Thursday 7 October, 7.30pm until 9.00pm, Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast, Antrim BT1 2FF
Venue: Belfast Exposed, 23 Donegall Street, Belfast, Antrim BT1 2FF
Tickets: Free, email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to attend
In 1989, a thousand Muslim protesters paraded through Bradford with a copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, before ceremonially burning the book, an act calculated to shock, offend and to dramatise Muslim anger and offence. A generation later, with controversies like those over Behzti or the Mohammed cartoons, and bans in Europe on the wearing of the burqa, questions raised by the Rushdie Affair still provoke controversy. Does equality mean respect for difference or the right to be treated the same despite our differences? Does the right to free expression become problematic when criticism of religious and cultural traditions appears to support, even perpetuate negative stereotypes in society at large? Is individual freedom a specifically Western concept, not applicable to a multicultural society, in which case can we even speak of universal rights and freedoms? If not, on what terms can we defend free speech at home and abroad?
The Belfast Salon hosts a conversation around censorship, self censorship and the limits of tolerance and freedom.
Miriam Elia visual artist; comedian; writer; broadcaster | |
Chris Gilligan senior lecturer, sociology, University of the West of Scotland; reviews editor, Ethnopolitics | |
Padraig Reidy news editor, Index on Censorship; regular contributor, Guardian's Comment is Free | |
Chair: | |
Pauline Hadaway
writer and researcher |
U.S. cartoonist Molly Norris has been declared a 'target' by radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who has issued a fatwa calling for her death
Daily Mail, 18 September 2010The campaigners against the pope’s visit have more in common with the fanatical Inquisitors of old than with Enlightened liberal humanists.
Frank Furedi, spiked, 16 September 2010Why invite the pope on a state visit – at a cost of millions in a time of cutbacks – when the vast majority are secular?
Polly Toynbee, Guardian Comment is free, 14 September 2010The church's critics have been mobilised by the Pope's visit but the rhetoric is tipping over into the extreme
Padraig Reidy, Guardian, 23 August 2010Taking the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa as his starting point, Kenan Malik examines how radical Islam has gained hold in Muslim communities, how multiculturalism contributed to this, and how the Rushdie affair transformed the very nature of the debate on tolerance and free speech.
Kenan Malik, Atlantic Books, 1 April 2009