to eliminate a film that transgressed their religious sensitivities: for example, “Our Prophet, Our Honour”. But many presented their demand for the suppression of civil liberties, as the MCB did, in the contemporary vocabulary of the human-resources department—harm, safety, and the rest of it. “Cineworld Promotes Hate”, said one sign. Another, inevitably, said, “Say No to Racism”, despite the film having no content that could reasonably be called racist and being created and portrayed largely by people of colour.
It was in this language of safety that Cineworld announced its capitulation, sending out a statement on 7 June that read in part: “Due to recent incidents related to screenings of The Lady of Heaven, we have made the decision to cancel upcoming screenings of the film nationwide to ensure the safety of our staff and customers.” The difference, obviously, is that, unlike the protesters’ cynical use of this language to infringe the rights of others, Cineworld’s fear for the safety of its staff are quite genuine, very well-founded, and might lead to other cinema chains, like the Vue, following suit.
Since 1989, when author Salman Rushdie published a novel many Muslims did not like and the clerical regime in Iran issued a bounty for his murder, driving him into hiding for decades and leading to the deaths of several people associated with the book, incidents of this kind have recurred frequently. The most (in)famous was perhaps the publication of some caricatures of Muhammad in Denmark in 2005, which by 2006 had been whipped up into an international incident by Muslim activists, leading to attacks on Embassies and other forms of violence across the world. Another cartoonist who drew the Prophet, the late Lars Vilks in Sweden, went into hiding in 2007 and still the efforts to kill him continued. In 2011, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo was firebombed after it published cartoons of Muhammad and in 2015 jihadists massacred the staff at their office in Paris. In 2020, a French schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in the street after he taught about the Charlie Hebdo controversy.
These incidents and others like them are important for the effect they have in reminding everybody in Western countries that they are risking their lives if they offend what Muslims regard as sacred, but these are the exceptions: these are the occasions when people have dared defy this predicament; most people do not. It might be said that this is preferrable—what do we lose if satire like Charlie Hebdo’s disappears, really?—but, of course, the effect is far broader than such “provocative” enterprises. The media, art, scholarship, and any other field one cares to mention lives under this shadow, and the stifling effect is only rarely seen in the headlines: it is mostly in the books not written, the exhibits not shown, the lectures not given.
“We are very offended”, said one protester in Bradford. “We have a right not to be insulted.” He was essentially correct about this. The West has lived under a de facto Islamic blasphemy law for quite some time, and events in Britain last week show that it is still very much in force.