Under dictatorships, writers are threatened with imprisonment. Democracies are a different matter

It is easy to see why the French novelist has been getting on people’s nerves for years. Ever since 2001, when anti-racist organisations took him to court for writing in a novel that Islam is ‘the stupidest religion’. Controversial, fiercely ironic and uncompromising in his judgements, Michel Houellebecq oozes political incorrectness from every line. Now they want him in prison. A judge accuses Houellebecq of “complicity in incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence against Islam”. The case stems from an interview he gave four years ago to the philosopher Michel Onfray. “The desire of the so-called ‘native French population’ is not for Muslims to assimilate, but for them to stop robbing and attacking them – or, alternatively, to leave,” the novelist said. “Houellebecq contests the charge levelled against him; the statements contain no intent to incite, not even implicitly, and fall within the scope of freedom of opinion and expression,” stated Thibault de Montbrial and Louis Cailliez, Michel Houellebecq’s lawyers. The writer faces up to one year in prison.

In Algeria, Kamel Daoud has been sentenced to five years in prison for a major novel about the ‘black decade’. In France, Houellebecq is under investigation. In dictatorships, writers and journalists are silenced through imprisonment. In democracies, they are taught to keep quiet. There is a world of difference between the prison in Oran and a Parisian judge’s chambers. And yet, the trajectory is not all that different.

Freedom of speech is (still) an inalienable right in France and throughout the West. We are the only ones who have it – not in Tehran, not in Moscow, not in Beijing, not in Doha. We should defend it jealously, even when those who profess it get on our nerves.