Anyone outraged by Labour MP Tahir Ali calling on the Government to introduce blasphemy laws has clearly not been paying attention, says Stephen Daisley in the Spectator, for there are already blasphemy laws in this country. Here’s an excerpt.
All Ali wants to do is make the [blasphemy laws] official. When he urges Sir Keir Starmer to prohibit the desecration of the Qur’an and other Abrahamic religious texts, as he did at Prime Minister’s Questions, he will be aware that people are already punished for desecrating the Muslim holy book, including children.
In March 2023, a 14 year-old boy was suspended from school in Wakefield after a copy of the Qur’an was ‘scuffed’. So great was the indignation that his mother eventually went before the local mosque, her sinful hair covered, and pleaded for her son’s safety.
In this country, we’re tough on blasphemy and tough on the causes of blasphemy. Just ask the Batley Grammar School teacher who faced protests from Muslims in March 2021 after he included an illustration of the Prophet Mohammed in a religious studies lesson. Well, you could ask him, except he’s apparently rather fond of his head and so has been in hiding ever since.
In fact, such is our zero-tolerance approach that we even punish Muslims who say or think the wrong thing about matters theological. In June 2022, cinemas across the U.K. pulled screenings of The Lady of Heaven, a historical epic telling Islam’s story from a Shia perspective, which did not go down well with elements of Britain’s overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim population. Mosques lobbied cinemas not to show the film, crowds of Muslim men gathered outside movie theatres, and Islamic website 5Pillars published a review denouncing The Lady of Heaven as “pure, unadulterated sectarian filth” and warned of “tensions”. (I always wondered what Pauline Kael would have sounded like from behind a burqa.)
While it might be jarring to secular ears to hear a British-born Labour MP propose the re-introduction of blasphemy laws, Ali is simply representing a section of his constituents.
A poll in March found that 52% of U.K. Muslims favour “making it illegal to show a picture or cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed” at some point in the coming 20 years. Reassuringly, the same poll showed a stout 23% opposed to the implementation of sharia.
Worth reading in full.
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