RELIGIOUS outrage sparks public uproar. Charges of blasphemy provoke impassioned demands for fearsome retribution and for the guilty to pay the ultimate price. A heated national debate erupts over the fundamental tenets of society, politics and culture.

It is Scotland, and the year is 1696. The furore in question is the affair of one Thomas Aikenhead, an 18-year-old theology student.

On a freezing Edinburgh night in the autumn of that year, Aikenhead and three acquaintances found themselves hurrying up the Scottish capital’s Royal Mile as they sought refuge from the biting cold. As they passed the city’s austere Tron Church, an embodiment of the country’s repressive Presbyterian church, the young man turned to his fellows and joked: “I wish right now I were in the place Ezra called hell, to warm myself there.”

The casual remark would turn out to be no laughing matter. The next day, Aikenhead’s comments were reported to the authorities of the Scottish church, the Kirk. They didn’t see the funny side.

A swift inquisition of other students revealed a litany of ridicule of the faith by Aikenhead. He had claimed that the Bible was a work of invention by the prophet Ezra; that Christ’s miracles were cheap magic tricks; and that the Apostles were “silly, witless fishermen”.

The incensed ministers of the Kirk quickly made the affair a cause célèbre. Scotland’s chief prosecutor, the Lord Advocate, began a prosecution under a law that those who “railed and cursed against God” or the Trinity were to be punished by death.

A repentant and shattered Aikenhead was convicted and condemned. Desperate appeals by distinguished supporters to the Scottish Privy Council, and to King William in London, failed as the Kirk demanded that an example be made. On January 8 of the following year, Aikenhead was put to death.

Three centuries on, the Aikenhead affair, which is related in compelling detail by Arthur Herman in his fascinating book The Scottish Enlightenment, offers some striking insights into the worldwide uproar surrounding the publication of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad first in a Danish newspaper and, later, in other European papers.

The 17th-century incident is, not least, a reminder that Islam has had no monopoly of extreme responses to religious offence. Aikenhead’s tragedy reminds us, too, how devout belief by a mass of the population can be cynically exploited for worldly ends by those who claim to be motivated solely by religious conviction.

Then, the young man’s error was seized on by the Kirk as a means to strengthen its theocratic grip on temporal power in Scotland; now, the confected outrage of President Ahmadinejad of Iran is a powerful means to unite the faithful of a poor nation that might otherwise focus on their Government’s shortcomings — not least, their lack of free speech.

Yet among the most important historic lessons we can take from the Aikenhead story flows from what was to follow. The young man’s tragedy was to be born just a few decades too early. Even as he went to the gallows, Scotland was in the grip of political and intellectual forces that, by the middle of the next century, would transform its society and its economy, laying many of the foundations for the modern West as we know it.

Just four decades later, David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, was able to write: “It is a rare and fortunate age when you may think what you like, and can say what you think.”

In this short time, Scotland made a great leap forward, in which it broke free from the dogmatic, authoritarian Kirk under which it had been yoked by John Knox, the firebrand preacher. Instead, it embarked on an age of enlightenment in which freedom of expression and the free exchange of ideas would trigger a great wave of economic and social progress, giving the world, among others, Adam Smith, the father of economic thought.

The vital link between free speech and economic progress is a neglected facet of the intense debate sparked by the Danish cartoons. It is one that we should celebrate and cherish.

Freedom of expression has been, and remains, the seedbed from which Western economic, social and scientific advancement has flourished. It has been the catalyst for the prosperity that we all enjoy. In earlier times, too, swaths of the history of economic and technological progress are, in fact, a story of heretical rebellion against dogmatic orthodoxy, and thus a testimony to the power of free expression.

Of course, it is possible to point to authoritarian regimes — now and in the past — that, for a time, have been able temporarily to achieve economic progress in some form despite brutal suppression of free speech.

History suggests, though, that the inevitable consequence of such repression is to stultify progress, stunt growth and ultimately bring about the collapse of the regime at the hands of a disaffected population. Little wonder that, at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, India was so keen to badge itself as “the world’s fastest-growing free-market democracy”.

It is, then, sad that some Western goverments — our own and that of the United States in particular — seem to have forgotten these lessons of history and have been feeble in their advocacy of free expression in recent days.

Sure, publication of the cartoons may have been ill-judged, insensitive and offensive, but free speech means that we must tolerate statements to which we actively object, however misconceived.

The limit to free expression plainly lies where its exercise, through threats of violence, intimidates others into silence, or tries to.

The duty of government is not to pronounce on whether a particular statement was in bad taste, but to defend vigorously our fundamental freedoms. To do otherwise is to pander to a retreat from reason and free discourse as the foundations on which our prosperity, and our society, has been built.

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