The comment of the present Pope Francis in the aftermath of the attacks on the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo is a reminder of the deep contradiction between religion and freedom of speech. Pope Francis remarked, in simple layman terms, that if someone were to say something offensive about the Pope’s mother then he could expect to receive a punch in the face. Speech, in other words, has serious consequences and cannot be conducted irresponsibly.

Simply avoiding recklessness in the use of free speech is insufficient; the principle itself is fundamentally flawed. Freedom of speech is an irreligious ideal originating from a materialist worldview that has become a key intellectual weapon in the secular West’s ideological war on religion. It is necessary for sincere people of religion to abandon secularist intellectual constructs and return to conceptual frameworks that are consistent with true religious belief.

Freedom to be secular

Freedom of speech is presented as if it were a neutral principle, allowing all sides to express their points of view openly, in order that all may judge which is best. But no such principle can ever be truly neutral. In fact, freedom serves the secularist agenda only. People of religion are at a serious disadvantage within a society built on such principles, as is evidenced by the weakening of religion in the West during three centuries of secular rule. Freedom of speech assumes sovereignty for man, not for man’s Creator. By accepting freedom of speech, this secular worldview is already locked in before discussion can even begin. If the man of religion engages in discussion on the basis of free speech, then he will be forced to reformulate the rest of his thinking on this secular basis also. If, for example, a Jew, Christian or Muslim attempted to say that their scripture is explicit in forbidding adultery in society, then he will be told that it is not valid for him to call for this as it contradicts the very freedom that he is himself enjoying in stating his case.

Secularists say that freedom of speech is necessary psychologically as suppression of feelings and desires can be harmful for the individual. But preventing harm to the individual cannot justify crassly hurting the feelings of others in some misleading expectation of catharsis. Negative feelings and harmful desires require deep introspection and treatment and not instant expression or gratification. The ideal of free speech fails to evoke the necessary intelligence and wisdom in discourse that is essential to harmonious, civilised society. Tolerance in society is achieved through inculcating respect for each other, and not by insisting on the freedom to voice whatever comes into one’s head. In other contexts, secularists will say that one is free only to the extent that one does not impair the freedom of others or bring harm to them. Is hateful speech not harmful? Does ridicule not impair one’s freedom? Secularists gleefully caricature what religion holds to be sacred. The true secularist agenda, blatant in their satire, is to undermine religion and not to tolerate it. People of religion, even when they disagree, do not stoop to ridicule the beliefs of others. Islam, for example, clearly warns against slandering others’ gods, even if these be pagan idols, and the Islamic world was championed for its legacy of religious tolerance, from Andalusia to India.

Secularists argue that free speech is necessary to protect against oppression. This argument is false. Oppression is possible whenever man is given authority over his fellow man. While freedom, and the egocentric individualism it instils, only reduces empathy for others, the religious disposition softens the hearts of those in authority while inspiring those under them to stand firmly against any form of tyrannical behaviour. There is a long history, in Christianity as well as Islam, of pious believers challenging tyranny. Western secular liberal democracies have proved far more oppressive than the religious states that preceded them. There are more people of African descent in what is becoming known in the United States as its “prison-industrial complex” than there were slaves at the time of America’s civil war. Indeed the United States has the highest proportion of prisoners in the world today. The West portrays itself as the land of the free; but it is freedom with a great number of seemingly necessary limitations and exceptions.

The secularists argue that religion leads to militant conflict, and that freedom of speech inculcates an attitude of toleration in all. Military conflict occurs wherever political and institutional processes break down. Western secular liberal democracies, with their capitalist imperial ambitions and their rapacious military-industrial complexes, have inflicted unimaginably higher levels of military terror across the world than all the religious states that preceded them. Islam had never engaged in exploitative colonial behaviour despite ruling from Spain to Indonesia, and although Christians had done so, the real explosion in empire-building occurred after Europe’s revolutions not before. It is materialist dogma that fires the passion for maximising worldly material benefit. Religion has always worked to turn man towards loftier aims.

Secularists will say that freedom of speech is of value to the religious also, because it guarantees their right to express their religious views. We don’t need the secularists’ idea of freedom to guarantee such rights. These rights were expressed perfectly well before the idea of freedom was developed. The existence of multiple schools of thought in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths is evidence of a long history of toleration for dissenting views. In fact, the secularists advocate religious freedom not to promote genuine religious interpretation but to strengthen so-called ‘modernists’ in their manipulation of religious truth in order to covertly incorporate the secularist agenda and wage war on religion from within.

Materialist origins

Freedom of speech first emerged in European political discourse in the 17th Century CE when atheistic thinkers exploited the wars within Christianity to advance their materialistic agenda. The key breakthrough of these atheists was to furnish their ancient materialist creed with the political doctrine of freedom and democracy. According to these atheists, freedom and democracy follows naturally from materialism: if there is no Creator then man is master of his own destiny and sovereignty resides in him; therefore, man should be given freedom to live his life as he pleases and nations should embrace democracy so that they can devise laws in accordance with their collective will. Furthermore, if the hereafter does not exist, man can abandon self-denying altruism and throw himself into whole-bodied pursuit of worldly pleasure and gain.

This materialist political doctrine presented an apparently insurmountable challenge to Europe’s Christian rulers. Their solution was to adopt a compromise between materialism and religion in the name of objective empiricism, under which materialist political doctrine would be accepted but ‘metaphysical’ debate about religious beliefs would be sidestepped. They viewed this compromise as necessary in order to protect Christian creed without realising that they were destroying the Christian civilisation built upon this creed. The ideas of freedom and democracy were effectively grafted onto a new secular creed that, while retaining religion, separated it from life. The Christian holds his creed as private, personal belief only while the public domain is swamped by the secular creed and its materialistic political culture. Man is a social being; constant public bombardment by materialist values will relentlessly dominate all else. Genuine ethics, humanity and spirituality become suppressed as man rushes to gorge himself on material worldly benefit alone.

Freedom of speech sets the terms for intellectual discourse within secular society. By adopting the principle of free speech, the West opened the door for the extensive propagation of materialist values within what was previously religious Christian society. Materialist ideologues strongly campaigned for freedom of speech from the outset and used this principle to justify vehement attacks on Christianity as well as other religions. Even today, secularists rejoice in viciously savaging religious values in the name of satire or art. The appallingly disgraceful Charlie Hebdo caricatures are just the latest example of this.

Rights not freedom

Each society is shaped by a particular set of principles and values that sets the collective terms for the behaviour of its citizens and societal interaction between them. It is not possible for a single society to adopt multiple conflicting value sets, just as it is not possible for a single society to adopt multiple alternate legal constitutions. Freedom of speech provides only a faulty and biased platform for the conduct of discourse within society, and people of religion must move beyond this. Christian thinkers had long championed ‘natural rights’ within society since their medieval age, rights presumably adopted from Islam which at that time was the dominant world civilisation, and which had successfully implemented Islam’s lofty concepts of ‘huqooq Allah’ and ‘huqooq al-ibad’. The concept of well-defined divinely-ordained immutable rights forms a much sounder foundation for intellectual discourse and, indeed, for all other forms of human behaviour and interaction, than the abstract concept of freedom which secularists champion when beneficial but readily furnish with rationally-conceived limitations and exceptions when not.

Only three centuries ago, the entire world was dominated by religion. Religion is on the rise again. The intensified secular propaganda against religion, in the name of free speech, is just one further indication of how keenly the Western secular powers sense the religious resurgence, particularly amongst Muslims, whom they have targeted in a renewed war on Islam. Sincere Muslims are working hard to educate their societies about the evils of secularism and to re-establish the righteous Islamic Khilafah, which will structure society on the basis of immutable divinely-ordained rights, restoring man’s dignity and returning society to the harmony and tranquillity that existed before the usurpation of the world by disbelieving Western secularist imperialists. The true Islamic State will re-inherit its position as the leading state in the world and once again manifest the highest model of civilisation for all the peoples of the world to emulate, thus bringing to an end the rule of secularism and the atheistic materialism at its heart.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by

Ibn Nussrah, Pakistan