I must admit, I don’t understand blasphemy. I looked it up in the dictionary and that didn’t help much. From what I understand, it is blasphemy when one’s religious or spiritual beliefs are made the subject of hate-speech. That’s the easy part, but here’s what I don’t get: Being raised in urban Pakistan in the 90s, I’m sure a lot of you reading this will have heard Jummah rants from our esteemed maulvis against Jews and Christians and Hindus. How their beliefs are inferior and how their deities are vile. Isn’t that blasphemy?
I also distinctly remember a tele-film on PTV about this fleet of the Pakistan Navy that sneaked past Indian marine defenses and unleashed a barrage of artillery fire on an Indian military outpost and neighboring village Dawarka. The climax of this tale of extreme bravado was the destruction of a Hindu temple – incidentally the same Mohammed Bin Qasim demolished. I am ashamed to admit that I found the sight of Hindu worshippers running away in fright quite gratifying. I’m not too sure that the 1.5% of Hindu “Pakistanis” would have found it gratifying watching it on “national” television. They wouldn’t have found it at all pleasing to see their own “jawans” turning a territorial conflict against a secular enemy into a religious one.
So the next time we have fits of horror and outrage at a video of a man clad in orange spewing rubbish or hear of a minister doing so in a run-down church in America or learn of a movie made in Europe expressing anti-Muslim sentiments, we should think look to ourselves and our own intolerance towards other beliefs.
And that’s not the worst of it. It isn’t any less deplorable, although understandable when individuals or small groups discriminate based on religion or race. But what makes me despair is how governments and legal systems are grossly discriminating against their own citizens all over the world for having beliefs and ideologies different from the standard.
Recently, in Italy a Muslim woman was fined for wearing a hijab on the streets on her way to a prayer meeting. We’ve already seen the persistent discrimination hijab wearing Muslim women are facing in France. But staying closer to home, here in Pakistan there are questionable blasphemy laws that are being continuously manipulated to further suppress the minorities especially the Christians. Last week, a Christian woman in Sheikhupura was sentenced to death by the district courts for uttering blasphemous words. The story as I’ve heard it is that four Muslim women from a village near Sheikhupura reported to the police that they had witnessed this Christian woman uttering blasphemous words. The mother of five then spent a year in jail, before being sentenced to death by the district courts. This situation is pretty common actually. Around 10 people in the past 15 years have been sentenced to death over similar charges and then released on appeal to higher courts.
What baffles me terribly is that how easy it is for four individuals to point the finger at a Christian or Hindu citizen of this country accusing them of blasphemy and then the legal system will put them through hell because of it.
A few weeks ago, I posted a very funny YouTube video on Facebook from the 70s show “Monty Python and the flying circus”. Here a hilarious situation of a man being stoned for blasphemy falls into comical chaos. To the average viewer, the accusation of uttering “the name of our lord” and the severity of the subsequent punishment added to the hilarious inadequacies of the executioners. After reading about this particular incident and the blasphemy law in Pakistan, I couldn’t stop thinking about that clip.
The point I want to make in this very random rant, is that like Afia Siddiqui there are many other daughters of this country facing discrimination on this basis of religious intolerance. Daughters for whom we can do more than just pray.
