Dear Abdelwahab,

Salaam and many thanks. This is a very good and subtle piece, which serves
to highlight - as an American Supreme Court judge once put it - that there
are times and contexts in which the principle of freedom of speech provides
a refuge for rogues. I have done quite a lot of work on the genealogy of the
free speech principle, itself a European Protestant invention of the early
seventeenth century. Amidst all the recent trumpet blasts in favour of Free
Speech, nobody seems to have spotted the bitter-sweet ironies associated
with its Christian origins - in particular the ways in which Milton and others appealed to freedom from pre-publication censorship in order better to round on Catholics, Jews, Muslims and others considered unworthy or incapable of exercising the 'Reason' supposedly given by God. The remembrance of such precedents understandably prompted the distinguished American literary critic, Stanley Fish, to incite uproar of late by
proposing that there isn't such a thing as free speech, and that that's a good thing.
No doubt your fine points will come up during at Democracy Club talk by
Bhikhu Parekh.

All good wishes,
Professor John Keane