Writing for The Spectator, Brendan O’Neill laments the treatment of Hatun Tash, reflecting on what it means for freedom of speech in Britain.
O’Neill begins: “There is a Christian preacher, a woman, who has suffered the most heinous persecutions. She has been chased by mobs, arrested, unlawfully jailed and even stabbed. Where did this hellish hounding of a follower of Christ occur? Afghanistan, perhaps? Somalia maybe? Actually it was right here, in Britain.
“Her name is Hatun Tash. She is an ex-Muslim originally from Turkey. She’s now a Christian convert and colourful street preacher. She regularly gave impromptu sermons at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, where she’s been known to hold up a desecrated copy of the Koran while spreading the word of Christ.
“Her style is not to everyone’s taste, but so what? History is peppered with noisy, often millenarian ‘messengers of God’ who will have irked those who heard them. But that is no excuse for the horrendous abuse she has received. She’s been roughed up by mobs of young Muslim men. She’s been arrested for ‘disturbing the peace’. In 2021, she was slashed with a knife at Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park. The knifeman, this person who seemingly believes the violence of the blade is a just punishment for ‘blasphemy’, has never been found.
“Tash is back in the news after winning £10,000 in an out-of-court settlement from the Metropolitan Police. Back in June 2022, she had been preparing to speak at Speakers’ Corner. She was wearing a Charlie Hebdo T-shirt featuring an image of Muhammad and holding aloft a copy of the Koran with holes in it, to symbolise, she says, the ‘holes’ in Islam’s teachings. Someone snatched her Koran whereupon her team called the cops. Guess what happened next? Yes, it was Tash who was taken away.
“An angry mob formed around her. The police tried to lead her away but she refused to go. So they physically removed her, put her in a van, took her to a station, strip searched her, interviewed her at 4am and then let her go at 9am. The mob, meanwhile, who just hours earlier had surged towards this diminutive preacher yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’, were presumably in their beds, resting easy. It was positively Kafkaesque: the menacing men let go, the preaching woman interrogated.
“Tash launched legal proceedings, alleging wrongful arrest and a breach of her human rights, especially her right to speak. Now the Met has settled, to the tune of ten grand. Strikingly, this is the second time they’ve given her that amount of money: they did the same in October 2022 when she threatened to sue over two earlier arrests while preaching at Speakers’ Corner. Tash has donated her latest payout to an organisation that supports those who experience persecution for leaving the Islamic faith.
or idea should ever be put beyond criticism, or ridicule, or outright sacrilege.
Although O’Neill expresses his dislike at Tash’s defiling of the Koran, he defends her right to do so. For O’Neill, “there is something far more offensive, and scary, than Tash’s occasional sullying of the Koran: the chattering classes’ silence over her persecution. That there is a Christian preacher in 21st-century Britain who has been abused and hounded and slashed with a knife, and yet her name is virtually unknown, is profoundly troubling. It suggests liberals’ commitment to liberty, especially the liberty to utter, is thin indeed. In a more normal era, Tash would have become a cause célèbre, even among lovers of liberty who hated her brash style.
“The trials of this Islamic ‘apostate’ raise a pressing question: what do we value more – the right of an individual to speak freely or the right of certain groups never to feel offended? Right now, it’s the latter we have sacralised. This is confirmed by both the police’s heavyhanded response to Tash’s mockery of Islam and the shameful refusal of the intellectual classes to speak out against the violent harrying of this supposed ‘blasphemer’. These people are sending a message, however unwittingly. They’re saying it is better that a woman be prevented from expressing her deeply-held beliefs than for someone to feel offended by those beliefs. It is better to silence ‘blasphemy’ than to hurt a person’s feelings. Remind me: what century is this?
“The failure of liberals, and the state itself, to defend a preacher’s right to preach will have an awful impact. It will embolden fundamentalists. For it will give them the idea, the grim idea, that this woman’s utterances are so wicked that they are undeserving of the legal protections enjoyed by others. It will give them the impression that she’s fair game for hostility and harassment. For haven’t we already decided as a society that crushing criticism of Islam is preferable to causing offence to any of Islam’s followers?
“Moral cowardice has consequences. When people fail to raise their voices on the persecution of ‘blasphemers’ – whether it’s Tash, the Batley Grammar teacher hounded into hiding for showing his pupils an image of Muhammad, or the cinemas that showed the ‘blasphemous’ film The Lady of Heaven – they give a green light to blasphemy-hunting. They normalise the dogmatic hounding of those who commit the ‘sin’ of giving offence. Here’s the thing: their silence on Tash is far more harmful to society than anything Tash herself could ever do.”
Worth reading in full.
As ex-Muslims face increasing censorship in the UK, the FSU has warned of any attempts to define Islamophobia,
In March, The FSU published an essay by Tim Dieppe, with a Foreword by Richard Dawkins, arguing that any attempt to define ‘Islamophobia’ will have a chilling effect on free speech.
Tim Dieppe, the Head of Public Policy at Christian Concern, believes that any attempt to define ‘Islamophobia’ and punish those responsible for it, whether by cancelling them or changing the law to make ‘Islamophobia’ a ‘hate crime’, would undermine free speech. That’s particularly true of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims’ definition, which is so broad that, among other things, it means anyone disputing Hamas’s description of Israel’s military operation in Gaza as a ‘genocide’ is guilty of ‘Islamophobia’.
Click here to read Tim Dieppe’s essay ‘Banning Islamophobia: Blasphemy Law by the Backdoor’.
