The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair, with its eye on Islamist militants, has begun a nationwide campaign to make inciting religious hatred a crime punishable by imprisonment.
Home Secretary David Blunkett said the government's aim is to extend anti-discrimination laws to stop hatemongers from targeting people because of their religious faith and to "sideline" extremists who claim to speak for them.
The new law would be a "two-way street," Mr. Blunkett said. "It applies equally to far-right evangelical Christians as to extremists in the Islamic faith."
Mr. Blair's administration hopes to turn the proposals into law within a year and to model the necessary legislation along the lines of existing statutes outlawing incitement to racial hatred, which carries a maximum prison term of seven years.
In Britain, inciting racial hatred is defined as using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior "with intent or likelihood to stir up racial hatred."
The new proposals announced by Mr. Blunkett in a recent address to the Institute of Public Policy Research use the word "religious" in place of "racial."
But the government's campaign was seen in some quarters as an infringement on Britain's fundamental right to free speech.
Rowan Atkinson, the comedic star of the "Mr. Bean" movie and television series, said he and others in his profession fear that they could be prosecuted for lampooning religious figures.
Monty Python's hit movie "Life of Brian" — about a fictitious neighbor of Jesus Christ who is mistaken for the Messiah — never could have been made had the proposed law against religious hatred been in force, he said.
The home secretary insisted that such a law would not curb the rights of anyone to express their views about others' religions.
"The issue is not whether you have an argument or discussion, or whether you are criticizing someone's religion," he said. "It's whether you incite hatred on the basis of it."
Even some among Britain 1.5 million-strong Muslim population, which has become the target of numerous hate crimes since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, fear the effect such a law could have on the Muslims and on the right of the community's more extreme elements to speak out.
"In the light of the well-recognized Islamophobic society that we have [in Britain] at the moment, this legislation could very well be used against Muslim communities," said Massoud Shadjareh, chairman of the Islamic Human Rights Commission.
Mr. Blunkett announced his campaign against religious hatred even as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a fiery Egyptian cleric who preaches support for suicide bombings and for the beating of "disobedient" wives, arrived in Britain.
"I am very clear that some of the noisiest and most high-profile political and religious extremists in this country have no mandate to speak for the communities they claim to represent and evoke a reaction which plays into the hands of racists," he said.
Mr. Blair's government tried — and failed — to get similar legislation against religious hatred enacted in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
The House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, squelched that attempt. The new legislation might not fare any better.
Indian-born Meghnad Desai, a professor at the London School of Economics who sits in the upper chamber, predicted that the Blair government again will face "a very, very difficult time" in the Lords.
"We will get into a real muddle if we take religion as a basis for prosecution, rather than race," Mr. Desai said.
"Once you step into the religious cauldron, the depth is bottomless," he said. "There are Hindus and Buddhists and so on. ... How are we to define a religion? Are the Scientologists to enjoy protection, and what about Druids, and Satanists?"
Britain's main opposition Conservative Party sharply opposes the proposed legislation. Its home-affairs spokesman, David Davis, summed up its views about such a law: "It will impinge on civil liberties and only serve to make lawyers rich."