DOES freedom of the press have no limits? The question was long answered by Justice Holmes when he ruled that liberty of speech does not mean that a person could cry fire in a packed theatre and create a pandemonium there.

This should serve as a litmus test for the permissible freedom of expression, the press not excluded. This is the universally acknowledged truth that the liberty of action of an individual ends where the nose of his fellow citizen begins.

It means that an individual enjoys the liberty of action, but this is not absolute. It is relative to similar liberty of his fellow citizens. Simplistically put, the rights of the individuals and groups have to be correlated in a harmonious whole in order to ensure peaceful coexistence. This is why the constitutions of civilized countries seek to balance the right to free speech against considerations of national security not rights and a susceptibilities of citizens.

In this context, the state can impose reasonable restrictions on individuals, groups and the media in the interest of the security of state. What are those reasonable restrictions is not to be determined by the executive.

In a democratic state, it is the jurisdiction of the judiciary. The Indian and Pakistani penal codes have set limits to the freedom of expression according to which libel, slander, incitement to violence and injuring the religious sensibilities of any group are offence under the law and as such punishable with various terms of imprisonment. These legal principles are embedded in the common law system, which is in vogue in the Anglo-Saxon communities spread across the world.

The Commonwealth countries have provisions in their penal codes that prescribe punishment for such an offence. In the pre-partition days, during the British colonial rule, there used to occur incidents of blasphemy such as the publication of a sacrilegious work by an Arya Samaj leader titled Rangeela Rasool which triggered countrywide agitation culminating in the assassination of the author by a Muslim zealot, Abdur Rasheed. Again, during the early ‘50s, the Hindi version of a daily, Amrita Bazar Patrika, published a caricature which inflamed the feelings of the Muslims of India. The publication was condemned by all sections of the Indian population and the newspaper editor and publisher had to apologize for the scurrilous writing.

No individual or group dared justify the publication on grounds of freedom of the press. They were all apologetic about it. In contrast with the above incidents, the reaction of the Danish government to the popular agitation against the sacrilegious cartoons was one of cynicism. More impertinent was the behaviour of the Danish prime minister who refused to meet the ambassadors of the Arab countries. The protesting diplomats were not agitators.

The initial haughty reaction of the Danish prime minister refusing to take action against the newspaper and to apologize for the offensive cartoons added insult to injury to one billion plus Muslims the world over, including the ethnic Muslim citizens of Denmark. As if this act of profanation was not enough, the governments of the European countries, most of them home to considerable Muslim immigrants expressed their inability to take action against the newspaper on the flimsy pretext of freedom of the press, meaning that the press had the right to defame, libel, blaspheme and incite people to violence.

This interpretation of freedom of the press stands in marked contrast with the curbs imposed on the civil liberties by the so-called anti-terrorist laws in the US and Europe that provide for arbitrary detention of suspects without trial, deportation of immigrants on suspicion, subjecting the Muslims to extreme physical and mental torture to ferret out information, abduction of suspects from far-off countries in collusion with compliant regimes in violation of the ex-tradition laws and human rights. The western press is forbidden to question these acts because that might be deemed abetment to acts of terrorism.

When the cartoons appeared in the Danish newspaper in September, the blasphemous act was ignored by the Muslim governments and the Muslim peoples as an aberration of a lone publication, but after a couple of months when about a dozen newspapers across the continent reproduced the cartoons it was not difficult to see that it was an orchestrated campaign against Islam calculated to provoke the Muslims into violence. Some hotheads walked into the trap, indulging in incendiarism, ransacking foreign diplomatic missions in Damascus and Beirut and sporadic violence elsewhere, thus alienating the world- wide support and sympathy for their cause.

The violent reaction in a few places gave a ready excuse to the western governments to equate the two wrongs — blasphemy and violence — making the former right and counselling peaceful dialogue between the aggrieved and the wrongdoer.

The crusading neocons, the neo-Jesuits and their allies, the Zionists, know full well the conditioned reflexes of the Muslims towards blasphemous attacks on their Holy Prophet, the recent example being the verdict of the Iranian clergy on Salman Rushdie, whose right to blaspheme the apostle of Islam through his book ‘the Satanic Verses’ was espoused by the US and Europe.

Another example is furnished by Tasleema Nasreen whose heresies were lauded by the West as freedom of expression. Both Salman and Taslima were given asylum by Europe and encouraged by the West to continue their activities regardless of the offence that their writings caused to the sentiments of the Muslims. What kind of freedom is this that engenders hate against an entire community? One may ask: Should an individual or a group be allowed to inflame the religious feelings of many?

That such blasphemous acts enjoy the blessings of the European Union is apparent from the fact that when Saudi businessmen declared boycott of the Danish products, the EU Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, threatened the Saudi Kingdom to take the matter to the WTO. One wonders whether the WTO is the umbrella of the perpetrators of blasphemy, hate-mongering caricaturists and newspaper editors and their patrons in the governments.

Europe, which had been through religious wars during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods, might have renounced sectarian hatred and embraced religious tolerance at Westphalia in 1648, but it has yet to assimilate Islam in its body-politic as manifested in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnians, Kosovans, Albanians and Turkish Cypriots.

Now, it is the turn of Algerian immigrants in France, Turkish immigrants in Germany, South Asian immigrants in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Britain. It was, perhaps, to provoke these elements into violence that the widely circulated newspapers published the caricatures so that the governments of these countries find an excuse to launch a drive against the Muslim settlers there.

On the other hand, the West has launched a drive to purge the hateful material from the syllabi of Pakistan without itself reining in its own media which spew anti- Islamic propaganda. While rebuking the publication of cartoons by European newspapers, the US official circles have accused the Muslim countries of inciting anti-semitic feelings and violent anti-West demonstrations. This is not true because the Arabs themselves belong to the semitic race and their opposition to Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is inspired by national self-determination, a sacred human right.

On the contrary, the anti-semitic feeling runs deep among the Nordic and Slavic races and intermittently erupted in the Czarist pogrom in Russia and Eastern Europe during the 1880s and in Germany and Central Europe in the 1930s. Added to it is the apartheid and racial discrimination that was transplanted in the overseas colonies of Britain in North America, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and Namibia.

However, the Muslims should not think that they are any holier than others. For the sectarian killings in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan and infighting among rival denominations within the fold of Islam are no less abhorrent than racism. There is a great need for inter-sectarian harmony among Muslims and inter-faith conciliation on a global level. The demolishing of a mosque is as heinous a crime as the desecration of a temple or the burning of a church. The incident of blasphemy, far from hardening the religious divide, should serve as a catalyst for inter-faith conciliation.