By Eric Pfannier for The New York Times

Many countries censor the Internet, but few spell out their intentions as explicitly as Pakistan.

In an effort to tighten its control over the Internet, the government recently published a public tender for the “development, deployment and operation of a national-level URL filtering and blocking system.”

Technology companies, academic institutions and other interested parties have until March 16 to submit proposals for the $10 million project, but anger about it has been growing both inside and outside Pakistan.

Censorship of the Web is nothing new in Pakistan, which, like other countries in the region, says it wants to uphold public morality, protect national security or prevent blasphemy. The government has blocked access to pornographic sites, as well as, from time to time, mainstream services like Facebook and YouTube.

Until now, however, Pakistan has done so in a makeshift way, demanding that Internet service providers cut off access to specific sites upon request. With Internet use growing rapidly, the censors are struggling to keep up, so the government wants to build an automatic blocking and filtering system, like the so-called Great Firewall of China.

While China and other governments that sanitize the Internet generally do so with little public disclosure, Pakistan is being surprisingly forthcoming about its censorship needs. It published its request for proposals on the Web site of the Information and Communications Technology Ministry’s Research and Development Fund and even took out newspaper advertisements to publicize the project.

“The system would have a central database of undesirable URL’s that would be loaded on the distributed hardware boxes at each POP and updated on daily basis,” the request for proposals says, referring to uniform resource locators, the unique addresses for specific Web pages, and points of presence, or access points.

“The database would be regularly updated through subscription to an international reputed company maintaining and updating such databases,” according to the request, which was published last month.

The tender details a number of technical specifications, including the fact that the technology “should be able to handle a block list of up to 50 million URL’s (concurrent unidirectional filtering capacity) with processing delay of not more than 1 milliseconds.”

Following the Arab Spring, which demonstrated the power of the Internet to help spread political and social change, Pakistan’s move to clamp down has set off a storm of protest among free-speech groups in the country and beyond.

Opponents of censorship say they are doubly appalled because they associated this kind of heavy-handed approach more with the previous regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf than with the current government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

“The authorities here are big fans of China and how it filters the Internet,” said Sana Saleem, chief executive of Bolo Bhi, a group that campaigns against restrictions on the Internet. “They overlook the fact that China is an autocratic regime and we are a democracy.”

“What makes this kind of censorship so insidious is that they always use national security, pornography or blasphemy as an explanation for blocking other kinds of speech,” Ms. Saleem said, adding that her site had been blocked for several months in 2010 when it made reference to a ban on Facebook. Access to the social networking service had been restricted because of a page featuring a competition to draw the prophet Mohammed — something that is considered blasphemous by Muslims.

The Technology Ministry’s Research and Development Fund says in its tender that the Internet filtering and blocking system will be “indigenously developed,” but campaigners like Ms. Saleem say they think it is likely the agency will try to adapt Western technology for the purpose.

To try to prevent this from happening, Ms. Saleem wrote to the chief executives of eight international companies that make Net filtering technology, asking them to make a public commitment not to apply for the Pakistani grant.

On Friday, one of them, Websense, which is based in San Diego, responded, declaring in a statement on its Web site that it would not seek the contract.

“Broad government censorship of citizen access to the Internet is morally wrong,” Websense said. “We further believe that any company whose products are currently being used for government-imposed censorship should remove their technology so that it is not used in this way by oppressive governments.”

Websense had previously withdrawn the use of its technology from Yemen after facing accusations from the OpenNet Initiative, a U.S.-Canadian academic group, and other organizations that it had been used by the government of that country to stifle political expression on the Internet.

Governments around the world buy filtering and blocking technology to root out illegal content like child pornography. Some private companies employ it to restrict access to social networks and other distractions on company computers.

But the use of Western technology to rein in political speech in countries with repressive regimes has come under increasing scrutiny since the Arab Spring. The OpenNet Initiative said in a report last year that at least nine governments in the Middle East or North Africa had used such products, with the Western companies maintaining lists of sites to be blocked, including sites featuring skeptical views of Islam and even dating services.

Even before implementing its new system, Pakistan has been an active censor. The country was 151st, out of 179, on a ranking of media freedom by the Paris-based group Reporters Without Borders in 2011.

“Reporters Without Borders urges you to abandon this project, which would reinforce the arsenal of measures for communications surveillance and Internet censorship that have already been put in place by your government,” the group wrote in a letter Friday to Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.

To free-speech advocates in Pakistan, the government’s seeming insouciance about censorship is a particular cause for alarm.

“This is a case study,” said Ms. Saleem of Bolo Bhi, which is based in Karachi and whose name means “speak up.” “No government has ever done this so publicly.”

Filed under: Arab, blasphemy laws, China, Freedoms, Islam, Pakistan, Pakistanis Tagged: Arab Spring, blasphemy, Censoring in Pakistan, Censors, Censorship, China, Facebook, Great Firewall of China, Internet, Middle East, national-level URL filtering and blocking system, North Korea, Pakistan, Pakistan Censors, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, Reporters Without Borders, URL, URL Blocking, Web Pages, World Wide Web, WWW

This seems really pathetic. there is no room for these type of actions neither in constitution nor in Islam. forceful conversion is not allowed and directly against Quran. I think human rights organizations especially some of rich or political class hindu community member can raise the issue in high court or supreme court or  even in Sharia Court as it is a direct violation of Islamic law as well. Only conversion allowed is voluntary conversion by heart. Also I believe Islamic organizations can help in this as it is a direct insult and misuse of Islam.

My recent article for Viewpoint Online, published Jan 7, 2012:

Salmaan Taseer: The political context of a ‘religious’ assassination

Enforce rule of law, expose hypocrisy of the Taliban mentality

Just over a year ago, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated in the most cowardly manner by a government-assigned security guard. Mumtaz Qadri, a member of the Punjab Elite Force assigned to protect the Governor, pumped 27 bullets into his victim’s back as he headed to his car on the afternoon of January 4, 2011.

The sensational murder was no spontaneous act by an enraged fanatic. It was a well-thought out, cold-blooded plan. Was the executor acting alone, motivated only by ‘religious fervour’ as projected, or is there more to the issue than meets the eye? And even if his act was purely altruistic, should the law of the land not be applied to punish him?

The Governor was already a target of the ‘hate-filled organisations’ as he termed them, well before they saw an opportunity to (ab)use the ‘blasphemy law’ to unite their own until then divided ranks. For this, they needed a target. The opportunity arrived when a trial court sentenced a Christian woman, Aasia Bibi, to death on Nov 8, 2010, for ‘blasphemy’.

A few facts to put this situation in context:

• The ‘religious parties’, historically divided amongst themselves, have never made any significant headway in electoral politics in Pakistan. A democratic dispensation does not suit them.
• Although Pakistan under Gen. Musharraf officially cut ties with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan after 9/11 (reluctantly, the last country to do), it continued to allow the ‘home grown jihadis’ to operate, seeing them as useful to keep the fire smouldering in Indian administered Kashmir.
• In Feb 2008, a democratically elected government replaced Gen. Musharraf’s military regime. The new government eschewed the earlier policy of using non-state actors to achieve its foreign policy objectives – but the security establishment remained wedded to the outdated paradigm of ‘strategic’ depth (i.e. Pakistan’s continued influence in Afghanistan because of a perceived threat from India).

What does all this have to do with Salmaan Taseer and the politics behind his assassination?

Everything. The mindset and political ideology disguised in the rhetoric of religion is furthered by a security establishment that sees its duty as being to protect not just Pakistan’s physical frontiers but also its ‘ideology’, developed along conservative religious lines since the 1965 war with India. This ideology was strengthened during the Afghan war of the 1980s, when a national war of liberation was converted into a ‘holy war’ (as Dr. Eqbal Ahmad pointed out in his talk on ‘Terrorism, theirs and ours’, 1998).

Pakistan’s ‘religious’ organisations flourished and gained strength with Saudi and American backing during the Zia years (1977-1988). They were allowed to function freely during the military-dominated ‘musical chairs’ years in which no government could complete its tenure (1988-1999). As mentioned above, they also had a free rein during the Musharraf years (1999-2008) even after 9/11.

Since the end of the first Afghan war, these organisations have been targeting and killing religious minorities and progressive minded people in Pakistan. The genie released during the Zia years and nurtured under Musharraf was not going to go tamely back into the bottle.

Governor Taseer was already in their sights for his outspoken and rational views on religion and human rights. He had no qualms naming the organisations he suspected to be behind the May 2010 massacre of worshippers in an Ahmedi mosque in Lahore, where over 80 people were killed and scores of others injured.

“These hate-filled organisations – Sipah-e-Sahaba, (Lashkar-e-) Jhangvi — they all have same ideology – Taliban, Al Qaeda…,” he said during his condolence visit.

“They should be prosecuted in the courts,” he said. “Don’t let them off. There should be zero tolerance towards them. No political alliance is possible with these organisations, you can’t go around having them at your political meetings, the Punjab government should prosecute them”.

Five months later the religious parties found a way to unite their ranks by conflating the ‘blasphemy’ issue with the issue of the ‘honour of the Prophet’ (peace be upon Him), when there were protests against the death sentence of Aasia Bibi. The ‘religious’ organisations came out in full force calling for her death because she had allegedly said something derogatory against the Prophet (peace be upon Him).

For some years the ‘blasphemy’ issue had lain somewhat dormant. Now, after many years, a court handed down a death sentence for such a case. Protests against the sentence by human rights and Christian organisations led to counter protests by ‘Islamic’ groups that used the issue to build up their political strength.

The situation was reminiscent of the early 1990s when there was a surge of ‘blasphemy’ cases, and the first ‘blasphemy murder’ was committed. Between 1986, when the law came into effect, and 2010, 1,081 people were charged under it, including 138 Christians, 468 Muslims and 454 Ahmadis, according to the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP). In all cases investigated by human rights groups, motivations for these cases have been invariably rooted in rivalries or disputes related to money, property or other jealousies.

The High Courts and the Supreme Court have so far not upheld any death sentence passed by a lower court, although several defendants have been extra-judicially killed after being accused of ‘blasphemy’. In the early 1990s this was the scenario:

The frenzy had been building up. Masked gunmen had opened fire after a court hearing in April 1994, wounding Salamat and killing Manzoor Masih, one of the co-accused in the blasphemy case. Glossy, full-colour stickers and posters cropped up all over Lahore, calling for “believers” to find and kill (Asma) Jahangir. In July, a mob outside the Lahore High Court attacked her car. Luckily, she was not in the vehicle but her driver was assaulted and the car smashed. It was a few days later that the letter vowing to hunt down and kill Jahangir was delivered to her office. (Zarteef Khan Afridi: The tribesman who showed the way)

There was no case registered against Governor Salmaan Taseer but the propaganda against him was amplified by the proliferation of the 24/7 television channels and social media. Taseer was publicly projected as a blasphemer. The aggression of one particularly vitriolic television talk show host led the Governor to rebuke her: “You are acting as I am guilty of blasphemy” (watch the programme here and here).

Sunni Tehrik and other extremist organisations held rallies and demonstrations against clemency for Aasia Bibi and against proposed procedural amendments to the ‘blasphemy laws’ that PPP MNA Sherry Rehman sought to table. Put on the defensive, the government as well as opposition figures who had agreed to support the amendments, backtracked, leaving Rehman high and dry, her life under threat.

Zaid Hamid, Hanif Qureshi and others: preachers of hate misleading youth

Mumtaz Qadri was a known figure at such rallies where emotions were being whipped up. He even recited ‘naat’ at some of them – like at this one, just three days before he killed the man he was supposed to be protecting.

These questions arise:

• How was a man who attended such gatherings, who was already known for his extremist views (he had been earlier removed from the Special Branch because he was perceived as a security threat) inducted into the Elite Force in the first place?
• How was such a man assigned guard duty to a high profile target like the Governor Punjab?
• Why did the other guards not expose Qadri or get him arrested when he told them what he was going to do and asked them not to open fire, as he would surrender (as he said in his confession after his arrest)?
• Given that the other guards did not open fire, according to standard operating procedures in VIP guard duty, why were they not charged as accomplices to the murder, even though Qadri said he was acting alone?

Citizens for Democracy (CFD), an umbrella group of several professional and activist organisations formed on Dec 19, 2010 in Karachi, raised such questions in its statement of January 7, 2011. “We reiterate our stand that no one has the right to take the law into their own hands and kill anyone, regardless of whether they are accused of blasphemy or any other crime,” said the statement, endorsed by nearly 70 organisations.

But such voices were drowned in the din of ‘religious’ righteousness.

Qadri’s fellow guards who were detained after Governor Taseer’s assassination were released without being charged, as was the cleric whose inflammatory sermon convinced Qadri to pull the trigger.

Salmaan Taseer’s murder was followed just two months later by the murder of the Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian by faith, who had also been outspoken about the blasphemy issue. No one has been arrested for that murder. The trial court judge who sentenced Mumtaz Qadri to death has fled Pakistan for his own safety. Qadri’s supporters are calling for the death sentence to be commuted, which is somewhat puzzling given that Qadri has stated he is willing to die for his faith and he believes he has done right.

Pakistan has many pressing problems – including the perennial ones of clean drinking water, healthcare, education, shelter and so on that directly impact the people. But on a larger level, there is also clearly an urgent need to enforce the rule of law — charge, try and prosecute the guilty without fear or favour — and to expose the hypocrisy of the Taliban mentality that is tearing the country apart.

Salmaan Taseer was tragically gunned down a year from today for speaking up against the country’s controversial Blasphemy Law. Newsline has compiled interviews with and articles on the former governor of Punjab as well as the Blasphemy Law debate.

Today marks the first death anniversary of Mr Salman Taseer. The man needs no introduction in the local as well as international circuit. Most of us know him not because of the life he lived or the political associations he had but because of the manner in which he died. Exactly an year ago on [...]

Aasia Bibi: Praying for relief but in good spirits

“Prison staff is very good and kind to her and they are very much concerned about Aasia’s health and security as well, but due to the wrong news broadcasting the prison staff and prison authorities are feeling hurt,” says an update about Aasia Bibi from Centre for Legal Aid Assistance and Settlement (CLAAS) Pakistan. (Note: I know several  CLAAS members personally, and have worked with them on blasphemy case fact-findings for the HRCP). Reproduced below, their email of Dec 29, 2011:

As we have reported on 24th December that CLAAS team headed by Mr. M.A. Joseph Francis MBE (National Director CLAAS) including Ms. Katherine Sapna (Program Officer CLAAS) and Mr. Nadeem Anthony Advocate (Research Officer CLAAS) visited Aasia Bibi in the District Jail, Sheikhupura and shared with her the joy of the birth of Jesus Christ and Christmas blessings as well. CLAAS found her safe and sound. She was in good health and good mental condition and told to CLAAS team that prison staff is very caring and kind to her. She was very happy and told to CLAAS that she is only Christian female accused in the prison but the female prison staffs (wardens) celebrated Christmas with her by cutting the Christmas cake to wish her.

Aasia informed CLAAS that it’s about three years; no one comes to visit her except her husband and children. It is surprising that how people (organizations) can give wrong statements when they did not visited Aasia Bibi even they did not see her in the prison. CLAAS team visited her many times in prison but never found her sick. Massehi Foundation a Pakistani organization based in UK is spreading wrong news about Aasia Bibi, on 21st and 22nd December in the daily Nawa-i-e-Waqat and daily Khabrain Urdu newspapers of Lahore; they released news from Vatican City through staff reporter and said that Aasia Bibi has become physically weak she is unable to walk and hardly can stand on her feet. While Aasia told CLAAS that Jail staff is very much concerned about her security therefore they provide her uncooked material and she cooks food daily three times for herself.

CLAAS just want to request please avoid news broadcasting about Aasia Bibi and suggests to understand the sensitivity of the issue; it is dangerous not only for Aasia but also for the others who are facing the same charges of blasphemy or suffering from the unfair & prejudice practices of the judicial system as well as the grossly unsatisfactory prison system in the country.

Prison staff is very good and kind to her and they are very much concerned about Aasia’s health and security as well but due to the wrong news broadcasting the prison staff and prison authorities are feeling hurt.

It is worth mentioning here that Massehi Foundation never visited Aasia Bibi in the prison and they are not pursuing her case in the court.

We request you please keep quiet about Aasia case and do not highlight her and mention her in the Pakistan newspapers.

In Solidarity,

CLAAS Team

Zarteef Afridi's latest photo. Courtesy: HRCP

A tribute to the human rights activist Zarteef Khan Afridi who was shot dead recently – my article in The News on Sunday. Latitude News earlier published a shorter, different version titled In Pakistan, an unlikely hero dies for his cause. 

The tribesman who showed the way

There was the letter from an anonymous writer saying he was going to hunt down and kill her. And then there was the letter from an Afridi tribesman offering to come down and protect her.

This was in the mid-1990s. The recipient of the letters was the fiery human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, under threat for having taken on the case of Salamat Masih, the illiterate Christian boy sentenced to death for ‘blasphemy’ for having allegedly written sacrilegious words on the walls of a village mosque.

Little would anyone have thought that the writer of the second letter, Zarteef Khan Afridi, would one day himself face death threats for his stand on human rights issues. But he would have no armed guards protecting him when he rode his motorcycle, fully exposed and vulnerable, to the school where he taught for two decades in Jamrud, Khyber Agency. He was the school’s headmaster when unidentified militants, also on motorcycles, intercepted and gunned him down on his way to the school on Dec 8, 2011.

Salamat Masih

The slightly built, clean-shaven Afridi was also Coordinator, Khyber Agency, for the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), founded by Jahangir and others in 1986. His association with the HRCP began even before he offered to come down to Lahore from Khyber Agency with an armed ‘lashkar’ to protect her — an offer all the more commendable for having being made in a situation that was so fraught with risk.

The frenzy had been building up. Masked gunmen had opened fire after a court hearing in April 1994, wounding Salamat and killing Manzoor Masih, one of the co-accused in the blasphemy case. Glossy, full-colour stickers and posters cropped up all over Lahore, calling for “believers” to find and kill Jahangir. In July, a mob outside the Lahore High Court attacked her car. Luckily, she was not in the vehicle but her driver was assaulted and the car smashed. It was a few days later that that the letter vowing to hunt down and kill Jahangir was delivered to her office.

Asma Jahangir

Zarteef’s letter arrived after eight armed men broke into Jahangir’s family house in October and beat up her brother and his wife when they found her out. The assailants ran away when the house guards opened fire. One of them arrested later admitted that the aim had been to kill Jahangir and her sister Hina Jilani.

In that atmosphere of threats and intimidation, Afridi’s letter of support was a message of hope, particularly coming as it did from an area known for its religious conservatism. It showed that even there, conservative opinion is not homogenous and there are people willing to counter retrogressive trends.

“Born in this tribal milieu, Zarteef Afridi is peculiar for his pacifism and his commitment to the cause of education. Prevented in 1982 by maternal pressure from going to Soviet Russia for a degree in engineering, he turned to teaching instead,” to quote ‘In the eye of the storm’ an essay profiling Afridi’s work, published a couple of years ago by South Asia Partnership Pakistan (SAPPk).

“When he started out as a teacher (in 1983), the Afghan jihad, funded by the West, was in full flow and young men from all over the province made their way to the battlefield to either be killed or to become utterly criminalised. (But) children under the tutelage of the idealistic Zarteef were learning of the reality of the so-called jihad. Looking back, he can proudly claim that not one of the youngsters who passed through his hands went to the fight (although) many have risen to …become college professors and medical practitioners. Some have gone abroad while others have remained in their native land and in their own ways have been useful against the tide of obscurantism.”

Zarteef Khan Afridi: educationist, activist and visionary. Photo courtesy: Idrees Kamal

Although he was persuaded not to come down with armed tribesman to protect Jahangir, Zarteef Afridi continued to work for human rights. He participated in the first HRCP workshop in Peshawar conducted by the senior journalists and former newspaper editors I.A. Rehman and Hussain Naqi in 1991. The workshop trained volunteers to become correspondents to HRCP’s quarterly newsletter ‘Jehd-e-Haq’ (Fight for Rights).

Afridi was already “a practising progressive,” as Naqi puts it. “The extremists were more annoyed when he succeeded in arranging a jirga (tribal council) to oppose extremism and terrorism. He also succeeded in persuading a tribal industrialist to contribute funds for a children’s school for internally displaced refugees in camps.”

I met Zarteef Afridi at an HRCP meeting in Peshawar in 1996. All of us drove to Jamrud, where he proudly showed us the small public library he had built under the banner of the Fata Education and Welfare Society.

Since then, he catalysed 15 registered NGOs and CBOs in and around Jamrud. With a USAID endowment of Rs800,000 each, these groups focus on child rights, democracy and good governance. “In an area where women’s education did not merit much importance, Zarteef had long been a vocal proponent for it,” notes the SAPPk essay. “While he spoke for it in the hujras, he had a somewhat covert operation in progress within the homes as well. His training as an electrician and expertise in this field frequently took him into people’s homes. As he worked on their electrical appliances, he shamed the women of the household for their illiteracy. He says that over the years, this surreptitious campaign made for an increase in girls’ enrollment in schools, as well as that, it prepared older women for school.”

A primary girls' school in Khyber Agency: Zarteef Afridi furthered the cause

Zarteef Afridi’s organisation helped establish seven adult literacy centres in villages around Jamrud, for women between 17 and 65 years old. Although meant for about 30 students each, these schools cater to more than three times the number, totaling over 750 women.

In his work, Zarteef faced opposition even from his own family members. I remember him saying, “I want my daughters to marry of their own choice and not wear burqa (veil), but my wife gets angry. She says she will leave me if I encourage such ‘dishonorable’ behaviour.”

But his persistence made a dent. He ensured that no one in his family, starting with himself, received a vulvar, or bride price when marrying off their daughters. This spoke volumes for his commitment, countering the all too common hypocrisy visible in Pakistani politics, where activists who talk of human rights often stop short at practicing what they preach when it comes to their own daughters.

Zarteef Afridi was up against much bigger forces than his wife when he publicly advocated against these long-entrenched traditions. Besides countering bride price, he campaigned tirelessly for girls’ education and secular education, for women’s right to vote, and for Pakistani laws to be extended to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). He met some success in all these areas.

In August this year, President Zardari extended Pakistan’s Political Parties Act to the Fata, allowing political parties to operate there as they do elsewhere in the country. Increasing numbers of women and girls are attending school. Women voters are now visible on polling day in Jamrud.

Activists in Peshawar protest against the murder of Zarteef Khan Afridi. Photo courtesy: Idrees Kamal/Citizen Rights & Sustainable Development (CRSD), Peshawar

“Zarteef was the one who campaigned for women’s right to vote at elections and he took his family females to vote,” says Husain Naqi. “Both Nasim Wali and Benazir Bhutto contested and won seats in that area where the political parties had agreed that ‘their’ women will not vote!”

Even these limited gains are anathema to the extremist and criminal forces aligned with the Taliban. Afridi is the third HRCP coordinators to be murdered during 2011. “He was surely the most consistent and committed,” says Hussain Naqi.

Zarteef Afridi may be dead, but his consistency and commitment will live on in his legacy of peace, education and human rights values, shared by his community of activists in Pakistan and around the world. The loss is great and painful, but in the long run, his sacrifice and that of others killed in this path will not be in vain.

(ends)

One of the most instructive moments of clarity in the days since the assassination of Salmaan Taseer was provided by Jamaat-e-Islami chief Syed Munawar Hasan, as he spoke to the press in Karachi on Sunday. At a rally at which more than 20,000 Pakistanis gathered in defence of Pakistan Penal [...]

A version of this post was originally published here.

The Blasphemous Blasphemy Law
i usually don’t do smash and grab super quick blogs, and i try and avoid politics and internet activism like the plague. however, a couple of days ago i was asked by ahsan butt of fiverupees to do a post, and since ahsan is the dawood ibrahim of paksitani blogging* i couldn’t say no.

*(if you don’t believe me, check out the untimely demises of Aslam Kana’a Senior, Chotta Bubs and Nithoo Bhola to see what i mean)

the post in question is to talk about the upcoming rally to protest the blasphemy law. in case you don’t know about it, check out the details here. (Ed: the protest has since been cancelled until further notice)

but in order to avoid this event becoming a glorified GT, we have to get our heads wrapped around what argument we are proposing to place on the agenda. as mosharraf zaidi pointed out in his excellent article, the for and against camps in the blasphemy debate are often speaking at cross currents.

for many of us, the blasphemy law is abhorrent because it is so frequently misused and abused. however, we can’t expect to present this argument, because it shifts the focus away from the legitimacy of the law to a question of how it is being enforced. which leads us into the cesspool of arguing over how to implement laws properly in pakistan.

for others, the blasphemy law needs to be repealed because it is a violation of freedom of speech. this is the exact point (you might as well mark it and take a picture with it) where the anti-blasphemy law campaign finds itself being portrayed as a bunch of ‘liberal-extremists’ licking the soles of western boots.

why does that happen?

if we are to accept freedom of speech as a valid value to cherish, then it means that we believe that we think everyone has the right to say what they feel. that’s great in theory, but in practice it boils down to two things.

first of all, it ignores the fact that in pakistan, by and large, you don’t have rights, you have power. if you have power to say what you feel like, you might pretend you are exercising your rights, but in reality you are flexing your considerable muscles. which means those without power are by and large without rights.

secondly, it implies that the only thing sacred is the right to free speech, and the sanctity of that right exists above and beyond anything else which might be held sacred. for the pro-blasphemy camp, this essentially translates into saying that people ‘should’ have the right to trash all that is sacred.

i might be wrong here, but i can sense that you are tensing up a bit. fear not – for many of the ‘progressive’ crowd, words like sacred and holy are immediately problematic and uncomfortable.

unfortunately, the problem is that until we can frame our debate in those very contexts of religion and things that are sacred, we are always opening up ourselves to be outflanked by claims that we are brainwashed from abroad and that we have no clue about what it means to be a pakistani.

so why don’t we take this debate on in a religious context?

the reason we don’t is that we seem to imagine islam like a supercomputer which we can only use once we have learnt C++ and Java and other more complex languages.

let me explain myself.

a few weeks ago, there was this thing on twitter where everyone was tweeting as their 16 year old selves. my favourite tweet of that day was by someone who wrote “one day i am going to learn arabic, interpret the Quran the right way and then all our problems would be solved.”

i know a lot of people who can relate to that feeling that there is a truth out there that we can get to if only we are learned enough.

however, we grow up and come to assume that the supremacy of islamic knowledge lies with those whose day job it is to memorize it, and thus we can’t hope to enter into a religious argument with them without resorting to non-religious points of views.

well that’s just bullshit.

because if the blasphemy debate is to be won over, and i am talking in pragmatic terms here, it has to be framed in the context of religion itself. whether we like it or not, that is the context wherein the majority of our society can converge upon. that is not to say that we are all rabid fundos or enslaved by the opium of religion, but rather the fact that it is the most widespread mode of articulating ideas in our society.

and there is no reason we can’t frame a progressive argument in religious terms. this doesn’t mean looking up ayahs and tafseers and hadith, but employing some basic logic.

the problem with the idea of blasphemy, particularly at the level of personal insults, is that it implies that the Prophet or God or the Book are some sort of virginal brides in see through chemises whose honor can be irrevocably slighted with even the smallest speck of dirt.

unleashing the law to punish business card trashing and water bringing betrays a supreme sense of insecurity about the perceived value of that which is meant to be sacred, because it implies that something as mundane as those actions would bring the whole edifice of faith and religion crashing down.

so we need to ask the pro-blasphemy camp – is the Prophet an idea, an example, a person so weak and defenseless that even the naming of a teddy bear will tarnish his image? is your faith so weak that it needs to kill an impoverished woman to save itself? is your religion so wobbly that a business card can bring it down?

even if you don’t believe in the sacred history, the more or less accepted versions of historical islam admit that the Prophet bore some hardcore persecution of his people and his self without feeling the need to avenge them. so why is it that his followers 14 centuries on feel so insecure about any criticism thrown his way?

the blasphemy law needs to be repealed because it is a blasphemy in its own self. it reduces that which is supposedly sacred into an idea so weak and powerless that only the most violent action can seem to save it. the blasphemy law is an insult to anyone who has faith, because it claims that an idea which requires blind belief can be shattered by something inconsequential.

you might not agree with me, and you might not feel that you can carry this debate with anyone armed with tafseers and hadiths. that might be true, but i honestly believe that even if this is a losing argument, it is not a futile one. because it zeroes in on the realm of religion – the very realm the pro-blasphemy camp seems to believe it owns, and can thus manipulate it for its own purposes.

at the end of the day, the reason we should wish to repeal the blasphemy law, or amend it is not because we would like to see the triumph of our own political belief and agenda. we should wish to take this stand because we don’t want to see innocent, powerless people be mercilessly persecuted and murdered.

the reason we should wish to make this argument should not be about politics, but about humanity.