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Religion and Freedom of Speech: Cartoons and Controversies
Robert Post, with commentary by Deniz Göktürk, David Hollinger, and Saba Mahmood

Robert Post is David Boies Professor of Law, Yale University. He taught at the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, 1983-2003. In March 2007 Post returned to Berkeley to deliver the Una’s Lecture at the Townsend Center. This is an excerpt of his lecture.

On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten solicited and published 12 cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. By American standards, the cartoons are prosaic.

One is a child’s portrait of Muhammad in the desert; another shows Muhammad’s face intertwined with Islamic symbols, like the crescent and the star; several poke fun of the newspaper, calling the cartoons a “PR Stunt” and the journalists a “bunch of reactionary provocateurs.” Some contain ordinary, rather anodyne satire. One shows Muhammad with a turban in the shape of a bomb; another confuses Muhammad with St. Peter, portraying the prophet at the entrance to cloud-filled heaven facing a long line of suicide bombers, saying, “Stop, Stop. We ran out of virgins.”

The consequence of publishing these cartoons was truly dreadful. There were riots throughout the world. According to one estimate, 139 people died. A fatwa was issued offering a million-dollar bounty for the death of the cartoonists. Newspaper editors were fired and imprisoned, newspapers were closed, and an Italian minister was forced to resign for displaying the cartoons on his T-shirt. The Swedish foreign minister was forced to resign for attempting to close a website that wished to display the cartoons.

Islam contains a rich history of portraying the prophet Mohammad, but the modern fundamentalist sects who now claim to speak for Islam believe that it is forbidden to publish any representation of Muhammad, or, in some versions, of any prophet recognized by Islam. How ought the law respond? How should the law mediate between the demands of religious sanctity and freedom of speech?

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Commentary

Deniz Göktürk (Associate Professor of German)

David Hollinger ( Preston Hotchkis Professor and Department Chair of History)

Saba Mahmood (Assistant Professor of Anthropology).