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What does insulting Islam mean today – seemingly everything from provocative cartoons to having a website championing for free speech. The Saudi writer Raif Badawi has been sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes, 50 per week, for setting up a website calling for a more liberal and free society in Saudi Arabia; he was arrested in 2012 and his blog shut down.

Today he will receive the second round of lashes after Friday prayers, despite international condemnation of torture and human rights violations. As so often the cry of God is great will be followed by an act of violence. The world will watch as we become increasingly desensitised to the levels of brutality perpetrated by Islamists and states of all creeds and colours. Saudi Arabia isn’t the only country to violate international laws but it does so often with an air of chilling certainty that its punishments reflect piety.

If globalisation has made the world a smaller place, never before have cultural values seemed so far part. I believe we should speak up not out of any moral high ground but rather if we stand for any kind of universal human dignity, we can’t remain silent. After all, it’s the appeal of a certain puritanical and violent Islam that is being played out on the streets of Europe; and what happens in distant lands affects us over here. It’s one thing for leaders to march together defending free speech, and however welcome that is - it’s quite another to stand up for it in the face of autocratic states.

And yet this is the real challenge because one country isn’t supposed to dictate to another how it should manage its laws; political realities make it very difficult to intervene in the culture of another country. Over the last few years, writers and artists have spoken out against the destruction of all that Saudi Arabia considers an insult to its ideas of true Islam; and yet in the end we have been helpless to do anything. Today we can plead that Raif Badawi’s crime is pardoned. If we remain silent in the assurance that forgiveness will just happen, it won’t.

God is great is heard all the time but it seems to me that the words God is merciful are gradually disappearing from the streets and in the pulpits. A merciful God is of no value to those for whom mercy means weakness. `Je suis Raif’ is springing up over social media but we don’t need another hashtag to appreciate that the demand for a more open society can only ever be a good thing wherever we live. In Raif’s own words, `his government’s hold over people’s minds and society shall vanish like dust carried off in the wind’ but if this does happen, it may already be too late for Raif.

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