This chapter discusses two Middle English Charlemagne romances, The Siege of Milan and The Sultan of Babylon, to illuminate post-1291 anxieties about royal politics, Christian infighting, and God’s will and support. It brings these romances into conversation with two main bodies of literary and historical material. The first consists of writings that polemically engage with the question of whether English and French kings should prioritize domestic affairs or crusading activity. The second consists of poems, letters, and chronicles that, written by Christians following crusading defeats, feature wrathful rebukes of God and threats of conversion to Islam. I draw on this latter corpus to offer a new interpretation of the literary motif of the “afflicted Muslim” who vents his military frustration on his “gods,” arguing that such depictions should be understood as projections of Latin Christian anxieties about God’s lack of support to the crusading enterprise.

The chapters in Part II—which analyse the way in which the ECtHR applies its general principles relating to Article 9—follow the loose concentric circles model. Chapter 4 focuses on cases concerning deprogramming, coercive psychiatric treatment, indoctrination, and sanctions on employment due to religion or belief affiliation. These are the kinds of cases one would expect to fall into the innermost circle in the loose concentric circles model, where there is strongest forum internum relevance and weakest countervailing factors and, thus, a high degree of forum internum protection. Through the case law analysis, this chapter aims to demonstrate that the ECtHR’s approach is consistent with its general principles relating to Article 9. Even in these kinds of cases, the ECtHR does not offer absolutely absolute protection to the forum internum, rather, the ECtHR balances factors indicating a violation (primarily, but not only forum internum relevance) with countervailing factors in order to reach its decision. This chapter explains that the ECtHR only offers a very high degree of protection where it considers forum internum relevance to be strong and countervailing factors to be weak.

Jonathan Swift was a High Church clergyman and Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland. However, Gulliver displays no Christian devotion. His Christianity is simply assumed in a narrative which presupposes a largely Christian readership. The chapter considers Gulliver’s witness of religious practices in the countries he visits. Gulliver’s Travels is predominantly a secular book, but its philosophical, political, and historical perspectives are refracted through the lens of Swift’s religious confession. In these voyages to remote nations of the world, Gulliver encounters or discusses religio-political issues that were highly controversial back home in Gulliver’s England. The book draws upon religious history and polemic. The satire’s treatment of European religious controversy and its view of human nature attracted charges of blasphemy and irreligion, as had Swift’s earlier satiric masterpiece A Tale of a Tub.The chapter examines these charges and comments on some modern critical views of the religious implications of Gulliver’s Travels. It indicates some significant parallels between Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Thomas More’s Utopians.

Chapter 4 deals with atheism after 1660, including the legacy of the Civil War and particularly the influence of Thomas Hobbes. It offers vignettes of such freethinkers as John Wagstaffe, Daniel Scargill, Charles Blount and the Earl of Rochester before confronting the issue of the continuing scarcity of named examples of actual atheists. It considers the case of ‘The Second Spira’ and finds it of questionable validity; on the other hand, it prints verbatim a supposed statement of atheistical principles made in 1700 by an apostate, George Smith. It ends with the early eighteenth-century case of Richard Burridge, an atheist who was prosecuted for blasphemy but who subsequently reformed and capitalised on his dubious reputation.

Chapter 5 gives a detailed account of the trial and execution of Thomas Aikenhead in Edinburgh in 1696–7. The statements that Aikenhead was accused of making are itemised, and their incendiary and openly blasphemous quality is clear. It is also noteworthy that he made such statements in public and seemed reluctant to retract them. This explains the harsh penalty to which he was subjected, which was the subject of much comment at the time. The case also attracted interest in England, not least from John Locke, who preserved various key documents relating to it. Here, Aikenhead’s sources are investigated, including the dangerous books to which he had access in the university library and elsewhere, and his ingenuity in constructing an irreligious ‘system’ from them is asserted.

Chapter 9 draws some conclusions from the book. By way of reiterating the assurance of atheists on which stress has been laid throughout, it offers the case of Giulio Cesare Vanini, executed at Toulouse for his active promotion of atheistic ideas in 1619. It compares this with the case of Aikenhead but contrasts it with that of Pitcairne, who was more discreet in his propagation of his irreligious views. After assessing other examples of free-thought in early eighteenth-century Scotland, it then turns to the state of affairs in England, where prosecutions for apostacy were haphazard. It is argued that what is in evidence was a degree of complacency on part of the orthodox, as is illustrated by the examples of Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke, and the Conclusion ends by noting hints of atheist opinion in England in the eighteenth century, suggesting that a non-theistic outlook was becoming thinkable as an alternative to orthodoxy.

Millions of “secular Muslims” would become “practicing Muslims” if there existed a variant of Islam compatible with their values, for instance one that would broaden women’s rights and adapt rites to the rhythms of modern life. If no liberal variant has emerged, the reason is not that Islam is monolithic. As with other religions, it admits diverse interpretations. Yet over fourteen centuries, variations in interpretation have produced just one major schism: the Sunni–Shii split of 661. This is puzzling because Christianity, the other monotheism with over a billion adherents, sees schisms frequently. If the collective action necessary for a liberal schism has not materialized, a basic reason lies in obstacles to conducting honest discussions on what Islam represents. Liberal Muslims are intrinsically opposed to settling conflicts through violence, which handicaps them vis-à-vis groups prepared to charge them with physically punishable religious offenses. Easily victimized, they cannot fight back as effectively. Thus, apostasy and blasphemy rules, the two most lethal weapons of Islamic illiberalism, reproduce the fears that allow their preservation. To avoid personal trouble, liberal Muslims, atheists, non-Muslim believers, and assorted other dissenters all avoid repudiating the notion that apostasy and blasphemy are acts that require temporal punishment.

Although entry into Islam is costless, exit was banned early on. According to a widely accepted interpretation of early Islam, soon after Muhammad’s death a precedent for banning apostasy was set. In fact, the underlying dispute was over zakat, and the episode amounted to enforcing the tax code. But recasting this historical detail would not necessarily settle controversies over Muslim religious freedoms. Certain Quran verses speak of retribution against nonbelievers. Others preclude compulsion, arguably establishing a right to leave Islam. Insofar as a textual inconsistency exists – and that itself is debatable – for advocates of liberalizing Islam the challenge boils down to prioritizing liberal verses. Blasphemy and heresy charges, used repeatedly to persecute heterodox sects, also restrict sundry liberties. The fear of getting accused of religious offense constrains political discourse and inhibits collective action. But a broadening of Muslim religious freedoms through the liberalization of apostasy and blasphemy rules is not unthinkable. Analogous transformations have occurred in other religions. Besides, Islam has been reinterpreted repeatedly since its emergence, radically so in modern times. Innovations include Islamic banks, which are business corporations, and various Islamic NGOs, which are organized as nonprofit corporations. Evidently, no absolute barrier exists to broadening Islamic religious freedoms.

This chapter explores the existence and persistence of religious offences in the case of artistic expressions that are considered to be blasphemous, offensive, defamatory, irreverent and otherwise transgressive. Drawing on the jurisprudence of human rights bodies, it examines the international legal framework applicable to blasphemous arts and the human rights principles pertinent to controversies over creative freedom involving incitement to religious hatred. Moreover, drawing on the jurisprudence of the UN Human Rights Committee, the UN Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the European Court of Human Rights, it discusses the application of general principles of human rights law (such as the element of intention to stir religious hatred, or the impact of particular expression on religious minorities) on artists and artworks. Last but not least, the chapter discusses the international politics of blasphemy drawing on controversies of global scale such as Danish cartoons and Charlie Hebdo, and incidents related to the rise of Islamic extremism. In this respect the author emphasizes the need to avoid undermining the value of free speech in the human rights edifice, while also emphasizing the need for a better, cross-cultural understanding of both religious and artistic traditions.

Having identified that “Islamic” constitutions also often, counterintuitively, contain many democratic features and rights, Chapter 5 moves from the analysis of Islam and rights in a constitutional “textual” setting to the question of how the interaction between the two plays out in practice when litigating. It does so by using examples of court cases (for example, of women’s rights, access to justice, etc.) in Egypt and Pakistan, where the two different strands of the constitution – rights and Islam – could potentially have conflicted but did not. It shows how “modernist” judges interpreted the Islamic supremacy clauses to not only protect the rights of citizens but in some cases, for example, in cases where the right to “access to justice” was at stake, also used such clauses to develop new rights. However, it also illustrates that in other cases – such as to do with blasphemy – the Islamic content of the constitution can and has been used to erode rights to freedom of expression and even to freedom of religion. Nevertheless, the chapter’s contribution is to draw on comparative scholarship to argue that a political pursuit of Islam does not necessarily need to impede rights provided various institutional measures are in place – including independent courts with the power to engage in judicial review, competing and intellectually robust religious authorities and legislatures that can actively construct and critique religious narratives of law, and, above all, a state that can bring those with “extreme” interpretations (e.g. Salafi parties) into the nonviolent political arena and challenge them politically.

The controversy over Angāre in the early 1930s has always been interpreted as a contest between religious and secular forces given the furor around the publication for being “blasphemous.” Turning to relevant legislation in the period, contextualizing debates around blasphemy in the legal and literary spheres, and analyzing responses to the text, I problematize assumptions behind seeing the controversy as one about religion vs. secularism. I argue that the text and the reception to it is best read as a crisis over ethics within the colonized, Urdu-speaking Muslim upper classes of urban North India, who were beginning to stake their raison d’etre and sense of selfhood on minority political status. This status had enormous consequences a decade later in the demand for Pakistan. This chapter shows how this early controversy was about how a class of Indian Muslims were identifying as an ethical community, not a religious one.

Chapter 7 draws together the arguments presented in the preceding chapters, to underline the way that traditions around bringing disputes to court interacted with a written bill of rights to make courts the fora for disputes over expression in Massachusetts, as it dealt with the challenges to authority posed by challengers to religious and social orthodoxy and the gradual unfolding of its own version of democracy. Though no less concerned with individual reputation, Nova Scotians’ struggles over the jurisdiction of political institutions and greater distance from reform movements shaped disputes over expression and the way that defenses to libel claims were conceived. In these two kindred places, legal cultures, constitutional understandings, publishing practices and the quirks of personality interacted with sociopolitical pressures to shape libel law in general and the defenses of truth and privilege in particular, matters vital to individuals and to the institutions of democracy.

Chapter 5 describes the law regarding speech aimed at religion and morality. Against a backdrop of oppressive prosecutions and antiabolitionist violence, Massachusetts saw denials of the constitutionality of libel law and a rising insistence on individual rights to freedom of conscience and expression. Both the pornographic classic Fanny Hill and the first birth control texts became cheaply available in Massachusetts, and lawyers adapted the law to prosecute obscenity. Nova Scotia likely had fewer such texts, and outside Halifax legal actors also had fewer texts to refer to in drafting indictments. On the religious front, Nova Scotia’s basically voluntaristic environment made religion political, with the Anglican elite on the defensive, but disputes over belief reached neither the legislature nor courts. Massachusetts, however, gradually eliminated establishment, leaving winners and losers. Free Thinkers evoked concern, especially the Englishwoman Frances Wright, whose lectures challenged Christianity, capitalism, slavery and patriarchy. Many understood republican ideals as justifying majoritarian violence, a logic that did not resonate in Nova Scotia, where disputes centered instead on configurations of institutional power.

This chapter turns to the experiences of the laity when they found themselves in ecclesiastical courts in disputes over marriage, wills and burial, disorderly behaviour, or unacceptable use of language: speech crimes: brawling, defamation and blasphemy. It looks at examples of the costs and consequences to the laity of finding themselves in ecclesiastical courts, and the role of the debtors’ prisons.