On April 15, 2013, a court in Istanbul convicted Fazil Say of “publicly denigrating the religious values of a section of the population” for various postings on Twitter. His suspended 10-month jail sentence was upheld on September 20, 2013. The conviction related to tweets and retweets, including lines of a poem attributed to the Medieval Persian philosopher poet Omar Khayyam, that the court found insulting to Islam and offensive to Muslims.
The sentence was suspended for five years, meaning that the pianist would not be sent to prison unless he was convicted of re-offending within that period. He appealed the verdict at the Supreme Court of Appeals, and after a long and convoluted legal battle his conviction was overturned and Say was acquitted of blasphemy charges on September 7, 2016.
Case History
On May 25, 2012, Say was charged with religious defamation under Article 216/3 of the Turkish Penal Code for a series of messages he posted and retweeted, and under Article 218 of the Turkish Penal Code, which increases sentences by half for offenses committed “via press or broadcast.” The claimant who brought the case against Say argued that the tweets publicly degraded the holy values of three major religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Say’s lawyer, Meltem Akyol, denied that his client’s retweets were degrading to religious values, highlighting the fact that one of those included in the indictment was not only a retweet, but a direct quotation from a verse written by Omar Khayyam. Another simply stated “I am an atheist and I am proud to be able to say this so comfortably.”