Pakistan: Taseer’s daughter challenges blasphemy law

"These extremists, they want to tell you how to think, how to feel, how to act. It has made me more resolute that these people should never win."

Ahmadiyya Times | News Watch | Int'l Desk
Source/Credit: Indian express
By Agencies | June 20 2011

A day after her father was gunned down by an Islamist extremist, a grieving Shehrbano Taseer wrote on Twitter, "A light has gone out in our home today."

In the months since, the 22-year-old daughter of the late Punjab province Gov Salmaan Taseer has emerged as one of Pakistan’s most outspoken voices for tolerance. Through her writing and comments, she warns any audience who will listen of the threat of Islamist extremism. And yes, sometimes she gets scared. She has received threats from militants, who’ve warned her to remember her father’s fate.


"These extremists, they want to tell you how to think, how to feel, how to act," said Taseer. "It has made me more resolute that these people should never win."

Salmaan Taseer was assassinated on January 4. The confessed killer, Mumtaz Qadri, boasted he had carried out the slaying because the politician wanted to change blasphemy law that impose the death sentence for insulting Islam.

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"For everyone else it was the governor and their leader and this man, and it was this big, sexy story and it was so sensationalist. But for me, it was my father," Shehrbano Taseer said. Taseer majored in government and film at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is by profession a journalist.

Taseer’s followers on Twitter often receive notes that criticise Pakistan’s discriminatory laws, especially blasphemy claims that have reached the courts since her father’s death.

Unlike many politicians, she’s also willing to criticise the role Saudi Arabia has played in funding numerous hardline Islamist schools in Pakistan.

Taseer is frustrated with the Pakistani justice system’s delays in processing the case of Qadri. She wants the former bodyguard to spend his life in solitary confinement. A death sentence is "too easy," she said.

"In Pakistan, we have few brave and honest leaders," she said of the political atmosphere. "We need our heroes alive."

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