Silence is a decree all should fear

Political correctness, as much as fundamentalism, is responsible for our state of absurdity, writes Umberto Eco.

ALMOST 15 years have gone by since I wrote that within a few decades Europe would become a multiracial continent, and the process would cost us blood and tears. I wasn't a prophet, but merely a man who studies history, convinced that if you know what happens in the past and why, you can better understand what will take place in the future.

Even if the terrorist attacks in European countries over the past few years are excluded from consideration, it is clear a troubling trend is emerging. In France, a high school teacher, Robert Redeker, wrote some highly critical things about Islam and subsequently received death threats. In Berlin, the Deutsche Oper's production of Mozart's opera Idomeneo was cancelled because it featured not only the severed heads of Jesus and Buddha (and we can let that pass), but also of the Prophet Muhammad.

Then there's the scholarly Pope Benedict XVI who, in his address to scientists at the University of Regensburg in September, quoted a Byzantine emperor's thoughts on Islam; the Muslim world erupted in protest. He ought to realise that there's a difference between a university professor's lecture and a pontiff's televised speech, and so perhaps he should have been a little more careful (but those who used the historical quotation as a pretext for calling for a new religious war are not the sort I'd like to go to dinner with).

The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote a fine article about the Redeker case, published in Le Point magazine. You may disagree with Redeker, he argued, but you have to defend his right to express his opinion freely on religious matters; our society cannot submit to blackmail.

As for the Idomeneo affair, the Italian political commentator Sergio Romano recently wrote … well, I will try to put it in my terms, thus relieving him of responsibility. If a director includes a display of the severed heads of major religious figures in his staging of a Mozart opera when such a thought never even crossed Mozart's mind, the least you should do is kick the director in the pants, but for aesthetic and philological reasons.

The illustrious musician Daniel Barenboim, writing in Italy's La Repubblica newspaper, wisely wonders if it is really in the spirit of Mozart to stage the opera in this way. Despite this, Barenboim defends the rights of the artist and explains why freedom of expression is a necessary condition for artistic creativity.

I think my friend Daniel, who is of Russian-Jewish descent, would join me in complaining about the fact that versions of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice are often criticised because the play was inspired by the anti-Semitism common in the playwright's day, even though it shows us a human and pathetic Shylock.