Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported a curious incident that took place late last year in the village of Saint-Genis-Pouilly in France. A local cultural center had organized a reading of a 265-year-old play by Voltaire called, Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet. When local Muslim groups demanded that the performance be cancelled, the mayor replied by calling in police reinforcements to protect the theatre. Minor disturbances broke out on the night of the reading, but the gendarmes quickly restored order and the play was performed.

Despite the title, it is difficult to understand Muslim objections. The play really isn’t about Islam at all. Rather, it is an attack on all forms of religious tyranny – particularly the kind exercised by the Catholic Church in 18th Century France.

It was common for writers of the period, who were liable to be jailed if they made direct attacks on church and crown, to mask their criticisms by pretending to write about Islam. A favorite device was to contrast Muslims and the Muslim religion favorably to the bigoted brand of Christianity then in force.

Thus, ten years before his play about Mahomet, Voltaire wrote a play called Zaire, about a young woman who was abducted by the Turks when she was a baby and raised as a Muslim. When the play opens, she and a handsome Turkish noble have fallen in love. They are about to marry, when Zaire’s father and brother inconveniently pop up and demand that she embrace Christianity. Their insistence on her conversion ultimately brings about the girl’s death. (Get it? Who are the real fanatics in this play?)

Similarly, the French philosopher Montesquieu wrote a book called The Persian Letters, which concealed social satire under what purported to be the letters home of a Persian visitor to France.

Yet another example is Mozart’s opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio. At the end of this opera, the Turkish pasha shows himself to be a more enlightened and humane ruler than some Christians in authority.

Therefore, properly understood, there is nothing in Voltaire’s play intended to disparage Islam. But even if there were, should militant Muslims be permitted to censor the work?

For anyone who believes in the freedoms that brave spirits like Voltaire struggled to secure for us today, the answer, clearly, is no. Under our Western system of values, people have the right to express viewpoints that others find objectionable, or even blasphemous.

It is no good saying, as some so-called liberals have said in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy, that freedom of the press requires the media to be “responsible” and “sensitive” to other people’s deeply-held religious beliefs. No. Freedom of the press, if the right means anything at all, includes the right to deliberately shock and offend.

Take away the right to publish what some consider to be offensive, and where do you stop?

In Voltaire’s time, a silly noble who refused to doff his hat to a religious procession was broken on the wheel – a particularly barbarous form of capital punishment. In some Muslim countries today, vicious anti-semitic propaganda is commonplace; Christians are forbidden to practice their faith, even in private; and Muslims who change their religion can be executed for “apostasy.”

And yet there are Muslims who insist that they have the right to prohibit anything that they regard as demeaning to Islam, and commit violence if their wishes are not acceded to.

If we give in to that kind of blackmail, we make ourselves unwitting pawns in a conspiracy to repeal the modern world.

Vive Voltaire!