Should it be illegal to call Mohammed a paedophile?
by Douglas Murray, The American Spectator:
The ECHR have decided that truth is not a justification.
Should you be allowed to say that the founder of one of the world’s largest religions was a paedophile? According to the European Court of Human Rights the answer is ‘no’. In a decision issued this week the Court in Strasbourg ruled that this statement is defamatory towards the prophet of Islam, ‘goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate’ and ‘could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace.’ Details of the long-running case can be read here.
I will come to the civilisational problems with this in a moment. But first allow me to point out what a difficult position this puts my book collection in. For beside me as I write I have a huge four-volume collection of the hadith (sayings) of Mohammed picked up on my travels in North Africa some years ago. They are the Bukhari hadith – that is the collection of hadith that scholars of Islam recognise to be the most authentic and reputable collection of Mohammed’s sayings. Whenever I open them I find out many interesting things about the founder of Islam.
[…] Unwittingly, perhaps, the ECHR has brought us to something of an impasse in this ruling. For the hadith are – next to the Qur’an – the most important foundational texts of Islam. And they state, repeatedly and without caveat, that the founder of Islam had sex with a girl of nine, who he had married when she was six. Mohammed was 53 at this time.
Today we would call this paedophilia, and would have no difficulty in identifying it as such. Of course most of us would also remember that in the past different norms existed and we should try to understand their context. But deciding that nothing critical might be said of such a person or set of actions is a problem isn’t it? And an exceedingly bad precedent to set.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
