A matter of faith

---Express Tribune, Pakistan

A matter of faith

By Basil Nabi Malik
May 03, 2010

The writer is a lawyer with Malik, Chaudhry, Ahmed and Siddiqi in Karachi (basil.nabi@tribune.com.pk)

It is common knowledge that we are duty bound to follow and respect the Constitution of Pakistan and each and every one of its articles. However, the same becomes a tad bit difficult when certain unpalatable clauses are added which really have no business being in the constitution.

For example, if I were to ask anyone as to the definition of a ‘Muslim’, I am guessing the last place they’d look would be in the Constitution of Pakistan. However, lo and behold Article 260 of our constitution actually defines the term. Ironically, all this happened during the time of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, though he was, of course, pressured to do this by certain religious quarters.

Although it was clearly a political move, the method was unique. Rather than to go into the intricacies and complications of trying to forge a unanimously agreed-upon definition, which many thought was next to impossible and perhaps even unnecessary, he thought it fit to zero in on an exclusionary clause which ‘enlightened’ us on what a Muslim could not be.

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However, clearly, this was the kind of medieval quackery that only ‘scheming politicians’ could think of. It took the likes of General Zia in 1985 to give us an affirmative definition of a Muslim, sans the discussions and attempts at consensus building, which in all likelihood, he probably found irrelevant. He did this in the form of the President’s Order No. 24 of 1985, whereby Article 260(3) was substituted with what can best be described as intriguing definitions of the terms ‘Muslim’ and ‘non-Muslim’.

The word ‘Muslim’ entailed: “a person who believes in the unity and oneness of Almighty Allah, in the absolute and unqualified finality of the Prophethood of Muhammad (pbuh), the last of the Prophets and does not believe in, or recognise as a prophet or religious reformer, any person who claimed or claims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad (pbuh)”. General Zia, however, didn’t leave it at that.

For some odd reason, he didn’t feel that the people of the country would actually be able to understand the term ‘Muslim’ and so the definition of ‘non-Muslim’ was also inserted. The term ‘non-Muslim’ was defined as: “a person who is not a Muslim and includes a person belonging to the Christian, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or Parsi community, a person of the Qadiani Group or the Lahori Group who call themselves ‘Ahmadis’ or by any other name or a Bahai and a person belonging to any of the Scheduled Castes”.

Effectively, in one stroke, General Zia did what Justice Munir in the Munir Report of 1954 dreaded and forewarned against: the adoption of certain religious worldviews at the expense of others, thereby inducing divisions in society. To be more exact, after asking a variety of the ulema as to what the definition of a Muslim would entail and receiving varying responses, Justice Munir said in the report that: “keeping in view the several definitions given by the ulema [defining the term Muslim], need we make any comment except that no two learned divines are agreed on this fundamental.”

The point is that what business is it of the state to get into this whole matter of defining who is a Muslim and who isn’t. One would have thought that this is a matter best left to individuals themselves and is something to be assessed by their conduct and actions — and in any case it is a private matter for each individual. It’s a pity that the 18th amendment chose to ignore this in the present constitution.

URL: http://tribune.com.pk/story/10274/a-matter-of-faith/

Blasphemy Law haunts minorities even after 18th Amendment

The News International - Pakistan

Thursday, April 22, 2010 | National

Blasphemy Law haunts minorities even after 18th Amendment

Thursday, April 22, 2010
By our correspondent

Karachi

The legacy of Zia Ul Haq continues to haunt the minorities in Pakistan as the 18th Amendment failed to do away with the controversial Blasphemy Law.

Representatives of minority communities have expressed concern over the government’s silence towards the repealing of the law.

Patron of the Pakistan Hindu Council, Ramesh Kumar told The News that he had met with top government officials, including Chairman Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reforms, Senator Raza Rabbani regarding amendments to the blasphemy law but failed to get any response.

“The law has greatly been misused against all the minority communities living in the country. There is a dire need to amend the law. I also made some suggestions regarding the selection procedure of the parliamentarians representing the minorities. However, this request, like its former, was also ignored.” Kumar suggested that parliamentarians should be nominated by public votes and not by party nomination.

Representing the Christian community, the secretary general of All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, Michael Javed, said that the government officials had promised on several occasions that amendments would be made but all these ended up in smoke. “It seems that the state has forgotten the outrageous Gojra incident in which seven people were burnt alive and more than 40 houses were torched. Due to the Blasphemy Law, hundreds of innocent people have been killed and several others are languishing in jails on the pretext of false cases.”

Moreover, the government’s decision to allocate four reserved seats in the Senate for the minorities is just a deceptive picture as the ones who would be sitting on the chairs would be representing their respective political parties and not the masses, he added.

A minority rights advocate, Elvis Steven, stated that the sentiment of the community has also been hurt over the exclusion of minorities in the constitutional committee for the 18th Amendment Bill. “Neither any amendment was not made to laws pertaining to minorities nor was any minority leader was taken into consultation for the reforms”.

“The Blasphemy Law has become a dead noose for us,” said Sardar Ramesh, of the Sikh community, a community which has no representation in the government or in the opposition. He said that no follower of any religion could even think of defaming or desecrating another religion and the death sentence punishment for the law should be abolished.

However, the most vulnerable minority community is the Ahmedis who continue to face discrimination and violence in the light of the law.

A report titled ‘State of Human Rights in 2009’ by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan displays a bleak picture of the minorities. Last year, a total of 41 complaints regarding Blasphemy Law were registered by the police, out of which some 37 Ahmedis were booked under the law. Around five Ahmedi citizens were murdered in target killings.

“The law is exploited and our people are the worst sufferers. Everyday we are issued death threats but remain silent for fear of our lives. Until and unless the government repeals the discriminatory law, the minority communities won’t be able to breathe freely,” said an Ahmedi leader.

URL: www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=235325

Pakistan: Looking for justice [Comment]

--- Daily Times, Pakistan

Monday, September 21, 2009

COMMENT: Looking for justice — Syed Mansoor Hussain

The ultimate conundrum is that if a Christian is asked the question, do you believe that the Prophet of Islam (pbuh) was a Prophet and the Quran is the word of God, the believing Christians must say no, and if they say that, under the law are they not guilty of blasphemy and have committed a capital offence


Last week I had hinted that I might write about how Muslim Americans have become discriminated pariahs in the US after 9/11. But then something at home forced me to concentrate on what is happening to minorities in Pakistan. Indeed in comparison it almost made me feel better about how we as Muslims are being treated in the US.

The Gojra carnage that has mysteriously disappeared from public perception and our news channels and newspapers is just one thing. More recently, a young Christian boy arrested for blasphemy died in jail, the ‘authorities’ insisting that it was a suicide. Sure!

And then the story broke about the case of a ‘mentally retarded’ woman who has languished in custody for thirteen years after being accused of blasphemy but was never presented in court. This woman has been officially declared as somebody probably incapable of even understanding the meaning of blasphemy and yet remained incarcerated for all this time without judicial review.

“You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan.” That is what Jinnah said sixty-two years ago to the people of Pakistan but today the very same people who shout the loudest about Jinnah and his legacy are the ones that ignore his words.

Almost two decades ago when democracy had just returned to Pakistan after a rather egregious military dictatorship, Pakistani Americans had a series of seminars in New York City to discuss what needed to be done in Pakistan to strengthen democracy. Platitudes galore! However, one almost offhand remark about the state of minorities in Pakistan during one such ‘seminar’ remains stuck in my mind.

Somebody brought up the fact that the Pakistani flag has a white part representing minorities and therefore minorities are an important and protected part of our national heritage. But then an obviously ‘liberal’ cynic pointed out that after all Pakistanis needed some part of the flag to drive the pole through. Of course what he said sounds a lot more ‘descriptive’ in Punjabi.

As I sit here today thinking about how our minorities, especially the Christians are being treated in ‘modern’ Pakistan, that remark reverberates ever so much in my mind. However, historically the Pakistani establishment has never been kind to minorities.

The Ahmadiyya community was targeted during the agitation in 1953 and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto the secularist declared them non-Muslims twenty years later under religious pressure. Even the Shia have been, and still are, under threat. Fortunately for the Shia they are much too large a community and too integrated to be easily separated and targeted except in discrete areas of the country.

Perhaps some of my readers might even remember a time not too long ago when Shia doctors were being killed just because they were Shia. Interestingly, some of them were killed just because they had Shia-sounding names, so much so that Shia doctors and even some with Shia-sounding names began to leave Pakistan.

Of the minorities, most of the Sikhs left Pakistan at the time of partition as did most Hindus with a few staying behind, mostly in Sindh. During the first few decades of Pakistan, the Christian community was an important and fully integrated part of the national fabric. There was a thriving ‘Anglo’ community in Lahore that I remember well and many Christians held important positions as educators, civil servants and members of the armed forces.

But everything started to change after the “enlightened” days of Islamisation. Most, if not all, of those that could afford it among the Christians, the Ahmadis and even the Parsees left Pakistan for western countries. Sadly, of the Christians left behind the majority now belongs to the poorer classes and therefore is most vulnerable.

The recent spate of violence against the Christian community is not entirely about religious extremism and an excess of ‘Islamist’ zeal. I personally believe that after the Taliban and their supporters became isolated and unpopular due to attacks on other Muslims, they have changed tactics. Any radical organisation needs to keep its base involved and fired up and since attacks that killed other Muslims became undesirable, the Christian community has become an easy and obvious target.

Considering the political and bureaucratic indifference to these attacks, this strategy of attacking Christians seems to be paying off. It provides the Taliban types with enough ‘face time’ on TV and in newspapers and keeps their radical base involved and active. Unfortunately many in our bureaucracy, among the politicians as well as in our lower judiciary are either entirely intimidated by, or else agree with, the Islamist types and therefore do not pursue cases against them to bring them to justice.

The ‘apologists’ for the Taliban types keep repeating the mantra that Islam is a tolerant religion and as such the violence aimed at Christians or even against Muslims could not possibly be the work of real Muslims. Who then were the people that burned houses and residents in Gojra or recently blew up a hotel in Kohat? Are they not Muslims and are they not doing whatever they are doing in the name of Islam?

The ultimate conundrum is that if a Christian is asked the question, do you believe that the Prophet of Islam (pbuh) was a Prophet and the Quran is the word of God, the believing Christians must say no, and if they say that, under the law are they not guilty of blasphemy and have committed a capital offence?

And that is my question to the powers that be. What is more important when it comes to the survival of the federation, the price of sugar or the legally sanctioned killing of non-Muslims just because they believe in their faith as we do in ours?

Syed Mansoor Hussain has practised and taught medicine in the US. He can be reached at smhmbbs70@yahoo.com

URL: www.dailytimes.com.pk/defau...y_21-9-2009_pg3_3