By not making Pakistan a theocracy even after short-sightedly establishing it as a Muslim nation, Muhammad Ali Jinnah provided an excellent opportunity for that country to peacefully coexist within the comity of secular democracies. But in what was a bewildering constitutional move, Pakistan decided to call itself an ‘Islamic Republic’ even while claiming to be a state ‘dedicated to the preservation of democracy’. Since then, it has been hurtling headlong into a state of ataxia that has numbed its capacity to comprehend its statal essentialism.
Over the years, civilian-military rule in Pakistan could figure out neither the meaning of the designation ‘Islamic democracy’ nor its societal implications. Is it about enacting laws to target political opponents and curtail the freedoms of religious and ethnic minorities or is it the name of statutorily preserving legal egalitarianism and social justice as envisaged in the Quran and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Attacked for alleged blasphemy
A serious consequence of this ontological incertitude has been the maddening perversity of thought that marks the justification of mob violence against those charged under blasphemy laws in Pakistan. The most notorious example of this was the ordeal a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, went through before being acquitted of blasphemy in 2018. Many who defended her had to pay with their lives including the Punjab Governor, Salman Taseer.
The latest manifestation of the chronic malaise was the lynching in Sialkot earlier this month of a Sri Lankan man for allegedly taking down posters on which Quranic verses were inscribed. Less than a week before the Sialkot savagery, an extremist mob had burned a police station in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa when officers rejected its demand to hand over a mentally unstable man arrested for allegedly desecrating the Quran. These ghastly incidents were preceded by the shocking arrest in July this year of an eight-year-old Hindu boy for “intentionally” urinating on the carpet of a madrasa library where religious books were kept. The boy’s family and several members of the Hindu community in the district of Rahim Yar Khan had to flee their homes when a Muslim crowd attacked a Hindu temple after the boy’s release on bail in August.
The unnerving commonality that runs through almost all blasphemy cases in Pakistan is the questionable nature of the charges and the insatiable appetite for vigilante justice. According to the Center for Social Justice, a minority rights organisation in Pakistan, between 1987 and 2020, about 1,855 people were accused of blasphemy under Sections 295-B (Defiling, etc., of Holy Qur’an) and 295-C (Use of derogatory remarks, etc., in respect of the Holy Prophet) to 298-C (Person of Quadiani group, etc., calling himself a Muslim or preaching or propagating his faith) of the Pakistan Penal Code. Seventy-eight of them were killed in extrajudicial ways of which 42 were Muslim. Muslims also made up 75% of the people charged under blasphemy laws in 2020.
This shows that the criminalisation of factitious religious offenses in Pakistan has become a legislative tool to impose on the people an interpretation of Islam alien to the Quran and Prophetic teachings, not to mention the political scores that are sought to be settled through it.
No justification in the Quran
In the context of blasphemy, the provision in question is Section 295-C of the Pakistani Penal Code which seeks to punish anyone who “defiles the sacred name” of the Prophet. It is indeed a great sin to denigrate the Prophet. But there is no historical evidence to suggest that it was criminalised in the early phase of Islam. The Arabic term for this offense, sabb al rasool , was not in use during the Prophet’s lifetime although the Quran mentions several defamatory insults that were hurled at him. The reason for this could be that the Quran did not criminalise the barbs (or mockery of the Quran). It asked the Prophet to ignore them and distance himself from the offenders showing magnanimity (73:10, 6:68).
Sabb al rasool had its genesis in the misinterpretation of Prophetic rulings that made treasonous behaviour against the nascent Muslim community a capital crime. It is true that some of those killed under this law had also abused the Prophet. But their execution was exclusively for treason because the Prophet could never have sentenced his detractors to death in violation of the Quranic instruction to ignore personal insults. In short, there is no categorical directive in the Quran or Prophetic teachings to justify any worldly punishment for blasphemy.
Most of the extra-Islamic offenses developed gradually in the post-Prophetic period (after the Rashidun Caliphate of Companions Abu Bakr, Umar, Usman, and Ali) due to the ‘religionisation’ of Islam for political exploitation. This was done by tribal despots in collaboration with a complaisant clergy. In Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison , scholar Ahmet Kuru points out that marginalisation of the intellectual and bourgeois classes by the ‘ulema–state alliance’ contributed to the endurance of Muslim authoritarianism. It is no wonder, therefore, that Muslim history is dotted with violent inquisitions over creedal polemics such as the mind-boggling 9th-century contestation in the Abbasid Caliphate to establish if the Quran had existed eternally or was divinely created at some point in time. The Abbasid Caliphs used the controversy to consolidate their religious credentials in pursuance of power, reducing Islam to a dogmatic creed in the process.
Understanding democracy
In reality, Islam had emerged more as a movement for social justice than a ritualistic religion. The Prophet’s mission was not to alienate people from mundane realities and dulcify them with distant paradisiacal promises but to educate and liberate them from oppressive yokes ( yaza’u anhum israhum wal aghlaala ).The Quran, while upholding religious freedom (2:62 & 256, 6:108, 10:99, 22:40, 109:1-6), presented in a non-dogmatic manner its fundamental doctrine of tawheed (monotheism) to emphasise the logical impossibility of multiple creators at a time when the Meccan oligarchy was inventing and managing deities to exploit and control the masses.
In a detailed passage (6:136 -140) the Quran explains how this exploitation — which included the ritualistic killing of children — necessitated the appearance of a Prophet who would inspire humans to overcome their gullibility through emancipatory education. Indeed, the first message (96:1-5) delivered by the Prophet to the Meccans began with the word ‘read’ ( iqra ) and spoke of the liberative nexus between knowledge ( ilm ) and the pen ( qalam ).
If Muslim countries which boast of being Islamic democracies are to fulfil the obligations of Islam, they should take steps to de-religionise the faith and restore its Quranic originality. Only then would they be able to understand the true meaning of democratic values such as freedom of religion, civil liberties, fraternity, equality, human rights, and sustainable development. Perhaps this is what the Prophet meant (in Bukhari) when he asked Muslims to be lenient and promote peace by not presenting Islam in a manner that creates aversion for it in the minds of people ( yassiru wa laa tu assiru; wa sakkanu wa laa tunaffaru ).
A. Faizur Rahman is Secretary-General of the Islamic Forum for the Promotion of Moderate Thought. Email: themoderates2020@gmail.com
Published - December 13, 2021 12:15 am IST
