Christian Girl Charged With Blasphemy In Pakistan

[General Mung Beans]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/world ... istan.html

Christian Girl’s Blasphemy Arrest Incites a Furor in Pakistan
B.K. Bangash/Associated Press

People gathered at the house of a Christian girl in the suburbs of Islamabad, Pakistan, after she was arrested and accused of burning a religious textbook.
By DECLAN WALSH and SALMAN MASOOD
Published: August 20, 2012

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The arrest and imprisonment of a Christian girl accused of violating Pakistan’s blasphemy laws stoked a public furor on Monday, renewing international scrutiny of growing intolerance toward minorities in the country.

The police jailed the girl, Rimsha Masih, and her mother on Friday after hundreds of Muslim protesters surrounded the police station here where they were being held, demanding that Ms. Masih face charges under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. A local cleric had said Ms. Masih had burned pages of the Noorani Qaida, a religious textbook used to teach the Koran to children.

By Monday night, as Pakistani Muslims celebrated the feast of Id al-Fitr, Ms. Masih and her mother were being held in Adiala jail, a grim facility in nearby Rawalpindi, awaiting their fate. Meanwhile, a number of the girl’s Christian neighbors had fled their homes, fearing for their lives, human rights workers said.

Senior government and police officials agreed with Christian leaders that the accusations against Ms. Masih were baseless and predicted that the case would ultimately be dropped.

Still, the case has already grabbed global headlines and inspired a hail of Twitter posts, even though several details are in dispute.

Christian, and some Muslim, neighbors said Ms. Masih was 11 years old and had Down syndrome. Senior police officers dismissed those claims; one described her as 16 and “100 percent mentally fit.”

Whatever the truth, experts said Ms. Masih’s plight highlighted a wider problem. “This case exemplifies the absurdity and tragedy of the blasphemy law, which is an instrument of abuse against the most vulnerable in society,” said Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch.

While non-Muslims have long been vulnerable to persecution in Pakistan, the state’s ability to protect them is diminishing. Last week, gunmen executed 25 Shiites after taking them off a bus near Mansehra, in northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province. On Saturday, Hindu leaders in Sindh called on the government to protect their community from forced conversions by Muslim extremists.

But it is the emotionally charged blasphemy issue that has most polarized society. Ever since the governor of Punjab Province, Salmaan Taseer, was gunned down by his own bodyguard in January 2011 for his support of blasphemy reforms, the space for public debate has narrowed in Pakistan.

Violent mobs led by clerics have framed the argument, as appears to have happened in Ms. Masih’s case.

Neighbors said the girl’s family were sweepers — work shunned by Muslims but common among poor Christians — and lived in a slum area in Islamabad.

Malik Amjad, landlord of the family’s rented house, said the controversy started early last week after his nephew saw Ms. Masih holding a burned copy of the Noorani Qaida. The nephew informed a local cleric, Khalid Jadoon, Mr. Amjad said.

Desecration of Muslim holy texts is illegal in Pakistan and punishable by death. But Mr. Amjad said the incident bothered few local residents initially and caught fire only at the instigation of the cleric and two conservative shopkeepers.

“He tried to shame people by saying, ‘What good are your prayers if the Koran is being burnt?’ ” Mr. Amjad said.

Mr. Amjad said he handed the girl over to the police for her own protection and criticized the cleric’s role. “He exaggerated the incident and provoked people,” he said.

It was not clear how, or even if, Ms. Masih had come across the burned religious book. One neighbor, Malik Shahid, said it might have simply become accidentally swept up in a trash pile she was collecting.

The Pakistani police often are forced to register blasphemy cases against their wishes, human rights campaigners say, either to save the accused blasphemer or their own officers from attack.

In July, a large crowd, prompted by inflammatory statements from local mosques, swarmed a police station in Bahawalpur district in southern Punjab, searching for a blasphemy suspect who was being interrogated by police. The mob seized the man, beat him to death and burned his body outside the station.

A similar mob attack occurred in June in Karachi, Pakistan’s most populous city, although in that case the police beat back the protesters.

The turmoil comes just days after Pakistanis marked the country’s 65th independence anniversary amid muted ceremonies and considerable soul-searching across the political spectrum.

“Desecrating graves, arresting 11 year old with Down syndrome, targeting of Shias — the list goes on. This is not what r religion is about,” Shireen Mazari, a staunch nationalist commentator, said on Twitter.

The adviser to the prime minister on national harmony, Dr. Paul Bhatti, said he hoped to defuse Ms. Masih’s situation through talks with moderate Muslim leaders. Dr. Bhatti is the brother of Shahbaz Bhatti, a minister for minorities who was gunned down outside his Islamabad home in early 2011, weeks after Mr. Taseer’s death.

Even if Ms. Masih avoids blasphemy charges, her family is unlikely to ever return home. Although nobody has been executed under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, even suspected blasphemers are in danger for the rest of their lives.

Several have been killed by vigilantes; others have been forced to flee Pakistan.

...

[wautd]

Fundies

I'm surprised she isn't beaten to death (yet) by those animals

[KhorneFlakes]

The shitstorm begins.

No doubt that most Christian's response to this will be the typical "Help! Help! We're being oppressed!", instead of citing as an example of why fundies are bad and you should stay the hell away from that point.

[Simon_Jester]

As a straightforward matter, they are being oppressed. Why should they say that instead of "Oh my God, this entirely different religion hates us and does nasty things to us, how could we be so wrong?"

[K. A. Pital]

Koran or Koran-related bookburning is not going to make you any friends among the Muslims, even among the more moderate ones. Since the Pakistani state is hardly strong on the whole secularism thing, as the article says... why'd anyone do such a thing? I guess that can be explained by the Down syndrome.

[Simon_Jester]

Or the 11-year-old child thing. That's also a possible explanation.

[Ultonius]

As the article states, it's entirely possible that she simply came across it while sweeping.

[Hillary]

It's the modern-day equivalent of witch-hunting really - the mere accusation of which results in a death sentence, regardless of fact.

[K. A. Pital]

It's the modern-day equivalent of witch-hunting really - the mere accusation of which results in a death sentence, regardless of fact.

You can't apply the term "modern day" to places like Pakistan, Afghanistan or Sub-Saharan Africa. What modernity they ever enjoyed was brief and more often than not it ended in the Vendee taking the entire land on a back-in-time trip.

[Hillary]

A fair point, Stas.

[Skywalker_T-65]

That is just depressing on so many different levels. Its bad enough that Pakistan even has 'blasphemy' laws in the first place...but its really bad when the police only use them to protect people. I mean, beating a man to death because he did something wrong (in their mind)?

And in this case...a little girl with Down's Syndrome? Even if she was 16 and 'mentally healthy' like some people are saying...she still could have found it while sweeping. Overreactions to an extreme...remind me why we help Pakistan?

[Highlord Laan]

Gotta love that religion of peace. Christianity isn't any better in the long run, but you don't see people getting beaten to death in vatican city for "blasphemy."

[K. A. Pital]

Christianity isn't any better in the long run, but you don't see people getting beaten to death in vatican city for "blasphemy."

That's because the grip of Christianity has been forcibly removed from society's neck via the late XIX-XX century secularization, a process which rarely if ever went to the same extent in islamic nations, for different reasons.

[Guardsman Bass]

In the case of the girl, there had apparently been some tensions between the community of poor Christians that she was part of and neighboring muslims. The latter were pretty much hair-trigger ready to respond violently to any perceived offense, and "offending Islam" was the easiest one (particularly once the cleric mentioned in the article starting stirring up shit).

You can't apply the term "modern day" to places like Pakistan, Afghanistan or Sub-Saharan Africa. What modernity they ever enjoyed was brief and more often than not it ended in the Vendee taking the entire land on a back-in-time trip.

In Pakistan's case, it's that they had a "secular" upper class of professionals, businessmen, and politicians that thinly covers the ultra-conservative, still highly rural society that makes up most of Pakistan. That part of Pakistan is pretty conservative even by "majority muslim country" standards, and the hard-core push for "Islamic nationalism" under Zia in the 1980s didn't help.

[Thanas]

It is practically the same in every former colony.

[K. A. Pital]

It is practically the same in every former colony.

Surprisingly enough - no. A contrast between some parts of India and, say, Indonesia or Pakistan would reveal that this is not always the case.

[Thanas]

It is practically the same in every former colony.

Surprisingly enough - no. A contrast between some parts of India and, say, Indonesia or Pakistan would reveal that this is not always the case.

India is not a typical colony and never was and even there we have as a whole an upswing in religious fanaticism. But seriously, whenever the colonial power is only interested in cheap labor and keeping the locals in line there is little doubt that this will happen.

[General Zod]

Gotta love that religion of peace. Christianity isn't any better in the long run, but you don't see people getting beaten to death in vatican city for "blasphemy."

You just see them getting beaten to death for being gay, which is basically the same thing. Though Christians still have the occasional honor killings, and doesn't Ireland have an anti-blasphemy law? I'd be curious to see if anyone's been charged with that.

[K. A. Pital]

India is not a typical colony and never was and even there we have as a whole an upswing in religious fanaticism. But seriously, whenever the colonial power is only interested in cheap labor and keeping the locals in line there is little doubt that this will happen.

Colonial powers are usually interested in that, of course, driven by Malthusian competition ideas, so most colonies were kept in such a situation for the benefit of the metropole. However, it is remarkable that the response to such policies by former colonies or dominions differed over the ages. Some nations had radical secular elites rise up after decolonization, others, like Pakistan or Indonesia, followed the religious nationalism idea (first massacring those who stood in the way of such a doctrine).

[Simon_Jester]

Some did both. Egypt, for example, started off with Nasser: a secular advocate of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism. He became discredited after military failures against Israel, having set that up as the great test of pan-Arabism's success.

So he was replaced by Mubarak, who was also secular, but had no ideology except "I want to be in charge." So Mubarak's strategy was to avoid risks that could throw him out of office. The problem is, that meant he could safely crush his domestic secular opposition- no internal consequences for that, and no serious external ones. But he couldn't safely crush his religious enemies because of how tied-in they were with Egyptian culture.

So after about forty years of rule by Mubarak, there was very little left to replace him except another military dictatorship (again with no ideology or vision beyond "I want to be in charge") or religious fundamentalism.

[K. A. Pital]

True. However, there was a period when secular standards were prevalent - for Libya, for example, it lasted several decades before the current turmoil, and in Tunisia it is still there. On the other hand, Indonesia has been more or less in the same state since it killed a million commies and feminists as well, trying to purge itself from uncleaniness in the eyes of Allah, and even now there are hardly any really strong female rights organizations in the nation.

So if you ask me which strategy is best, I'd say that a nation should take a chance to secularize rather than take no chances. Pakistan under Zia-ul-Haq essentially went the road to a failed state when he islamized everything from courts to science. They also became best buddies with America due to geopolitical circumstances, but it didn't help in the long run and doesn't help now at all.

[Valten1992]

Gotta love that religion of peace. Christianity isn't any better in the long run, but you don't see people getting beaten to death in vatican city for "blasphemy."

You just see them getting beaten to death for being gay, which is basically the same thing. Though Christians still have the occasional honor killings, and doesn't Ireland have an anti-blasphemy law? I'd be curious to see if anyone's been charged with that.

I'm Irish and this is the first I've heard of that. Religion is kinda a touchy subject over here at the moment, but outside of attacking priests or defacing church property, you wouldn't get arrested for what counts as "free speech".

[D.Turtle]

A cursory look here shows that more countries than just Pakistan enjoy the "benefits" of blasphemy law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

I guess you could toss in Russia as well now with the whole "poor Church ppl insulted, lock up insulters for two years in prison".

[General Mung Beans]

A cursory look here shows that more countries than just Pakistan enjoy the "benefits" of blasphemy law
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

I guess you could toss in Russia as well now with the whole "poor Church ppl insulted, lock up insulters for two years in prison".

Hasn't the Orthodox Church called for their release? http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-chu ... 80861.html

[wautd]

A cursory look here shows that more countries than just Pakistan enjoy the "benefits" of blasphemy law
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasphemy_law

I guess you could toss in Russia as well now with the whole "poor Church ppl insulted, lock up insulters for two years in prison".

Hasn't the Orthodox Church called for their release? http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-chu ... 80861.html

Yeah... somehow I think those fuckers are as sincere as Putin when hoping they shouldn't be punished too severe. In other news they told they were willing to forgive their crime but that they still should be punished by law.