In Pakistan, Zia
al-Haq introduced Hudud
Ordinance, under which theft was made punishable with the amputation of hands;
adultery and slander with flogging and death.
Soon after its promulgation the Pakistani courts were inundated with
cases alleging all kinds of atrocities against women. A Karachi court sentenced
twenty-five year old Shahida Perveen and
thirty-year old Muhammad Sarwar to
death by stoning them on the charge of adultery. The sentence could not
materialize for lack of witnesses and evidence.
In another instance, twenty-four year old Roshan Jan moved the court for divorce,
alleging physical torture by her husband.
She left her home (as required by the ordinance) and moved into a
neighbor’s house. Meanwhile, her husband
lodged a complaint with the police, accusing her of committing adultery with
the neighbor, who was married. On the
basis of the complaint, Roshan Jan
was arrested and persecuted.
Commenting on such instances, the influential Pakistani daily, Muslim of Islamabad said there were
dozens of Muslim women kept in jail without trial and pointed out that
unscrupulous men were taking full advantage of the Hudud ordinance to indulge in the sexual exploitation of women.
There are many such instances that are horrifying and show how the shari’a
laws, however, well-intended, are misused.
The second
achievement of Zia-ul-Haq was
introduction of Blasphemy Law in 1980.
The Criminal Code of Pakistan’s Penal Code provides penalties for
blasphemy ranging from a fine to death. Of all the Muslim countries, Pakistan
has the strictest anti-blasphemy laws.
The Federal Shari’a Court was
created and given jurisdiction to examine any existing law to ensure it was not
repugnant to Islam. A person can be charged with blasphemy on testimony alone,
and be immediately and arbitrarily detained without opportunity for bail. Under
this law, the only evidence needed is one 'reliable' man's word. The political
and societal clout of Islamic extremists and clerics makes it unsafe for
lawyers to represent the accused and for courts to acquit them. It also puts
great pressure on local police officers to file phony blasphemy charges. For
instance, Shafiq Masih, a Faisalabad Christian, was charged with blasphemy
following a dispute with a neighbor. A crowd of over 1,000 persons soon
converged on Shafiq's home and were prepared to lynch him. Although police
intervention saved his life, the local police chief charged Shafiq with
blasphemy to calm the sentiments of the mob. In 1997, Lahore High Court justice Arif Iqbal Hussain Bhatti (who in 1995 had
ruled to acquit accused Christian blasphemers Salamat and Rehmat Masih) was
killed after a spate of death threats. The assassination of the Governor of Punjab,
Salman Taseer, on Jan. 4, 2011 in Islamabad.
Taseer advocated that the clause in the Constitution declaring the Ahmadi community to be non-Muslims
should be revoked. He commented on a TV interview about the country's blasphemy
law and also expressed his intention of filing a mercy petition for Asia Bibi
who has been sentenced to death by a court under the Blasphemy Law.
Taseer was against the amendment made by military dictator, General Ziaul
Haq. The next day, thousands turned up
for his funeral in Lahore in spite of denunciations by some clerics and
religious scholars from mourning Taseer.
The Jama’at Ahle Sunnat threatened
mourners with the same fate as that of Taseer, and warned that 'No Muslim should attend the funeral or even
try to pray for Salman Taseer or even express any kind of regret or sympathy over
the incident.’ It said anyone who
expressed sympathy over the death of a blasphemer was also committing
blasphemy."
Qadri reportedly said he killed Taseer due to the latter's vocal opposition of
the blasphemy law in Pakistan.
Supporters of Mumtaz Qadri blocked police attempting to bring him to the
Anti-Terrorism Court in Rawalpindi, and some supporters even showered him with
rose petals.
In Nov. 2010 the Lahore High Court in Pakistan barred
President Asif Ali Zardari from pardoning the Christian women, Asia Bibi, a
45-year old mother of four, sentenced to death on charges of insulting Islam.
This is not an isolated incident; allegations of blasphemy against the Prophet
and desecration of the Qur’an have often been used against Christians in local
and personal disputes. In Aug. 2009, allegations that Christians had desecrated
the Qur’an led to several days of rioting and violence, during which an
estimated crowd of 1000 stormed a Christian neighborhood in Gojra, Pakistan.
The mob killed eight, including six women, and burned and looted dozens of
houses.
Asia Bibi strongly denied the charges and requested a presidential pardon
after a lower court sentenced her to death in a case stemming from a village
dispute. The violent reactions of militant leaders and mosque preachers
triggered the assassination of Salmaan Taseer—the governor of Punjab and an
outspoken critic of the blasphemy law—by one of his bodyguards on 4 Jan. 2011.
The assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, admitted that he was influenced by the fiery
sermons of militant preachers who had denounced Taseer.
“Not a single registered
imams in the
city of Lahore with its 13 million people was willing to read Taseer’s funeral
prayers. Five hundred lawyers have signed up to defend Taseer’s assassin,
Mumtaz Qadri, but Taseer’s wife could not find a single criminal-lawyer to prosecute
him. It is hard to see which judge is even likely to pursue the case to its
obvious conclusion.”
In addition, the
blasphemy laws are used fairly routinely to harass those considered
"improper Muslims such as the Ahmadis who are subject to onerous
restrictions under law. Although Ahmadis regard themselves as Muslims and
observe Islamic practices, a 1974 Constitutional amendment during the time of
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto declared Ahmadis to be a non-Muslim minority because,
according to the Government, they do not accept Mohammed as the last prophet of
Islam. In 1984 the Government passed an amendment prohibiting Ahmadis from
calling themselves Muslim and banning them from using Islamic words, phrases,
and greetings. The punishment for violation of this section is imprisonment for
up to 3 years and a fine.
In addition to it,
an exhaustive list of violations in Pakistan, apart from Blasphemy, relates to
Universal Human Rights, child abuses, intolerance and persecution of minorities, woman’s
persecution under Hudood Ordinance, and ethnic, sectarian, civil and religious
blood-lettings and killings throughout Pakistan.
Freedom of religion in Pakistan has come into conflict with Shari’a Law. The original Constitution
of Pakistan did not discriminate between Muslims and non-Muslims. The
amendments made during Zia-ul-Haq's Islamization led to the controversial Hudood Ordinance and Shariat Court. Later, Nawaz Sharif's government
tried to enforce a Shari’a Bill, passed in May 1991. After the
incident of 9/11, Pervez Musharraf government took steps to curtail the
religious intolerance among
different factions of Muslim communities and non-Muslims.
In September 2009,
Abdul Kahar Ahmad pleaded guilty in a Malaysian Shari’a court to charges of
spreading false doctrines, blasphemy, and violating religious precepts. The
court sentenced Ahmad to ten years in prison and six lashes from a rattan cane. Somalia's
hardliner Islamist group al-Shabaab whipped women who were wearing a
bra, and whipped men for being beardless. The group said violation of Islamic
custom deserved whipping.
The so-called division of the world into dar-ul Islam (sphere of Islam) and dar-ul harb (sphere of war) is neither
the outcome of the Quran; nor the Sunna.
It is the invention of the classical jurists and legists. This division
of world into War and Peace is definitely not applicable in the present world.
Our survey shows how unrealistic this assessment has
been. Even today there is no ganging up among the Muslims. Muslims have not
been belligerent towards the non-Muslim; nor have the Muslims tried to convert darul harb into darul Islam either by force or by persuasion. On the contrary, their efforts have been
directed solely towards settling disputes among the Muslims, except in respect
of their campaign against Israel. There
are more than forty-five Muslim-majority states, which comprise nearly seventy
percent of the total Muslim population; the other thirty percent live as
minorities in non-Muslim states. There
have been wars or guerrilla skirmishes between one Muslim state and another;
for instance between Malaysia and Indonesia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Egypt and Saudi Arabia,
South Yemen and North Yemen, Oman and South Yemen, Libya and Chad, Libya and
Morocco, Libya and Algeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan and the eight-year war
between Iraq and Iran. The current surge
of revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Jordan and many others
expected to come in the wake, all these relate to the conflicts amongst
Muslims. There have been hardly any disputes, bloody or otherwise, between the
Muslim and non-Muslim states, barring the Arab-Israeli and India-Pakistan wars.
In the last many decades, summit conferences of the
heads of Muslim states and governments have been held many times under the
auspices of the Organization of Islamic Conference: in Rabat in 1969; in Lahore
in 1974; in Mecca in 1981; in Casablanca in 1984 and in Kuwait in 1987; but
they have never been successful to bring all the conflicting interests of the
Muslim states at one platform. Islamic
solidarity and solidarity of Muslim Umma
had always been a distant cry.
Fundamentalists do cause some disturbances here and there; but they have
not succeeded in taking over state power and shaping the world in their own
image. Even the Khomeini revolution in recent years is producing more
frustration than fulfillment among the Shi’a Iranians. Piety is, no doubt, important in the life of
an individual; but on it alone ‘collectivity’—a term wisely used by Imam
Shafi’i, to connote a nation—cannot be built.
Prof. Ziauddin Sardar of King Abdul Aziz University of
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, has described in a somewhat picturesque manner the
negative role of the Islamic militancy:
“By emphasizing the precision in the mechanics of
prayer and ablution, length of beard and mode of dress, they have lost sight of
individual freedom, the dynamic nature of many Islamic injunctions….They have
founded intolerant, compulsive and tyrannical orders and have provided
political legitimacy to despotic and nepotistic systems of government. They
have closed and constructed many enquiring minds by their insistence on in-objective
parallels, unending quibbles over semantics.
They have divorced themselves from human needs and conditions. No wonder
then that the majority of Muslims today pays little attention to them and even
foster open hostility towards them.
Theologians have complicated the definition of a Muslim
with various rules on how he should bathe, shave, keep his beard, trim his
moustache, clean his nostrils, wash his private parts, dress, talk, walk and
sleep; to them Ghazali has replied in
his Faysal al-Tafriqa thus:
“Among the most extreme and extravagant of men are a
group of scholastic theologians who dismiss the Muslim common people as
unbelievers and claim that whoever does not know scholastic theology in the
form they recognize and does not know the prescriptions of the Holy Law
according to the proofs which they have adduced is an unbeliever.
“These people have constricted the vast mercy of God to
His servants and made paradise the preserve of a small clique of
theologians. They have disregarded what
is handed down by the sunna, for it
is clear that in the time of the Prophet, may God bless and save him, and in
the time of the Companions of the Prophet, may God be pleased with them, the
Islam of whole groups of rude Arabs was recognized, though they were busy
worshipping idols. They did not concern
themselves with the science of analogical proof and would have understood
nothing of it if they had.
“Whoever claims that theology, abstract proof, and
systematic classifications are the foundation of belief is an innovator.
Rather belief
is a light which God bestows on the hearts of
His creatures as the gift and bounty from Him, sometimes through an explainable
conviction from within, sometimes because of a dream in sleep, sometimes by
seeing the state of bliss of a pious man and the transmission of his light
through association and conversation with him, sometimes through one’s own
state of bliss.”
BBC News
South Asia, 5 January 2011. Retrieved 2011-01-07.
