We shouldn’t rewrite the classics to appease religious belief but changing texts is not always wrong.” Stephanie Merritt on the (apparently false) story that the Bristol Old Vic production of Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine the Great” changed the text in order to avoid offending Muslims.
While the article is quite balanced in its treatment of that particular issue, you can’t but be struck by the casually bigoted attitude towards the religious beliefs of minority communities. Thus we are told, yet again, that the extension of the racial hatred laws to cover incitement to religious hatred should be opposed because “belief is a choice, ethnicity is not”. Yeah sure – Muslims don’t need protection against the hate-propaganda of the BNP because they can avoid it by the simple expedient of changing their religion or embracing atheism.
And then we are warned that “an increasing number of religious groups – even meek and mild Christians – now include rogue elements who feel their freely chosen beliefs are not robust enough to withstand criticism or mockery and must be defended by threatening or violent means”.
So, unlike the aggressive religions of minority communities, Christianity is the province of the “meek and mild”. This would be the faith that features George W. Bush and Ian Paisley among its adherents, would it?
Daniel Pipes complains: “My talks at university campuses sometimes occasion protests featuring Leftists and Islamists who call me names. A favorite of theirs is ‘racist’. This year, for example, a ‘Stand up to Racism Rally’ anticipated my talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I was accused of racism against Muslim immigrants at Dartmouth College, and pamphlets at the University of Toronto charged me with ‘anti-Muslim racism’.”
BNP leader Nick Griffin warns of the threatening Muslim conquest of Europe, taking as his text an article by “Patrick Sookhdeo, the brave International Director of the Barnabas Fund”.
In excerpts from a forthcoming book entitled ‘Free Expression is No Offence’, Philip Pullman, Monica Ali, Philip Hensher and Salman Rushdie consider the threat to free speech contained in the government’s Racial and Religious Hatred Bill.
“Mr Fernando is right to say that racism has no place in the lesbian and gay community. As I wrote in the Gay & Lesbian Humanist magazine ‘… racism is the antithesis of Humanism. We are not concerned where people come from genetically or geographically, but we ought to care very much about where they are going, ideologically. Racial discrimination is abhorrent …’ In other words, no one should be discriminated against or victimised because of their race, ethnicity, or skin colour – however, we should (and I quote again from the article) ‘… hold people to account for their beliefs and the actions that arise from them’.”