Press Release
The Champions of Free Speech Haven’t a Leg to Stand On

Despite all Muslims being the victims of hate speech against the Prophet (saw) and his companions (May Allah be pleased with all of them), the ardent secularists in the British government and the media have turned around to accuse Muslims, once again, for threatening free speech. The very notion of free speech is so riddled with contradictions that it comes as no surprise that its champions cannot put forward a reasonable argument in its defence. Instead, they are only capable of mustering a few weak emotional arguments, such as how Muslims should be grateful to their colonial masters who are much kinder to them than the regimes in Saudi or Afghanistan would be. Another ‘vaguely intellectual’ argument employed to defend their outrage is that entertaining Muslim sensitivity about insults to the core of our Deen, will lead to almost all speech being banned. So where does one draw the line?

Yet in reality the line is being drawn; by secularists who have benefit as their criteria. The contradictions that are so obvious to all Muslims, yet secularists appear to be blind to, are due to the differing interests of the secular elite and the ordinary Muslim. In fact, the interests of the ordinary citizen in the West hardly cangue with those of their elite masters, yet any attempt to expose this rift is ironically met with harsh limitations on such speech. Legislation is employed and more is being written to curtail and ban all manner of speech that goes against the interests of the elite few, yet freedom to insult and denigrate Islam and Muslims is oddly the exception, despite it being spiteful and hateful in character and motivation.

It is as though one is free to speak, unless it is a Muslim speaking, who is highlighting the contradictions in the theory and practice of free speech in the West.

The freedom to insult is not a progressive characteristic of an advanced civilisation, rather it is a lowly by-product of an ideology incapable of managing difference. Secularism has no criteria for determining what should and should not be said, so it relies on the democratic process to allow one view to dominate and oppress all others, simply because it has a larger hoard of supporters (manipulated or otherwise) on any given day.

Muslims should not support the notion of mob-rule that is embodied in democracy, nor should we defend the failed notion of free speech. Muslims are believers in the truth and should not be ashamed to promote it and to call for its honourable values. Islam is not in need of validation by an intellectually bankrupt secular ideology; the sublime Islamic culture speaks for itself as a witness to the superiority of it over all other thought and ideology.

[هُوَ الَّذِي أَرْسَلَ رَسُولَهُ بِالْهُدَى وَدِينِ الْحَقِّ لِيُظْهِرَهُ عَلَى الدِّينِ كُلِّهِ وَلَوْ كَرِهَ الْمُشْرِكُونَ]

“It is He who sent His Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth to show that it is above all [other] religions, even though the idolaters hate it.” [TMQ As-Saff 61:9]