In recent years, several events have encapsulated the sheer polemics between freedom of expression and blasphemy. The most notable of which include the Danish cartoon affair in 2005 and the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in 2015 – both of which echoed the Rushdie Affair of 1989. In all circumstances, blatant religious satire had lasting consequences. These tensions between contesting free speech ideals are as old as religion itself and have implicated the United Nations (UN) since its establishment in 1945. In fact, the drafting history of UN covenants and declarations is well supplied with conflicts between competing claims to free speech, particularly in regards to speech targeting religion (Farrior 1996; Kapai and Cheung 2009; Temperman 2016). No claim has been as controversial as the “Defamation of Religions” resolution sponsored by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), a multilateral organization representing the interests of Muslims at the UN. Introduced in 1999, the resolution calls for the adoption of international legal measures to criminalize the defamation of all religions while placing an emphasis on the unique vulnerability of Islam.
Much has been written on the defamation debate in relation to free speech and religion at the UN (Grinberg 2006; Lagon and Kaminski 2013; Noorloos 2014), however, this debate has yet to permeate the field of international communication policy (ICP). This paper critically engages with the ways in which religiously motivated actors mobilize and internationalize their domestic beliefs and values regarding global free speech policy. In recent years, OIC representatives have carried out this venture by using liberal and secular discourses that champion the idea of universal human rights and liberal individualism. Thus conceptualizing this debate as simply a clash between liberal universalism and cultural relativism risks missing the point, both because OIC terminology is well-supplied with a commitment to promote universalism and because OIC representatives have repositioned religious censorship as a way of protecting individual believers rather than religion in totality from harm caused by defamation. The OIC is approached as an innovative norm entrepreneur and a channel for norm diffusion in global communication policy arenas, which may counterbalance the academic fixation on how liberal norms spread in the non-Western world.