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Thirty years ago, it would have been impossible to write about blasphemy without mentioning the Rushdie affair. In effect, until the publication of The Satanic Verses (Rushdie, 1988) at the end of September 1988, most Westerners had never come across any instances of alleged blasphemy with such large-scale socio-political consequences. In addition, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against its author, on 14 February 1989, the sentence not only seemed excessive and disproportionate to the nature of the putative crime, but the Islamic world suddenly appeared as dangerous, tyrannical, and barbaric.1 Now, in 2022, it is extremely difficult to address the question of blasphemy without referring to the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh, who was ritually assassinated on 2 November 2004 in retaliation for his purportedly blasphemous short film Submission, which in turn triggered various arson attacks on Muslim schools and mosques (Buruma, 2006; Eyerson, 2008). Now, it is virtually impossible not to recall the global repercussions of twelve tiny cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, which were first published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten on 30 September 2005 and subsequently reprinted in various outlets in continental Europe as an act of solidarity with international campaigns for the preservation of the freedom of the press (Sifaoui, 2006; Sniderman et al., 2014; Favret-Saada, 2015; Rose, 2016). It is exceptionally hard not to rekindle the case of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian woman who was sentenced to death in November 2010 after being found guilty of contaminating a supposedly Islamic water supply by drinking a few cups from
the local tap (Bibi & Tollet, 2012; 2020). In 2022, no scholarly volume on blasphemy can possibly ignore the shootings at the offices of Charlie Hebdo on 7 January 2015, in which twelve people lost their lives (Bordet & Telo, 2017; Lançon, 2018; Eko, 2020). And most recently there was the brutal murder of Samuel Paty, d