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EDITORIAL: Abiding curse of Blasphemy Law

Before Al Qaeda and jihad became the buzzword of hate against the Muslims in the world, it was the notion of ‘blasphemy’ in Pakistan that made the global blood curdle; and, shamefully, this was Pakistan’s ‘pious’ contribution to modern Islamic jurisprudence. The party that promoted it as a legacy of General Ziaul Haq and his Islamisation was the Pakistan Muslim League. Now that its splinter is ruling Pakistan, it is heartening to hear that “Islamabad plans to reform its blasphemy law that Christian churches and human rights groups say the Muslim majority uses to oppress religious minorities”.

Senator Mushahid Hussain Sayed, who made this statement, also said in Paris (NB!) that the law, which gave the death penalty for insulting the Prophet PBUH, would be changed after the general elections due late this year or early next year: “We don’t want to hand another election issue to our friends”, said he, referring to the opposition Islamic parties. But he did not explain how the law would be changed because he probably didn’t know how his party would strategise its next move in this direction. In the case of the Women’s Protection Bill (WPB), the PMLQ made heavy weather of it in parliament and ended up making consensual sex culpable while trying to remove rape from the Quranic hudood laws.

Why isn’t the PMLQ in a hurry to change the notorious Blasphemy Law which has brought shame to the pure religion of Islam? One reason is the hold of the medieval madrassa on the minds of many Pakistanis who don’t want to change this law even though they realise that it is unjustly inclined to punish innocent people. It doesn’t require immaculate evidence (four revengeful witnesses) to trap a man, usually non-Muslim or Ahmedi, in a crime for which the minimum punishment is death. Since the whole process is shot through with a primitive longing to spill blood, no conviction in Pakistan has led to a hanging so far. But it takes seven to nine years on average for a trapped Christian rotting in jail to get his freedom from the Supreme Court.

Mr Mushahid Hussain will recall that his erstwhile boss, Nawaz Sharif, did not do very much as prime minister when Pakistan’s greatest social worker Akhtar Hameed Khan, in his 80s, was entrapped in a blasphemy case and had to trudge from Karachi to Multan to face a trial cooked up against him. The Muslim League, which actually increased the punishment of blasphemy from life to the death, did not care that Mr Khan was nursing a dirt poor community in Orangi and his project was once again the cynosure of international organisations looking for models of development in poor neighbourhoods.

Hundreds of innocent people have been harassed and kept in jails and outrightly killed through vigilante action by religious fanatics. One Christian bishop actually committed suicide when an innocent Christian was convicted by a sessions judge of Faisalabad simply because he was pressured by fanatic mobs standing outside his court baying for blood. Another law, related to alleged desecration of the Quran, has been lumped together with blasphemy and exploited widely in Pakistan. After the infamous case of Shantinagar near Khanewal, in which an entire Christian community was wiped out, another case in Sangla Hill took place in 2006 when another Christian community was torched, on the watch of Mr Mushahid Hussain’s party.

His present boss too may drag his feet when it is time for Mr Hussain to make good his promise after winning the 2007 elections. For short term domestic political reasons, Chaudhry Shujaat is not very keen to carry out Islamic reforms to make the faith look good at home and abroad. The reason is that he doesn’t have to tour abroad and face humanist audiences taking pity on the innocent people of Pakistan. But the change in Mr Hussain is welcome and was last seen when he spoke to an audience in Tehran about Iran’s dangerous tendency towards isolationism.

In fact the Blasphemy Law is nothing but a perverse and masochistic desire for isolationism. It is a kind of thumbing of the nose at a world which is asking us to take pity on our own people. Mr Hussain should probe the conscience of his party boss for the clue. Is it not a revenge he is taking on the non-Islamic world by being cruel to his own people? When President General Pervez Musharraf tried to remove the infamous mazhabi khana (entry of religion) from the Pakistani passport, Chaudhry Shujaat opposed it, not realising that there is no country in the world except Pakistan that supports this entry, and that too to victimise just one community.

If the ‘reform’ of the Blasphemy Law is going to be of the same tepidity as was the amendment to hudood laws, then we can predict that Mr Hussain’s promise will not be fulfilled and that what he said in Paris was nothing but a politician’s forgivable mendacity away from home.

SECOND EDITORIAL: Hekmatyar’s infectious wisdom

The old Afghan warlord and an erstwhile Pakistani favourite, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has vouchsafed from his hiding somewhere that the “US faces a Soviet-style humiliation in Afghanistan”. His own ratio of success in life has been minimal and running away from battlefields comes easy to him. He gave out the above prediction on a videotape.

The fact is that the Muslims will be hurt grievously if they believe that the United States will suffer the sort of reversal the Soviet Union did in Afghanistan before its demise. Emboldened by analyses such as the one offered by Mr Hekmatyar, the Chechens thought they could make the Russians run away from Chechnya too. Those who helped them were equally clueless. Today, the Chechens are a completely pulverised nation and Russia is on the brink of reasserting itself vis-à-vis the United States, the power for which Mr Hekmatyar fought so bravely in the 1980s although it was mostly against fellow-warlord Ahmad Shah Massoud. After Iraq, America will go home and resume its status as a big power. Its economy is better than most world economies, unlike the Soviet one, and its democracy is inclined to learn its lessons as Mr Hekmatyar’s authoritarianism never allowed him to do. *

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