Eye on extremism: Braving Pakistan's ‘clerical tsunami’

The blasphemy law is a tool used to persecute Muslim and non-Muslim minorities, as well as to settle petty grievances. In one case involving a 17-year-old ‘who allegedly blasphemed on a physics exam.’ is now condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch |
Source/Credit: ABC | Australia
By Stephen Minas | May 26, 2011

When American forces found and killed Osama bin Laden earlier this month, many were surprised.

Not because the Al Qaeda chief had been hiding in Pakistan. That, after all, had been the belief of the United States for years. No, the surprise was that bin Laden was found not in the rugged tribal regions hard by the Afghanistan border but in the garrison town of Abbottabad.

What’s more, the bin Laden compound proved to be several hundred yards from an army officer training headquarters that soon became, in media shorthand, ‘Pakistan’s equivalent of Sandhurst’. And Abbottabad is a mere 60 kilometres from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan.


The most wanted man in the world was found not at the periphery of Pakistan but at its centre. And the house that hid him became the perfect symbol for just how deep, and how near the top, lie lawlessness and violent extremism in Pakistan.

The terrorists quickly struck back, sending suicide bombers to kill almost 100 people at a police training centre near Peshawar. Sixteen people – five children among them – have been killed by a remote-controlled bomb in Khyber Agency. On Friday, also in Peshawar, an attack on a US convoy spared its intended victims but claimed a Pakistani bystander. Another attack by militants, this one in Karachi, was reported late on Sunday.

‘We will continue such attacks’, a spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban told Reuters. ‘Pakistan is our first target, and America is our second’.

Not 24 hours previously, in a pleasant London conference room, a young woman dealing with the human consequences of Pakistan’s tragic drift challenged her country to be better.

Shehrbano Taseer is a Newsweek correspondent and the daughter of the late Salmaan Taseer, the slain governor of Punjab. Governor Taseer was assassinated in January, shot 27 times by one of his bodyguards. The killer, who pled guilty, claimed Taseer's opposition to Pakistan's blasphemy law as his motive.

In particular, governor Taseer had taken up the cause of Aasia Bibi, a Christian peasant woman convicted of insulting the prophet Muhammad and sentenced to hang. (At trial, Bibi's accuser did not repeat the offending words because that would itself constitute a blasphemy – a stupidity lampooned in ‘The Life of Brian’.) Taseer visited Bibi in prison, worked to secure the condemned woman a pardon and campaigned against the blasphemy law.

The slain governor's story is a profile in courage. This is a man who, when warned by his son of the grave threats to his safety, responded with the words Lord Macaulay gave to the Roman hero Horatius: ‘How can man die better / Than facing fearful odds / For the ashes of his fathers / And the temples of his gods?’ This, as we know, was no idle bravado. The ghoulish reaction to his killing by clerics, lawyers and ordinary Pakistanis was reported here.

So it was striking that, mere months after this tragedy, Shehrbano Taseer came to London's Chatham House to offer a compelling analysis of the problems that led to her father's murder. The blasphemy law, Taseer explained, is a tool used to persecute Muslim and non-Muslim minorities, as well as to settle petty grievances. She cited one case involving a 17-year-old ‘who allegedly blasphemed on a physics exam’ and is now condemned to spend the rest of his life in prison.

The aggressive intolerance underpinning the blasphemy law is fuelled by the ‘madrasa system’ of religious education, which Taseer identified as ‘the breeding ground of all this Islamic terrorism’. Claiming that the state has ‘abdicated its responsibilities’ to provide a real education for all, Taseer spoke of eight-year-olds with little knowledge of maths and other basic subjects who ‘know how to operate a gun’, and 14-year-olds who know ‘how to strap on a suicide vest’. (Last week’s Economist reported that education accounts for 1.2 per cent of the Pakistani government’s budget, compared to 16 per cent for the armed forces.)

While acknowledging that ‘all madrasas are not evil’, Taseer warned that ‘tens of thousands of children are growing up to be merchants of hatred’.

Nor can the blight of extremist education be viewed in isolation. Taseer identified the other factors at work: militant Wahhabism exported by Saudi Arabia; the ‘disproportionate street power’ of religious fanatics; appeasement of extremism by non-radical elements in government; the ‘double game’ played by military and intelligence elements who draw distinctions between ‘good Taliban and bad Taliban’; and the ‘most venomous role’ played by media demagogues before and after her father's slaying.

The result, concluded Taseer, is that advocates of modernity and rationality like her late father find themselves ‘up against this clerical tsunami’.

Taseer identified school curriculum reform as a ‘first step’ in bringing Pakistan back from the brink. She also called for better-targeted foreign aid: ‘You can’t just build a school. You have to roll back the tide’ of extremism.

But prescriptions for secular education and justice tend to be vigorously opposed by those who have a stake in organised fanaticism. Taseer acknowledged this, quoting her father: ‘The puny dwarves become giants under the righteous cloak of religion’.

The great challenge, then, for Pakistan is to widen the appeal of secular government beyond the ‘liberal elite’. It is an elite far removed from the young Pakistanis who fall prey to radicalisation. And when even lawyers take to the streets to celebrate fundamentalist killers, it is an elite under siege. ‘There are islands of progress’, as the late international relations professor Fred Halliday once said, ‘but this is not sufficient: cosmopolis in one country is not an option’.

A cosmopolitan Pakistan is a distant prospect. Anatol Lieven, a professor at King’s College London, says flatly that Pakistan is ‘never going to be a secular, liberal state… It's not going to happen’. There is no cause for optimism. But in the courage of Salmaan Taseer and his daughter Shehrbano, there is at least cause for hope.

Stephen Minas is a journalist and a research associate with the Foreign Policy Centre, London. Twitter @StephenMinas



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