Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (22 page)

Ayub’s death sentence may also have provoked the death, perhaps by suicide, of prominent Catholic bishop John Joseph of Faisalabad. On May 6, 1998, Bishop Joseph was shot in the same courtroom and at the same spot where Ayub had been shot; he died on the steps of the courthouse. Many Pakistani Christians interpreted his death as a protest against the blasphemy law, and thousands marched at his funeral to protest his death and to oppose the laws. Hundreds were arrested, and two Christians were jailed on blasphemy charges because of remarks they allegedly made. One, Ranjha Masih, was sentenced on April 26, 2003, to life imprisonment and a 50,000-rupee fine on the charge of desecrating a sign on which was printed a declaration of Islamic faith: Ranjha had allegedly thrown a stone that hit the sign. Ranjha worked for the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), and the accusation against him came from a political opponent.
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In an especially peculiar accusation, Aslam Masih (Masih is a common Christian surname in Pakistan referring, in Arabic, to the Messiah) of Faisalabad, an illiterate Christian man in his mid-fifties, was arrested in November 1998 on charges that he had hung verses from the Qur’an in a charm around a dog’s neck.
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Court testimony indicates that some local Muslims resented seeing a Christian as a successful farmer and so refused to pay him for animals he had sold them. Subsequently, they stole all of his animals and filed a blasphemy case. Some locals then beat him up and handed him over to the police, where he faced further abuse. When his case was finally heard three and a half years later, a mob often gathered outside the courtroom while the prosecution produced only hearsay evidence against him. Nevertheless, he was found guilty in May 2002 and given two life sentences.
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He was often placed in solitary confinement and regularly beaten by other prisoners so that he became traumatized and suffered memory loss. After four and a half years, during which his family was allowed to visit him only three times, the Lahore High Court finally acquitted him on June 4, 2003. The appeals hearing took only five minutes, and, in overturning the conviction, Justice Najam ur-Zaman criticized the prosecution, noting that their chief witness had retracted his statement. However, Aslam has had to remain in hiding, with continuing threats on his life and against those who have sheltered him. On one occasion, arsonists set ablaze the house in which he was hiding.
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Yet another Christian named Masih—Younis Masih, age twenty-nine—was arrested and charged with blasphemy in September 2005 near Lahore, after locals told police he made derogatory remarks against Islam and Muhammad. He told Shahbaz Bhatti, who was then head of the All Pakistan Minorities Alliance, that dozens of Muslims attacked him on September 10, 2005, when he asked them not to sing loudly, because his nephew had died, and his body was still lying at home. On May 30, 2007, Younis Masih was sentenced to death. His appeals continue.
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In early July 2009, Imran Masih, a Christian living in Faisalabad, was accused of having desecrated the Qur’an. Following a common practice, Imran had cleaned out waste paper from his shop and burned it in the street. A nearby shop owner, possibly motivated by a business rivalry, accused him of burning pages of the Qur’an and blaspheming against Islam and its Prophet. He repeated the accusation to other Muslims, by some reports through a mosque loudspeaker. Imran was subsequently attacked, beaten, and tortured by an angry mob, which also looted his shop. Police intervened to stop the beating, but then they themselves detained Imran. On January 11, he was convicted of violating Sections 295-A and -B of the penal code and received a life sentence, as well as a fine of over $1,000 for intentionally burning the Qur’an so as to “foment interfaith hatred and hurt the feelings of Muslims.”
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Several of the most brutal attacks against Pakistani Christians in recent years began on July 30, 2009, in the village of Korian, home to around 100 Christian families. Several days after a Korian family was accused of throwing torn pieces of a Qur’an in the air at a wedding ceremony, where guests threw money in the air according to custom, mosque loudspeakers began calling for attacks against Christians. A mob of angry Muslims, armed with guns and explosives, used trucks to break through walls and gasoline to start fires. Approximately sixty houses were destroyed, two churches were ransacked, and livestock was stolen. Many families were able to escape and hide in the fields, where they watched their homes burn to the ground.
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The blasphemy charges and attendant violence soon reached the town of Gojra, where, on August 1, a crowd of around 1,000 Muslims, believed to be connected to the Taliban-linked Sipah-e-Sahaba militant group, attacked local Christians. Over forty homes were razed, and at least seven Christians were killed, six of whom (including two children) were burned alive. The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) found, in a report released on August 4, 2009, that the police had been aware of plans for the attack in Gojra, which appears to have been premeditated, but had not acted to stop it. “The police remained silent spectators,” said Zahid Iqbal, a local councillor. According to the HRCP, calls for Muslims to “make a mincemeat of Christians” in retaliation for the alleged blasphemy had come from Gojra mosques the previous night.
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Following the Gojra riots, Shahbaz Bhatti, then Minister of Minority Affairs, declared that “[t]he blasphemy law is being used to terrorize minorities in Pakistan.”
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Asma Jahangir, chair of HRCP, stated that Pakistan was witnessing a
“pattern” of rising violence against religious minorities, while local politicians protect the violators “and keep their names out of police reports.”
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On October 1, Pope Benedict XVI met with President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan and discussed the growing trend of anti-Christian violence in Pakistan, and there was talk of amending the laws.
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Despite these discussions, blasphemy convictions against Christians continued in 2010. On February 25, Qamar David received a twenty-five-year prison sentence for allegedly outraging Muslim religious feelings by disseminating blasphemous text messages concerning Muhammad and the Qur’an.
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In early March, a Christian couple were found guilty of desecrating the Qur’an after allegedly touching it without first washing their hands. Witnesses at the trial asserted that the couple had used the Qur’an in a black magic ritual and that they had written the Muslim profession of faith on the walls of their home. The couple, Munir Masih and Ruqqiya Bibi, were sentenced to twenty-five-year jail terms.
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On June 19, 2010, Rehmat Masih, believed to be eighty-five years old, was arrested by police in Jhumray and sent to Faisalabad District Jail. He had been accused of blasphemy by a Muslim neighbor, Muhammad Sajjid Hameed, with whom he had a land dispute.
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In November 2010, Asia Bibi, a mother of five, was sentenced to death for blasphemy in the town of Sheikhupura, near Lahore.
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According to the 1998 census, Hindus, including scheduled castes, comprise almost 2 percent of Pakistan’s population and are concentrated in the province of Sindh. They suffer from discrimination, economic hardships, and religious persecution and are often randomly attacked in general retaliation for attacks, or perceived attacks, on Muslims in India. They are also targeted by blasphemy accusations, although perhaps not as frequently as Ahmadis or Christians are targeted.

One example took place in July 2001. A Hindu, Ram Chand, who lived in Chack, Bahawalpur district, was constructing a bathroom floor for Mohammed Safdar. Safdar accused the laborer of defiling the name of the Prophet by carving it on a brick and took the brick to the village head. Deeply offended by this so-called act of blasphemy, local Muslims attacked homes and other property belonging to Hindus and also beat up Hindu women and children. Meanwhile, the police arrested Chand and his son, Ram-Yazman, charging them with blasphemy. Local Muslims reacted to these charges even more ferociously, blocking the road for hours and demanding that all Hindus be expelled from the area. Police arrested twenty Muslims for attacking Hindus.
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On April 9, 2008, a Hindu factory worker in Karachi, Jagdesh Kumar, was beaten to death by coworkers after allegedly making remarks that blasphemed against Islam. Factory guards made a failed attempt to take Kumar into protective
custody, while police officers who responded to the incident were later suspended for their failure to take proper action to prevent Kumar’s death.
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While charged proportionally less than religious minorities, Muslims, including Shias, Sufis, and Muslim reformers, but excluding Ahmadis, account for about half of those targeted by blasphemy accusations. In fact, adherents of the Deobandi school of Islam, from which the Taliban sprang, and which has been increasing its strength throughout much of Pakistan, have been carrying out a largely underreported violent campaign against Pakistani Shias and Sufis on the grounds that they are apostates.
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Mohammed Yousuf Ali, of Lahore, a Sufi mystic, was charged with blasphemy based on accusations that he claimed that he was a prophet. He denied the charge, and several of the prosecution witnesses admitted that they did not fully understand what he was actually teaching. However, the local media vilified him, and his trial was held in camera. On August 5, 2000, he was convicted of blasphemy under section 295-C and sentenced to death, thirty-five years of hard labor, and a fine. Ali was kept in Kotlakpat Jail in Lahore under poor conditions; he became ill, developing difficulty in speaking and in using his fingers, but was denied adequate medical treatment.
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Zahid Shah was charged with blasphemy and was jailed in September 1994. His detention was based on a complaint by an imam, Maulvi Faqir Mohammed, who said that Zahid had desecrated the Qur’an and made derogatory remarks about Muhammad.
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In 1997, he was released on bail by a local court and went to live with his brother at Faisalabad while the case was pending. In 2002, he returned home and unwisely became involved in an argument with some locals. Upon hearing that he had returned, Faqir Mohammed convened a
Panchayat
—council of elders—on July 5, 2002. After evening prayers, the imam broadcasted a fatwa over mosque loudspeakers, urging people to kill Zahid. Assailants broke into his house, hauled him outside, and beat him with iron rods and sticks in front of his wife and brother. His brother begged for mercy and promised that the accused would leave the village forever, but neither the mob nor the imam accepted these pleas. After Zahid lost consciousness, the mob dragged him to the village’s main intersection, where people from nearby villages quickly gathered; and when he regained consciousness, the mob stoned him to death. Police arrived hours later, did not arrest anyone, and did not send the body for an autopsy. No case was registered against the culprits because Zahid’s relatives were afraid to press charges. Several days later, the police did arrest thirty people, including the imam, for their role in the stoning.
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Some cases developed over allegations of what appears to be accidents. In 1996, one man slipped and fell onto a stove while holding a Qur’an. A page was burned, and the unfortunate individual was imprisoned. After a cleric incited
them against the alleged blasphemer, a mob accosted and burned him alive in his jail cell while he was awaiting trial.
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A blasphemy accusation similarly provoked the murder of Najeeb Zafar, owner of a leather factory in Muridke in Punjab and a member of one of Pakistan’s leading industrialist families, by other factory workers on August 5, 2009. A factory supervisor, Qasim, objected when he saw Zafar taking down an old wall calendar and remove tape from it since the calendar had “holy verses” on it. After quarreling with the owner, Qasim incited factory workers and local residents with a charge of Qur’an desecration, and they stormed the factory, seized weapons from security guards, and murdered Zafar and an employee.
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The Pakistan government’s ongoing war against the Taliban overlaps with repression of purported blasphemy. In February 2009, the government and the Taliban signed a short-lived agreement pledging to enforce sharia law in the Swat Valley region, partially in recognition that the Taliban were already in effective control. A spate of violence followed in the frontier provinces and tribal areas. In March 2009, three days after a threatening letter arrived at a Peshawar mausoleum commemorating the seventeenth-century Sufi poet Baba, a bomb exploded and damaged a portion of the shrine. The letter had warned against further promotion of “shrine culture” and spoke disparagingly of the fact that women were coming to pray at the shrine as well as men.
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On July 1, 2010, there was a suicide bomb attack by three people on the Data Darbar shrine in Lahore, which commemorates an eleventh-century Sufi saint, Ali bin Usman, and is probably Pakistan’s most popular Sufi shrine. The attacks took place on a Thursday evening, the most popular evening for crowds to gather; fifty-two people were killed and nearly 200 wounded. Although there was no claim of responsibility, Islamist extremists often accuse Sufis of being heretical, and officials maintain that it was the work of Punjabi Taliban.
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According to scholar Akbar Ahmed, “perhaps dozens” of Pakistani educators that have spoken out in favor of reforms have faced blasphemy accusations from their students. Among them is Dr. Mohammad Younas Shaikh, a professor who taught at the medical college in Islamabad. He did post-graduate studies in Dublin and London, and he was a participant in the Pakistan-India Forum for Peace and Democracy, a member of the South Asian Fraternity, the South Asian Union, and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. In 1990, he started an organization called “The Enlightenment,” dedicated to discussing Islam in a contemporary context. As its name indicates, it draws inspiration from the European Enlightenment and Renaissance. However, Shaikh still considers himself a devout Muslim and draws inspiration from the Qur’an.
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