Last Saturday’s Times reported that a Cambridge under-graduate has gone into hiding in a safe-house after receiving threats for having recently reproduced in a weekly satirical college flysheet one of the notorious Danish cartoons of Muhammad, along with a highly deprecatory remark about him, albeit one that some serious thinkers consider warranted, however misguidedly.
It also reported that, as well as dissociating itself from, and condemning, republication of the cartoon and publication of the comment, the student’s college is also beginning an investigation and disciplinary measures to determine whether he should be sent down for what he has done.
One can understand the college’s desire to avoid violent protests against the student as well as itself, sad though it be for the country to have found itself in a situation where, for something seemingly so comparatively trivial, such grave consequences have been thought liable to follow.
Should the college have announced it is considering whether to send the student down only as a way of taking the immediate heat out of the situation and until tempers cool, then its decision would be understandable. However, if it is seriously considering sending the student down, even if should he have been in breach of any student code of conduct it might have, its decision would represent a most serious and ill-advised restriction on freedom of thought and expression in one of the country’s oldest seats of learning.
It was bad enough when British newspapers refused to republish the cartoons at the time when world-wide protests about them were a major news item. But for a Cambridge college to take such draconian action against one of its students for having done so in one of its flysheets is much worse. What next? Will it be withdrawing copies of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses from the college library and other texts that have been known to or that they think might offend Muslims? Will they be withdrawing Richard Dawkins The God Illusion in case Muslims should decide to make that the object of their ire? Remember, at one time, denial of the existence of God was considered blasphemous in this country and a capital offence to boot.
It is one thing for British faith schools not to be allowed to teach deprecatory views about adherents of other faiths to their young charges. It is altogether another for a single undergraduate to publish a view that might offend or upset adherents of some faith, not because it insults them personally save by implying them to be fools rather than knaves for believing as they do.
Resort to use of imagery and satire to convey such thoughts about a faith is but a variant form of expression of such views. As such, one would have thought there was an unanswerable case for allowing publication and distribution of such imagery and satire in a non-incendiary context. Publishing them in a Cambridge college weekly fly-sheet hardly counts as taking the image and message onto the streets of Dewsbury, Luton and Tower Hamlets.
If it is asked: 'What about the possible offence that their publication in that college fly-sheet might give Muslim students at the college?', one could just as well argue that all its students should have to sign up to a code of conduct that required them to tolerate publication of views that might offend them, as long as they did not incite violence or hatred towards them for what they believe or who they are. How can there be a genuine liberal education in a University where there is not freedom of thought and expression?