ANALYSIS:The assassination of Salman Taseer has exposed the stifling intolerance that now permeates society in Pakistan at all levels, writes MARY FITZGERALD
THE SLAIN governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s wealthiest and most politically powerful province, was laid to rest in his beloved Lahore this week, his untimely demise shrinking even further the space for debate over the role of religion in the world’s second most populous Muslim-majority country.
Salman Taseer, a political bruiser who was unafraid to speak his mind, was gunned down by a policeman in his own security detail. After pumping 26 bullets into Taseer, the assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, a 26-year-old member of the elite force tasked with protecting officials, reportedly said: “I am a ghulam [servant] of the Prophet and the punishment for ghustakh-i-Rasool [insulting Muhammad] is death.”
Taseer had not insulted Muhammad, but had merely called for the repeal of draconian blasphemy laws that have long been used and abused. His killing has left those Pakistanis already nervous about their country’s drift not just towards militancy, but the wider currents of intolerance and extremism in which it flourishes, wondering what comes next.
“It has really shocked us all,” one Karachi-based academic wrote in an e-mail. “Not the assassination, since sudden death has become a sad feature of Pakistani life, but the implications for airing dissent on religious matters . . . It’s been frustrating for us . . . to have this rigid form of religion imposed on us [by] outside forces. Not sure if we can ever return to what we were.”
An editorial in Pakistan’s venerable Dawn newspaper excoriated officialdom for standing silently by in recent months as fundamentalists issued threats and fatwas declaring Taseer an apostate for his stance on the blasphemy legislation. “He paid the ultimate price for his rejection of the cancer of intolerance that has aggressively eaten away at this country for over three decades now . . . If Pakistan and Pakistanis do not try and excise the cancer within, the future of this country is very bleak indeed.”
Taseer had drawn the ire of Pakistan’s religious hardliners because of his public support for Aasia Noreen, a Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy under dubious circumstances in November. The judgment was criticised by human rights groups and prompted an appeal for clemency from Pope Benedict.
In 1986 Gen Zia-ul-Haq, the military dictator to whom Pakistan’s narrow seam of liberals ascribe much of the country’s present woes, modified colonial-era blasphemy laws to include the death sentence for anyone deemed to have insulted Muhammad.
Human rights groups say the legislation is often used as a pretext for attacks on religious minorities or to settle personal vendettas. No one convicted of blasphemy in Pakistan has ever been executed, but 32 accused – and two Muslim judges – have been killed by vigilantes.
Taseer’s assassination, and the reaction to it, raises serious questions over the extent to which a stifling intolerance, springing from rigid interpretations of Islam, has permeated Pakistani society. A crowd of supporters showered Qadri in rose petals when he arrived in court and the wider response to the murder has been telling. As those excusing Qadri on Pakistani TV channels or lionising him on Facebook and other websites demonstrate, criticism of Taseer’s views on the blasphemy law was not just limited to the usual spittle-flecked suspects.
“Those who have trawled the profiles of these supporters have said that they have MBA degrees, they follow football, they love the Pirates of the Caribbean films,” wrote novelist Mohammed Hanif. “Miley Cyrus figures on lots of these pages. And as [one Pakistani blogger] pointed out: ‘If you go through the profiles of Qadri supporters on Facebook, you’d think Justin Bieber was the cause of extremism in Pakistan’.”
Sami Shah, a columnist and comedian, railed against the “intellectual suicide bombers who kill rational thought and humanism” in Pakistan. “They are your co-worker, your friend, your mother. They are ignorance. They are stupidity. And worst of all, they are legion,” he wrote.
Last year a survey of students at some of the top educational institutions in Pakistan, conducted in co-operation with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, found them, overall, more religiously conservative than their predecessors. A majority said Pakistan should not become a secular state, almost 90 per cent declared Islam as their primary identity, and one-third believed gender segregation “saved society from evil influences”. This is far from the Pakistan many of the older generations remember. “The tree planted by Gen Zia is bearing fruits – sour ones,” wrote one Pakistani journalist in an e-mail.
Growing religious conservatism has not translated into more support for Pakistan’s constellation of Islamist parties, who have yet to garner much more than 10 per cent of the vote in general elections. But parties like Taseer’s own – the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) – appear increasingly cowed in the face of once marginal clerics whose voices are now amplified in the media. In late November, the governor’s PPP colleague, law minister Babar Awan, said there was no question of amending the blasphemy law, a position later echoed by prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani.
Taseer’s killing means another light has gone out in liberal Pakistan, a place now gripped by fear and anxiety.
Mary Fitzgerald is Foreign Affairs Correspondent