The Lights of a Perverted Faith

Do you have a definition of abject cowardice?  I do, one that I recently acquired.  A coward is a man who walks on to a school bus, full of children, and shoots a fourteen-year-old girl twice at close range, in the leg and more critically in the head.  The girl in question was guilty of a dire crime: she believes that education is a fundamental right for all.  This was enough to mark her as a target for assassination by the Pakistani Taliban. 

I was a bit out of the loop so far as news was concerned when I was in Tunisia.  But the one item that gripped my attention in early October was a report I saw on the BBC World Service concerning the attempted murder of Malala Yousafazi by a Taliban hitman, principally because she was an active campaigner for schooling for girls which, by their perverted lights, was ‘un-Islamic.’ 

Malala – her name means ‘grief stricken’ – has been active in her cause since the age of eleven.  It was then she began to write a blog for BBC Urdu, detailing what life was like after the Taliban took control of her native Swat Valley in Pakistan.  Her principal fear was over the future of her education – “I was afraid of going to school because the Taliban had issued an edict banning all girls from schools.” 

The Taliban, it has to be said, was allowed to consolidate its position in Swat in an act of retreat and appeasement by the Pakistani government, which hoped thereby to stop the spread of the cancer.  For several months, before they were finally ousted by the army in the summer of 2009, these religious fanatics established their own republic of Islamic virtue, the stuff of nightmares by any reasonable standard.  Men were forced to grow beards and women to wear burqas.  Those who did not comply faced lashing or beheading.  The brutish regime also closed schools, the majority of them for girls. 

After the Taliban’s removal Malala appeared on national television to talk about girls’ education.  Her courage in speaking against the Taliban was enough for the Pakistani government to select her as a fitting recipient of the country’s first National Peace Award for Youth.  But it also singled her out in another way.  At the beginning of this year she was placed on a Taliban hit list. 

That would terrify anyone, particularly a teenager; it would certainly have terrified me.  But Malala would not be silenced by fear. “Sometimes I imagine I’m going along and the Taliban stop me”, she said on television, “I take my sandal and hit them in the face and say, ‘What you are doing is wrong.  Education is our right, don’t take it away from us.’  There is this quality in me – I’m ready for all situations.  So even if (God let this not happen) they kill me, I’ll first say to them, ‘What you are doing is wrong.’”

Her shooting caused widespread outrage, in Pakistan and across much of the world.  How could it not?  How could it not given the callousness of the action, given her youth and given the cause for which she was prepared to risk her life?  Even countries with the most dubious record on human rights recognise the importance of universal education.  I’m almost tempted to say that girls’ schooling is no more of a ‘right’ than breathing; it’s a reflex. 

It’s impossible to breath under the Taliban.  These disciples of Iblis have blown up Sufi shrines, worshipers at mosques, and men and women in markets.  Bombs have been planted to ensure maximum loss of life.  Then there is murder incorporated, the assassination of specific individuals.  Public officials and journalists have been targeted but so, too, have religious scholars belonging to Muslim sects the movement has condemned as heretical. 

Malala was singled out because her campaign for educational rights was an ‘obscenity’, so said Ehsanullah Ehsan, a Taliban spokesman.  Greater poverty of spirit, greater ignorance, I find almost impossible to imagine.  These are people who kill in the name of God knowing nothing of God.  Is there any greater heresy, I have to ask?  There is obscenity alright, the obscenity of the Ehsanullah Ehsan and his debased kind. 

Of all the dark forces in the world the Taliban is among the darkest, deep in evil and ignorance.  To paraphrase some words of Sir Winston Churchill’s, if the movement succeeds all that we have known and cared for will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted faith.

A Warrant for Lawlessness

Rimsha Masihi is of uncertain age.  According to her parents she is only eleven.  According to a report submitted to a court in Islamabad in Pakistan she is ‘about’ fourteen.  In a way her age is irrelevant; eleven or fourteen, she is a juvenile under the law.  But that did not stop her from being held in a maximum security jail, all the while in solitary confinement.  It would be traumatic for anyone.  It was all the more traumatic for this underage girl because, according to some accounts, she has Down’s syndrome.

The present riots across much of the Islamic world over an insult to the Prophet Mohammed show how seriously people take their faith, and how seriously they react to any perceived offence.  It’s particularly serious in Pakistan, a country where the vast majority of people are Muslim, a country where blasphemy is punishable by life imprisonment or even by death. 

There is a paradox here.  Pakistan, as the Economist noted in a recent report, takes its religion seriously, yes, but it’s also a country where the Quran is routinely desecrated and the Prophet insulted.  Or at least it is judging by the number of cases brought before the courts under the blasphemy legislation. 

Rimsha is one such accused.  Vulnerable, educationally sub-normal and illiterate, she was accused of blasphemy in August after a neighbour and a local imam claimed that she had burned pages of the holy book.  Given that little girl is a Christian, part of the country’s tiny and cowed minority, the alleged offence was all the worse. 

She is the most unlikely and yet the most likely victim imaginable.  No sooner had the accusation been raised than a mob gathered outside her home in a slum district of Islamabad, threatening to burn her family to death.  The whole Christian community had to flee in terror of reprisals, as the girl was taken into custody.

The threat against Rimsha and her family was real enough.  In 2009 accusations of blasphemy against Christians living in Gojira in Punjab province saw eight people being burned alive by a mob.  More recently, a mentally disturbed Muslim man, arrested for blasphemy in the city of Bahawalpur, was dragged out of prison by a 2000-strong lynch mob and set on fire. 

In a recent article for BrooWaha detailing the plight of elderly women in Ghana accused of witchcraft (No Country for Old Women, 6 September) I made the point that there was some similarity in these cases with older forms of persecution in Europe and America.  Superstition is only part of the explanation; the rest is made up of more venal motives, often centring on personal or material factors

A similar process seems to be at work in Pakistan, where false accusations made under the blasphemy laws are used to settle personal scores or to lay claim to property.  In the case of Rimsha it gives all the appearance of pure sectarian intolerance, a convenient way of clearing out all of the local Christian families in the area where she lived.

She has now been released on bail.  Not only is the case against her weak in the extreme but her treatment also provoked an international outcry over the treatment of minorities in Pakistan.  More than that, two weeks after Rimsha was detained, Mohammad Khalid Chisti, the local imam and her chief accuser, was arrested after his deputy at the mosque claimed that he himself had secretly planted the pages of the Quran in her bag to make it seem that she had burnt them. 

But the case has acquired implications going beyond Pakistan’s borders. For some questions of innocence or guilt are clearly irrelevant.  There are those in the Muslim community prepared to speak up for Rimsha.  There are others, like a university student quoted in a recent Times report who said that the bail decision was wrong and against Islam – “As Muslims our goal should be to please God and not the US”, he said, “This decision may force people to take the law into their own hands.”  The threat could not be clearer. 

There have to be questions raised about the mentality and the morality of people who find injustice and persecution ‘pleasing to God.’  There have to be questions about a country that allows blasphemy law to be used as a tool of repression and mob violence.  It’s certainly true that there are those in the ruling Pakistan People’s Party who recognise the problem but they raise objections at their own peril.  Last year two of the party’s leaders were gunned down after criticising the law. 

In the end I think the case against Rimsha will be dropped, after the present national and international fires have damped down.  But no matter what the outcome she and her family are unlikely ever to return to their former lives.  For them there is never likely to be justice, just law that acts as a warrant for lawlessness.  

Mo More Volleyball

It’s always bad news to get on the wrong side of highland communities anywhere in the world, places with a militant tradition, places where grudges are never forgotten.

This thought was brought on by a recent piece by Decal Walsh in the Guardian (The village that stood up to the Taliban). He reports from Shah Hassan Khel, a village in Lakki Marwat, a district close to the lawless tribal lands in Pakistan’s north-west frontier. On 1 January a suicide bomber killed ninety-seven local people watching a volleyball game. The traditional forty days of mourning are now over; the men are taking to arms. “We will track them down. We will kill them, one by one”, said one of the elders.

The villagers had initially welcomed the Taliban, welcomed their promises of a ‘purer’ Islam, an Islam based on sharia law. But of course purity and ideals are one thing; kidnapping, smuggling and car theft, all intended to augment Taliban funds, are quite another. Even Taliban puritanism became too much, as girls were stopped from going to school and people stopped from watching television. Maulvi Ashraf Ali, the Taliban Don, also became a figure of resentment –“He claimed to be enforcing sharia law. What he really wanted was power.”

So, having had enough of these gangsters, the people of Shah Hassan Khel co-operated with the army in their removal. When they attempted to come back they were chased away, hence the New Year’s gift. The villagers, now armed with AK-47s, are on the hunt for Ali and his followers, believed to be hiding in North Waziristan.

It’s encouraging, certainly, when people are sufficiently motivated to take action against those who would take them back to the Dark Ages. However, this new vendetta is surely another illustration of how weak the Pakistani state truly is in the face of unscrupulous militants, people who would even hijack children as potential suicide bombers.

Meanwhile, as Walsh says, the Taliban has scored one small victory. They hated volleyball, I dare say another sign of western ‘decadence’. Volleyball is no longer played in Shah Hassan Khel. The players are dead.

Justice for Jinnah

Before going to India earlier this summer I watched some old movies, including Richard Attenborough’s Ghandi. I thought that the depiction there of Muhammad Ali Jinnah as a rather sinister and somewhat snobbish character entirely unfair, especially when set against the hagiography surrounding the Mahatma.

As always an understanding of the past depends on the preconceptions of the present. There is a widespread sympathy in the west for Gandhi and almost none at all for Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, insofar as he makes any appearance in popular consciousness. There is a simple truth to be considered here, conveniently overlooked: if any man was responsible for the division of India it was Gandhi, not Jinnah. Why? Simply because the Mahatma gave the Congress Party an ideology that drew heavily on Hindu tradition and culture. It was the fear of being a permanent minority in a Hindu-dominated India that led Muslim intellectuals towards the notion of the new state of Pakistan, first outlined in the 1930s by Muhammad Iqbal and later embraced by Jinnah.

Following from this I was fascinated to read a report last month in The Daily Telegraph by Dean Nelson from Islamabad, saying that Jinnah was, after all, prepared to consider staying within the political confines of an independent India. I read this soon after seeing a wonderful movie about Jinnah, staring our own Christopher Lees as the elder statesman. But what is more wonderful is that this claim, that the Muslim leaders would have eschewed the creation of Pakistan, comes in a book written by Jaswant Singh, a senior member of the Bhratiya Janata Party or BJP, the Hindu Nationalist Party.

In Jinnah-India, Partition, Independence Singh praises the leader of the Muslim League as a “great Indian hero” unjustly demonised by Congress. Jinnah, he continues, was prepared to back a federal India, a concession that broke on Jawaharlal Nehru’s insistence on a centralised state. Nehru stood in the way of a federal India which thus, in 1947, became a partitioned India, with all the horror that followed thereon.

I’m not quite sure exactly what is going on here, as all this comes from a member of a party that has been accused of fermenting anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat and other places. Not having read the book, I have a feeling that it has much more to do with contemporary Indian politics than a scholarly reassessment of the past. Undermining Congress, on the one hand and attacking Muslims, on the other, would seem to be part of the overall strategy of the BJP.

A rather less partisan assessment is offered by M. J. Akbar, Nehru’s biographer, and himself a Muslim, who responded by saying that Nehru feared the ‘balkanization’ of the newly independent state. He feared fragmentation while Jinnah feared domination. Jinnah’s solution was a federal state with the right of succession. Nehru accepted a federal state but without the right of succession. And so history was made under the tent of tragedy. Akbar goes on to say that the creation of Pakistan damaged the position of Muslims remaining in India, but this would have been much worse if it had never been established:

Had Pakistan not been born, how would we convince millions today that Pakistan would not become another America but a civil war mess? An unfulfilled Pakistan would have been too big a burden for India.

The cliché serves here: they really were damned if the did and damned if they did not. But I admire Jinnah as a historical personality, just as I admire Nehru.