BBC Arabist, Malise Ruthven, says that only "scholarly" criticism of Islam should be allowed 

It's a very long-winded article (in the NYT, unsurprisingly)  but the last 3 paragraphs of it (below) seem to be the point of it.  Ruthven burnishes his own scholarly status by using such hard words as "aniconic" and "docetic" but shows how much he really knows by approving of the term "Christianist" as a description of Pamela Geller.  She is Jewish and needs no assistance from Christians or Christianity to form her opinion of jihadists.  Ruthven is obviously far too grand to listen to or respect "ordinary" people

These contrasting responses suggest the possibility of a two-pronged approach to the free speech issues raised by images of the Prophet. “Insulting” the Prophet with the intent of stirring up hatred might be categorized as a form of “hate speech” comparable to anti-Semitism, racism, flag desecration, or Holocaust denial, which are forbidden by law in many countries (though not the US, where a proposed amendment protecting the US flag failed to pass by a single Senate vote in 2006), because the sacred image of the Prophet has become a fundamental part of how Muslim communities have come to define themselves. While in practice it may be difficult to draw the line between “insult” and “criticism,” if there is a distinction it must lie in intention.

In Britain, for example, the government’s effort in the wake of the Rushdie Affair to extend the race relations act in response to Muslims protests opened a legal minefield. It is now an offense (under the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act) to display by writing or other visible representation material that is “threatening, abusive or insulting” with the intention of causing “harassment, alarm or distress.” Yet the law paradoxically protects the right to “insult and abuse” with a proviso stating that nothing in it “shall be read or given effect in a way which prohibits or restricts discussion, criticism or expressions of antipathy, dislike, ridicule, insult or abuse of particular religions or the beliefs or practices of their adherents.” Intention is clearly the key. Had he been required to defend his book under the 2006 act, Rushdie and his lawyers would doubtless have argued that the storm of controversy it raised was an unintended consequence of a misreading (mostly by politically-motivated parties) of his “serious” novel.

Critical analysis of the Quran that challenges the myths surrounding the primal figures of Islam is another story entirely: it is something that scholars of other faiths have been engaged in since the Enlightenment. Since the nineteenth century, Islamic scholars such as Sayyed Ahmad Khan and Chirag Ali have questioned the authenticity of many of the hadiths (verbally transmitted reports) on which the earliest chroniclers relied for their accounts of the Prophet’s life, exemplary behavior, and ministry. It would be utterly wrong for the law to discriminate in favor of (or effectively against) Muslims by insulating them from this process, because critical engagement—about science, religion, and politics—is a necessary precondition for communities to flourish in a cosmopolitan and increasingly globalized world.

Source

It's absurd to expect everybody to speak with academic precision and yet that is essentially what this guy is proposing.  What about having one law for all and not a law that suits just a few?

Treating everyday speech as scientific or scholarly speech is a very common bad-faith ploy.  For instance, if a man says:  "Blacks are a criminal lot", he will immediately be hounded as some sort of terribile bigot who is obviously wrong because some blacks are not criminal.  But that is bad faith.  That all blacks are criminal is unlikely to be what the speaker meant and instead of people trying to understand what the speaker is really saying he gets condemned.

If however, someone says that "the incidence of criminality is  much higher among blacks than whites"  he gets a pass.  I know.  I once said something similar and even got it published in one of the academic journals of sociology  -- of all places.  But I did have some striking statistics on my side.

There is far too much "hunting" of people according to the way they express themselves.  In a decent world one would try to understand what the average person was saying rather than pouncing on him with vile and superficial allegations because his speech is a bit careless.  That someone has the background to speak in an academic way is no guarantee of wisdom, rightness or moral probity.  The praise recently lavished on the unrepentant and disgusting Communist Eric Hobsbawm is evidence enough of that.


Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).