BY KAMILA SHAMSIE
I first became aware of Pakistan’s blasphemy law a
little before I turned 18. It was 1991 and although less than three
years had passed since a plane explosion killed General Zia and
subsequent elections brought Benazir Bhutto to power, the optimism which
surrounded those events had already largely dissipated. Benazir’s
ineffectual government had lasted less than two years before being
dismissed on corruption charges and Zia’s protégé, Nawaz Sharif, was the
new prime minister. If Benazir lacked the political power and nerve to
overturn any of the repressive laws which Zia had introduced or
strengthened in the name of Islam, Nawaz lacked the inclination to do
so. The coalition of parties which he headed – the Islamic Democratic
Alliance – had, from the outset, knowingly positioned itself against
Benazir’s secular, female-led Pakistan Peoples Party.
So it wasn’t surprising, but it was sickening, when
Sharif’s government went along with the Federal Shariat Court’s ruling
of October 1990, stating that an existing law which permitted life
imprisonment rather than death to those found guilty of blasphemy was
repugnant to Islam. “The penalty for contempt of the holy prophet… is
death” the court plainly declared, and the government drew up a bill to
bring the law into accordance with this ruling.
The blasphemy law, as it has come to be known, had been
around in a milder form long before the Federal Shariat Court’s ruling.
In 1947 when the new nation of Pakistan adopted the Indian Penal Code
(drawn up by the British), it included Section 295A which ran as
follows: “Whoever, with deliberate and malicious intention of outraging
the religious feelings of any class of citizens of Pakistan by words,
either spoken or written, or by signs or by visible representations or
otherwise, insults or attempts to insult the religion or the religious
beliefs of that class, shall be punished with imprisonment of either
description for a term which may extend to three years, or with fine, or
with both.”
For the first few decades of Pakistan’s existence
Section 295A was scarcely ever invoked but when General Zia came to
power following a military coup and decided that the best way to
circumnavigate the absence of a popular mandate was to claim the role of
religious saviour, everything changed in the relationship between
religion and state. “Islamisation” became the word of the hour – or
rather, of the decade that followed Zia’s usurpation of power. All
political parties were banned, their leaders imprisoned if they weren’t
in exile, except for the right-wing religious party, the Jamaat-e-Islami;
advancement in the army and government became tied to a willingness to
espouse Zia’s Islam; school curriculums were “Islamised” – which meant
science fell out of favour, religious instruction was raised above all
other subjects and the heroes of Pakistan’s history were men who killed
(usually Hindus and Sikhs) in the name of religion. It is worth noting
that everyone in Pakistan today under the age of 40 who attended
government schools (which is most of the school-going population) would
have had Zia’s curriculum and world view pressed into their brains from
a very early age.
At the private school I attended, where we followed the
O-level syllabus and used English language texts published outside
Pakistan, I grew up learning an entirely different version of the world.
Our history lessons covered the ancient world, medieval Europe, a
patchwork of Indian history from the Aryan invasions to the rise of
Buddhism to the Mughals, through the British empire to the creation of
Pakistan. Islamic lessons – known, to the great amusement of my parents,
as RI (religious instruction) – weren’t given any great prominence but
at the same time all students knew that RI was the one lesson where you
couldn’t question anything.
Where did this attitude come from? I didn’t learn it
from my home life, I know; was it merely the atmosphere of Zia’s
Pakistan seeping through or had religion always been sealed in a
protected bubble except in the most radical circles? That’s a question
which requires more space to discuss – for the moment, suffice it to say
that by the mid-1980s an extremist version of Islam had not only been
codified in law but had made its way into daily life. Moreover, the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and India’s acts of brutality against the
largely Muslim population of the Kashmir valley provided seemingly
endless opportunities for pro-jihad propaganda. And then, of course,
there was Saudi Arabia, delighted with the Wahhabism of Pakistan’s new
head of state and only too happy to spend its petrodollars funding
Wahhabi mosques and madrassas in Zia’s beleaguered nation.
All this is necessary to understand the atmosphere in
which Zia widened the scope of the blasphemy laws, most notably with the
addition of a new section, 295C: “Use of derogatory remarks, etc in
respect of the holy prophet: Whoever by words, either spoken or written,
or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or
insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the holy
Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) shall be punished with death, or
imprisonment for life, and shall also be liable to fine.”
From the first, the new and expanded blasphemy laws were
used as tools of persecution, used not only against non-Muslims but also
against Muslims belonging to minority sects (who were viewed by the
Wahhabis as being as bad as, if not worse, than non-Muslims). In an
entirely skin-crawling manner the newly fanged laws made perfect sense
for Zia’s rule – if you’re going to claim that your authority stems from
your role as champion of Islam then you have to show yourself zealous in
finding and punishing those who offend Islam, both at home and abroad. I
have to confess that I don’t recall any conversations around the
blasphemy laws in Zia’s days. Perhaps this is because there was so much
else to froth at the mouth about around his Islamisation policy. Or
because I was 13 at the time.
But I remember very clearly the terrifying period four
years later, in the newly democratic Pakistan, when Nawaz Sharif’s
government did something which Zia’s government had considered and
rejected: impose a mandatory death sentence in blasphemy cases. Every
hope that the end of Zia would see a reversal of his Islamisation
policies died right there and the number of cases registered under 295C
kept on rising.
Most of those who were accused, particularly in the
early days, were non-Muslims or Ahmadiyyas (a group who refer to
themselves as Muslim but have been declared non-Muslim by the Pakistan
state and are subject to vicious persecution). But the case which most
struck me was that of Akhtar Hameed Khan – a development activist, and
one of the great heroes of Pakistan and in particular of my home city of
Karachi. I always heard his name uttered with admiration in my household
so it was chilling to pick up the newspaper one morning and find him
accused of blasphemy and even more chilling to hear the offending words
were in a poem for children that ‘could be read’ as blasphemous if you
chose to interpret them in a particular way. In the end, he escaped
conviction (as he did on the other two occasions when he was accused
under the blasphemy law) but the incident was enough to make it clear to
me that the law could be used against any writer who strayed from
orthodoxy.
In Benazir’s second term in office her government made
some attempts to amend the blasphemy law to decrease its abuse by those
seeking to persecute minorities or settle private scores. Her law
minister, Iqbal Haider, later said he had won the agreement of other
parties, including the hard-line religious Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F),
for making those amendments; but as soon as a newspaper erroneously
reported that the government was planning to repeal the blasphemy laws,
there were mass demonstrations by religious groups, which so intimidated
the government that Iqbal Haider quickly declared support for the laws
and dropped all talk of amendments.
It was around this time, while at university, that I
first encountered the term “Kafkaesque”. It seemed designed for the
blasphemy laws: if one person had said something blasphemous, their
words could not be repeated, not even to a policeman or in a court of
law, because voicing the blasphemous words would itself be an act of
blasphemy, and so the accuser would become the accused. Those charged
under the blasphemy law were immediately imprisoned and placed in
solitary confinement, awaiting trial, for their own protection; failure
by the police to do so, the logic went, left open the possibility that
the accused would be killed either by their neighbours (if they weren’t
imprisoned) or by other inmates (if they were imprisoned) because
passions run so high over blasphemy charges.
The only ray of light in all this was the refusal by the
Supreme Court to uphold a single guilty plea in all the blasphemy cases
that came before it though in reality this could mean that an accused
person could be in solitary confinement for years and years while the
case worked its way through the judicial system. The judges themselves
were not immune to pressure: in 1997 Arif Iqbal Bhatti, a high court
judge, was assassinated after finding three men not guilty of blasphemy.
At a certain point it started to seem impossible to
imagine anything would change. Attempts to merely modify the law had
failed – President Musharraf had been the latest head of state to
suggest the possibility, only to back-pedal furiously in the face of
pressure from the religious right. The growing feeling in Pakistan that
Islam was a religion under threat in the world meant that there was even
less likelihood than before of anyone mounting a challenge to the status
quo.
Into this situation strode Salmaan Taseer, governor of
Punjab (the most powerful province in Pakistan). In an entirely
unprecedented move, he went with his wife to visit a Christian woman in
prison, Aasia Bibi, who had been in solitary confinement for over a year
after an altercation with a group of Muslim women who had refused to
drink from the same glass of water as her because they considered her
“untouchable”. These women later claimed Aasia Bibi had spoken
blasphemous words in the course of the fight and she was taken away to
solitary confinement and later found guilty by the lower court.
Salmaan Taseer promised that Aasia Bibi would receive a
presidential pardon. He also called the blasphemy law “a black law” and
pointed out that it was man-made, not god-made. President Zardari, whose
backing Taseer claimed to have, started to dither. No presidential
pardon was immediately forthcoming and the judiciary (already at
loggerheads with Zardari for entirely separate reasons) ruled that he
had no right to grant a presidential pardon until the appeals process
was exhausted. While Taseer continued to rail against the blasphemy law,
his own party deserted both him and Sherry Rehman, the already
out-of-favour minister who had tabled a bill to amend the laws. The law
minister, Babar Awan, insisted there was no possibility of changing the
laws and the interior minister, Rehman Malik, went one better and said
that he would personally kill anyone who blasphemed. The right-wing
press – who make Fox News look left-wing by comparison – applauded this
stance and condemned Taseer.
“I was under huge pressure sure 2 cow down b4 rightist
pressure on blasphemy. Refused. Even if I’m the last man standing,”
Taseer tweeted on December 31. Four days later, he was dead, gunned down
by one of his own security guards who said he did it because of Taseer’s
stand on the blasphemy law. For this the murderer has become a hero in
large parts of Pakistan – when he arrived in court to be arraigned,
lawyers threw rose petals at him. Near the same time, Taseer’s sons were
throwing rose petals on their father’s grave. Absent from the grave site
was the head of Taseer’s party, and the country’s president, Asif Ali
Zardari. It was clear that rather than doing the only decent thing and
repealing the blasphemy law in honour of Taseer’s memory, the government
wanted to put as much distance as possible between itself and the memory
of the bravest man in its party.
It was left to Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, a conservative
politician from the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid), to say that
amendments were needed to prevent abuse of the blasphemy law. At the
time this seemed the best anyone could hope for – not to touch the law
itself but to make it very difficult for anyone to register an
accusation of blasphemy against someone else. But even the faint hope of
such procedural changes dimmed as the weeks went by. On January 30,
Hussain’s political party and other centre-right parties joined the
right-wing religious groups in a massive rally demanding that the
blasphemy laws remain untouched. The head of the JUI (F) publicly
declared that the newly appointed governor of the Punjab should visit
Taseer’s assassin in prison – just as Taseer had visited Aasia Bibi. A
few days after this, Prime Minister Gilani announced that Sherry Rehman
had agreed to withdraw her ‘private member’s bill’ calling for
amendments to the law, in keeping with the PPP’s policy of leaving the
law untouched. Politically isolated and under threat from extremists,
Rehman – who weeks earlier had seen a 25,000 person strong rally march
through her home town of Karachi declaring her an enemy of Islam – said
she would stand by her party’s decision.
Through all this the newspapers continued to carry
stories of people charged under the blasphemy law, including a schoolboy
who was reported to the authorities by an examination board for
allegedly blasphemous remarks he had written on an examination paper. At
the beginning of March, Pakistan’s minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti,
was assassinated and the Taliban claimed responsibility. He was a
Christian and the only non-Muslim in the cabinet. In January, Bhatti had
told AFP: “During this [Aasia] Bibi case I constantly received death
threats. Since the assassination of Salmaan Taseer… these messages are
coming to me even publicly. The government should register cases against
all those using hate speech.” The Kafkaesque nightmare continues.
