Pakistan's Medieval Era Islamist Dysfunction

"The arrest of Engineer Muhammad Ali Mirza [Muslim cleric, scholar and resident of Jehlum city] is not about public order."

"It is about silencing independent voices who dare to question sectarian clergy and challenge the monopoly of state-approved lapdogs. Meanwhile, violent mobs like TLP [Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan], who block highways, attack police and hold the state hostage are coddled, unbanned and quietly paid off."

"This selective justice is why Pakistan is stuck in perpetual chaos."

Lahore-based attorney J. Sajjal Shaheedi 

 

"The doubts and uncertainties that arise in such cases are ignored by the courts."

"[This is likely] due to the fear of religious backlash and potential mob violence against the judge if the accused is acquitted."

We are preparing our appeals against the decision and will g ..

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“We are preparing our appeals against the decision and will  ..

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Manzoor Rahmani, lawyer for four men sentenced to death for blasphemy 

 

"There is a growing realization that blasphemy laws are used to exploit vulnerable people and religious minorities,"

"Blasphemy claims are used for land grabs, targeting business rivals and criminal extortion."

"Historically, attempts to reform blasphemy laws have been quickly shut down by violent protests from radical Islamic groups. The real test is still ahead, as social change in Pakistan moves slowly." 

Thomas Mueller, persecution analyst, Open Doors 

Pakistan is eighth on the Open Doors World Watch List, making it a place of extreme persecution for many of its 4.5 million Christians  Open Doors

 

 In Pakistan, blaspheming Islam is considered a major crime, punishable by prison sentences, and even a death sentence. In this country an accusation of blasphemy has the power to incite mobs with murderous intent. In the recent past, politicians and lawyers who have challenged the laws on blasphemy in the country have been murdered; they themselves paying the ultimate penalty by virtue of public outrage through questioning blasphemy laws and in so doing, interpreted by raging mobs as being themselves blasphemous.

 

Pakistan amended its blasphemy laws in 2023 to make punishment more severe for blasphemy violations. Since that time, arrests have risen phenomenally, from several dozen annually to hundreds, and in particular when charges of blaspheming Islam on the Internet are involved. Many of those standing accused on these charges claim to have been entrapped by online extortionists. Experts on human rights point out that a rising tide of blasphemy is a certain method for Islamist groups to incite public support and attract funding through the pretext of defence of religious sanctity.

 

Interviews with families, legal experts, rights advocates and officials, along with government reports reviewed, suggest a pattern of abuse where strict blasphemy laws target individuals. A government-operated human rights body documenting a sharp rise in arrest for online blasphemy identified 11 in 2020, 9 in 2021 and 64 in 2022. The revised punishments, however led to arrests rising dramatically to 213 in 2023 and to 767 in the first seven months of 2024.  

 

Smoke plumes from a police vehicle set on fire by supporters of Pakistan's blasphemy laws in the southern sea port city of Karachi in October 2024. 

 

Arrested on charges of blasphemy, the convicted often spend months in prison before an actual trial eventuates. Most blasphemy cases in courtrooms are pursued by private groups led by lawyers and backed by networks of volunteers who monitor social media, searching for potential violators of the blasphemy laws. Their aggressive efforts to identify and convict cases reflect a rising "politicization of blasphemy laws. they have made it their cause to punish any possible act of insult to what they hold in reverence", explined Peter Jacob, executive director of the Center for Social Justice Pakistan.

 

The Legal commission on Blasphemy Pakistan has pursued dozens of online blasphemy cases while denying charges can be contrived. "Never before have we seen such foul dishonouring of Islam, the Holy Quran, Prophet Muhammad and other revered figures", claimed Rao Abdur Raheem, a lawyer with the group.

 

Five men were sentenced to death in Rawalpindi in Punjab Province, over accusations of committing blasphemy online. Ten people accused of blasphemy were put to death through incidents of mob vigilante violence. Lat year a police report titled "Blasphemy Business Group" exposed a criminal network that threatened people with fabricated blasphemy charges to secure payoffs. They operated often with official complicity from the Federal Investigation Agency.  

 

In August dozens of homes and churches were torched in eastern Pakistan after two Christians were accused of damaging the Quran   Reuters

 

Conveniently Re-Assignment History to the Waste Basket

"It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk for attack by violent protesters."
"Yes, he [Sir Winston Churchill] sometimes expressed opinions that were and are unacceptable to us today, but he was a hero, and he fully deserves his memorial."
"We cannot now try to edit or censor our past. We cannot pretend to have a different history."
"Whatever progress this country has made in fighting racism — and it has been huge — we all recognize that there is much more work to do. But it is clear that the protests have been sadly hijacked by extremists intent on violence."
“Would it not be better and more honest to ask our children to understand the context, to explain the mixture of good and bad in the career of Churchill and everyone else?"
"I will resist with every breath in my body any attempt to remove that statue from Parliament Square.” 
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson

Police officers stand in front of the Winston Churchill statue during a rally in Parliament Square in London on Tuesday. Ahead of expected protests on the weekend, the statue has been boarded up. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press)

"It's clear that we're in the middle of a public health crisis. So it's not safe for them [protesters], it's not safe for the people around them [for everyone to be gathering in crowds during the COVID-19 pandemic]."
"Secondly, we do have information that people are intent on coming to cause violence and confrontation."
London Police Chief Cressida Dick

The statue of former British prime minister Winston Churchill is seen defaced in Parliament Square, central London after a demonstration outside the US Embassy on June 7, 2020. Photo by Isabel Infantes/AFP via Getty Images.

In Britain, those styling themselves anti-racism protesters, taking the opportunity of the Black Lives Matter protests set off by the Minneapolis police killing of African-American George Floyd in the United States, have made demands of government and its agencies at every level, universities and other groups who sought to memorialize events and personages in history as part of the nation's heritage, that it is their intention to see that all vestiges of Britain's imperial past reflected in monuments and statuary, the naming of institutions and public thoroughfares be extinguished.

Damage and the assaults of graffiti declaring Sir Winston Churchill -- the WWII saviour of Great Britain, who stood virtually alone with his British Empire support against the axis powers supporting Nazi Germany until the entry of the United States of America following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbour -- forced the British government to close off Parliament Square and to board up the parliament-facing statue of Sir Winston Churchill, Britain's war years prime minister whose pledge to the country to 'never give up' in the struggle against the Thousand-year Reich was fulfilled in Germany's defeat.

In the United States, where the protests first emerged in late May, statues erected to memorialize Christopher Columbus were destroyed by ravaging mobs of violent thugs; the statues disfigured in Boston and Richmond, Virginia last week. Black Lives Matter groups protesting the death of George Floyd have outdone themselves in their destructive fury, aiming their vandalism at Confederate memorials n the south of the nation; Richmond and Birmingham, Alabama, Charleston, South Carolina and Raleigh, North Carolina.

In Virginia, a statue of Christopher Columbus erected in Byrd Park, Richmond, was pulled down, and thrown face down into Fountain Lake; a just end, the mob felt, for a man who violently abused the indigenous people he found occupying the New World, when he 'discovered' it in 1492. A bronze statue that was dedicated in 1927 in recognition of a great explorer. Back in London, its mayor, Sadiq Khan, supported the protests' claims that controversial monuments that cause offence be removed.

Churchill statue, Whitehall boarded up  Photograph: Blitz Pictures/REX/Shutterstock

The list drawn up by Black Lives Matter supporters includes statues of leading historical figures included among them, Sir Francis Drake, Nancy Astor, Christopher Columbus and William Gladstone "for celebrating slavery and racism", according to the campaigners. A figure of Edward Colston, a 17th-century slave trader, was thrown into Bristol harbour before councils and museums were able to tuck it out of view.

Over a thousand demonstrators in Oxford fixed a demand for the removal of colonialist Cecil Rhodes' statue. Mayor Khan remarked that he "hoped" a new commission for diversity in the public realm would recommend removal of memorials that "don't accurately reflect our values", in a mayoral bid to place history in the dungeon of a revisionist garbage heap. If you can't see it, it cannot have occurred. London had "an uncomfortable truth" with historical links to slavery, according to Mayor Khan.

  Baden-Powell statue in Poole. Photograph: Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images

"Our nation and city owes a large part of its health to its role in the slave trade and while this is reflected in our public realm, the contribution of many of our communities to life in our capital has been willfully ignored -- this cannot continue."  Not all are in agreement with the mayor's assessment. An assembly member, Susan Hall, stated that "Instead of virtue-signalling and starting a divisive debate, Sadiq Khan should focus on his job"

A list of 60 statues, plaques and monuments was put together identifying which among Britain's rich history of movers and shakers were to be destroyed, according to anti-racism activists who declared the "need to be removed so that Britain can finally face the truth about its past". Charles II, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Nelson, Prime Minister Gladstone, Sir Francis Drake, and Charles Grey, the former prime minister who oversaw the abolition of slavery in 1833, all listed given their "responsibility for colonial violence".

The Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall being boarded up on Friday. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images