April 5-11, 2002
Our blasphemy law and its victim community
Khaled Ahmed's Analysis
Nothing has damaged Pakistan's reputation as a civilised country more than the two Penal Code sections 295-B and 295-C. The first punishes desecration of the Holy Quran with life imprisonment and the second punishes the offering of insult to the Holy Prophet PBUH with the minimum sentence of death. The movers of the law intended it for the persecution of the Ahmedi community in Pakistan which former prime minister Bhutto had already declared non-Muslim through the passage of the Second Amendment to the 1973 Constitution in 1974. Further disabilities were placed on the community through Martial Law Order 20 by General Zia in 1984 allowing the courts to punish the Ahmedis if they called their place of worship by the name of 'mosque' or gave a call or azan for their prayers or used any of the epithets used by the Muslims. What was meant for the persecution of the Ahmedi community at the hands of the state was used by the unscrupulous against Christians and Hindus in order to dispossess them of their property. According to one practice adopted by Sipah Sahaba against the Christians accused of blasphemy, the entire Christian community of a given locality is ejected from their houses and the houses given over to the accusers. Many jehadi organisations have been known to have indulged in this business of dispossession of property. Action against the Christian community has highlighted the problem internationally, especially as the entire Christian church becomes a target of the law in sections of the Bible where some Quranic prophets are seen to be insulted. But the real issue, the stated-aided persecution of the Ahmedis, has retreated into the background. A recent publication summarises the cases of persecution of the Ahmedi community, bringing out the irrationality of the blasphemy-related laws in Pakistan. The community finds no defenders among the Muslims of Pakistan because the law actually emanates from a 'national crime' on the order of the German antipathy for the Jews, the Iranian antipathy of the Bahais, and the Turkish antipathy of the Armenians. It is because of the primordial nature of the crimes committed against the Ahmedis under law that the state of Pakistan looks so irrational to the outsider. In the anthropological perspective, the Pakistanis are performing the rite of immolation which gives them spiritual satisfaction and validates their identity as a nation. It is from this anthropological standpoint that the persecution of the Ahmedi community should be understood in Pakistan. A look into the Nigerian psyche while Nigeria promulgates the shariah in its various states would also be helpful in understanding Pakistan's own tribal direction. Persecution of Ahmedis in Pakistan during the Year 2001 tells us of the normal pattern of action taken against the Ahmedis. The local cleric becomes obsessed with the heresy of the community and starts targeting the local Ahmedi inhabitant. His fulminations force a kind of boycott on the Ahmedis who may then be killed by a riled Muslim, as in the case of Shaikh Nazir Ahmad of Faisalabad whose murder by a chowkidar was brushed under when the clerics got together and made the administration retreat from prosecution. Mr and Mrs Abdur Rahim of Sahiwal were found murdered after they had extricated themselves from an earlier case of blasphemy after a trial that had gone on for a decade. In Gujrat, which has emerged as a hotbed of anti-Ahmedi action usually based on the dispossession of property, Muhammad Akram and Naeem Ahmed were murdered by the local rival families. In most cases, after the murder of the Ahmedis the police registers cases against more Ahmedis while ignoring the real culprits. Pakistani judges are intimidated into awarding stiff sentences to the Christians, but in the case of Ahmedis they do it for personal spiritual satisfaction. A case in Hyderabad makes good reading. An Ahmedi landlord wanted to expand a Muslim mosque that already existed on his land in Mirpur Khas. He got a Sindhi Muslim to demolish it and built a bigger one in its place. The new mosque came up in 1998. A local cleric got wind of it and reported the matter. The DSP, after discovering the real story, set aside the plaint. After this, prime minister Nawaz Sharif and president Tarar were approached by the plaintiffs and orders were issued from Islamabad to proceed against the said Ahmedi. Anti-terrorist Court Judge in Hyderabad took his time, then sentenced two Ahmedis to 118 years each in jail under blasphemy. The Supreme Court asked the court to review whether the case actually belonged in the terrorist activity, which the court thought it was. The pattern is to resort to the summary Anti-Terrorist Courts to get the Ahmedis punished in short order. Sometimes the situation can be comic. In Kotri, an Ahmedi was sentenced because he had written the kalima on his house. His plea was that the kalima was already written on his house when he purchased it. Had he rubbed off the kalima after he got the house he would equally have been guilty of blasphemy. The case that finally ended in the conviction of this 70 year old Ahmedi dragged on for ten years. In most cases Ahmedis accused of blasphemy are not allowed bail and can rot in jail over many years. Also in Kotri, four Ahmedis were proceeded against under the blasphemy law and could be awarded the death sentence. Out of the four one died during prosecution that went on for nine years, two ran away from Pakistan and the one left behind was finally sentenced to two years in jail in 2001. Another case in Kotri, which also seems to have become a hotbed of anti-Ahmedi campaign by the clergy, one Ejaz was made to undergo a trial for nine years before he was let off the charge of insulting the Holy Prophet PBUH. A number of the co-accused fled the country. There are cases of false registration routinely punished by the courts. One Ahmedi in Khushab made the mistake of registering his new born son as a Muslim in 1995 and was convicted in 2002 for having used Islam (and sentenced to one year in jail) which he was prohibited from under the law. One lady in Mansehra made the mistake of calling herself Ahmedi Muslim on her zakat exemption certificate. She was prosecuted together with three others including her father who had endorsed her certificate. The lady was lucky to get bail but the case was still pending in 2001. Another Ahmedi in Sindh was convicted of breaching Martial Law Order 20 when he allegedly got himself counted as Muslim in the census. Another Ahmedi who hung a calendar printed with the kalima was also convicted of offence under Martial Law Order 20. Some Ahmedis are lucky that they are not convicted of maximum blasphemy, but even if they go in for one year they have spent years defending themselves, sometimes without the right of bail. Hounding the Ahmedis out of educational institutions is routine even in the big cities where normally the most absurd cases are dropped because of the close scrutiny of the English press and the strength of the central bureaucracy. In Islamabad one Ahmedi lady teacher was hounded because she taught Arabic grammar in a state-owned institution from a prescribed book which used a phrase that could be construed as blasphemous. The phrase contained the word Muhammad but it was not the name of the Prophet PBUH. Yet the Khatm-e-Mabuwwat clerics got into action and one Urdu newspaper reported the matter in a prejudiced way. One lady hit the teacher on the face. The education department suspended the said teacher. Meanwhile the Khatm-e-Nabuwwat clerics called on the government to remove all Ahmedis from the education service. The teacher was finally let off from the charge of blasphemy, for which she could have been hanged, after being accused of being 'careless'. In Lahore a shopkeeper at the Engineering University was declared by an Islamic party to be a blaspheming Ahmedi (which he was not)and demonstrated against the vice-chancellor when he was not responsive. Finding that the charges would not stick, the student agitation changed the campaign into a demand for the separation of Ahmedi and Muslim mess in the University. The vice-chancellor was sympathetic to the Ahmedi students but could do nothing. He advised them to leave the University hostels. Several places of learning in Lahore and other big cities have witnessed Ahmedi students being beaten up. The institutional administration is usually enlightened but is most reluctant to defend the rights of the Ahmedis because they don't want confrontation with the clerics, the student wings of the religious parties and the jehadi organisations which the state is using to fight the Kashmir war. During 2001, 71 cases were registered against the Ahmedis. Other kinds of persecution went on too. Branch offices of the Khatm-e-Nabuwwat organisation run by Deobandi and Barelvi clerics and backed by aggressive Deobandi jehadi outfits in the small towns of Pakistan regularly issue warnings to the local Ahmedi inhabitants. These warnings are couched in extremely violent language threatening action which is clearly against the law and thus reflects the attitude expressed by one judge of the Lahore High Court when he told an audience that Muslims should punish the blasphemers themselves instead of resorting to legal remedy. In the smaller cities, the judges take upon themselves the role of the punisher and threaten the Ahmedis after calling them into their courts. In many cases when the plaintiff was not keen the judge was willing to earn spiritual reward by proceeding against the Ahmedis on his own. In other cases, the judges awarded the maximum punishment simply because they could not cope with the threats hurled at them by the clerics and their armed followers. Every government recognises the unholy and completely draconian nature of the blasphemy law in Pakistan. Even the right wing politicians like Raja Zafarul Haq who interface with the clergy as a clout against the state have tried in the past to 'rationalise' if not repeal the law, but such is the power of the clergy and the religious leaders of Pakistan that virtually no one can take any meaningful action. The world community has put pressure on Pakistan but no remedial measures at the administrative level have helped alleviate the plight of the targeted communities. The law adds to the other factors of lawlessness and crime in the country. The 'soft' state definition of Pakistan will persist as long as elements campaigning in the name of religion are either allowed exemption from law or offered laws as a handle to increase their power vis-à-vis the state.
April 05 - 11, 2002 - Vol. XIV, No. 6