Debunking the Qadri narrative
The likes of Mumtaz Qadri seem to have been given the licence to kill by this country’s seminaries
The writer is a freelance writer based in Islamabad. She blogs at www.aishasarwari.wordpress.com. She can be followed on Twitter @AishaFsarwari
Mumtaz Qadri appealed to the courts recently to spare his life after he was sentenced to death for taking the life of Punjab governor, Salmaan Taseer in 2011. The Supreme Court has now dismissed Qadri’s review petition against his death sentence. All holy scriptures talk of how the vain fall. The people who garlanded Qadri are now either busy picking on the imbecility of Donald Trump or taking a hiatus until the time some other event unfolds in the future that takes their fancy.
We cannot let what Qadri did be forgotten. His conviction is that rare victory for those who feel dejected by the state’s inability to stand up for the downtrodden and oppressed minorities of this country. Taseer was targeted for his stance in the Asia Bibi case, the Christian woman who was accused of having committed blasphemy.
What Trump is doing in the US is a much more benign version of what Qadri did in Pakistan. The former is only limiting himself to spewing hate-filled rhetoric, while in Pakistan the likes of Qadri seem to have been given an unabashed licence to kill by this country’s seminaries and mosques. Sadly, very few Muslims openly protest the kind of actions that Qadri committed. In contrast, Muslims vocally protest the intolerant diatribe in the US against a largely elite Muslim strata, and rightly so. However, the likes of Qadri are far more dangerous. The stakes here are higher. People in this country have only limited constitutional protection compared to Muslims in America. Until Qadri sees the gallows, the message to the young men in this country is that taking the law into your own hands will bring you glory, rather than living as a law-abiding citizen, and that your own notion of virtue is superior to the notion of the apex Court. It was when faced with this kind of lawlessness that Hobbes described life as brutish and short.
With the Supreme Court’s verdict and the rejection of Qadri’s appeal, we can rejoice that there is still some spine left in our country. "It is our responsibility to safeguard the law and stand by our oaths,” says Justice Asif Saeed Khosa. He also said that criticism of the blasphemy law did not amount to committing blasphemy. Sometimes, in this country even common sense can sound revolutionary.
What is necessary is to carry out a reflective inquiry into why a member of the Punjab police’s Elite Force turned against the man he swore to protect. The failure is on many levels: the lack of psychometric testing of our law-enforcement officials; the widespread intolerance that our schools and mosques impart; the media’s feverish need to sensationalise and create hype around an imagined breach of sensibilities to get better ratings; the pathetic backfoot that Taseer’s political party played on when he was campaigning for Asia Bibi.
As a people, we fail to classify our heroes accurately, erroneously placing the crown on the one who killed an unarmed man. We also need to work towards re-educating our youth. Unlearning is a mighty hard task. We need to have greater understanding of this false sense of persecution that Muslims globally have to enable our country to progress. These insecurities need to be addressed and not allowed to fester. We should also have the ability to explain in detail what it is that led to Qadri’s conviction. It is an opportunity to inculcate, not just the fear of the state in those who seriously consider taking the law into their own hands and think nothing of persecuting the downtrodden, but also the state’s love for those who continue to stand up to fight for the empowerment of minorities, particularly women minorities, in this country.
Pakistan’s educated Twitterati has all the time for initiating #FreeMumtazQadri trends. Trends for persecuted minorities, however, never have their day. Till now, the Salmaan Taseer narrative was told to our people from the Mumtaz Qadri angle. It is now time to do the reverse and tell Pakistanis about the Mumtaz Qadri narrative from the Salmaan Taseer angle.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 21st, 2015.
We cannot let what Qadri did be forgotten. His conviction is that rare victory for those who feel dejected by the state’s inability to stand up for the downtrodden and oppressed minorities of this country. Taseer was targeted for his stance in the Asia Bibi case, the Christian woman who was accused of having committed blasphemy.
What Trump is doing in the US is a much more benign version of what Qadri did in Pakistan. The former is only limiting himself to spewing hate-filled rhetoric, while in Pakistan the likes of Qadri seem to have been given an unabashed licence to kill by this country’s seminaries and mosques. Sadly, very few Muslims openly protest the kind of actions that Qadri committed. In contrast, Muslims vocally protest the intolerant diatribe in the US against a largely elite Muslim strata, and rightly so. However, the likes of Qadri are far more dangerous. The stakes here are higher. People in this country have only limited constitutional protection compared to Muslims in America. Until Qadri sees the gallows, the message to the young men in this country is that taking the law into your own hands will bring you glory, rather than living as a law-abiding citizen, and that your own notion of virtue is superior to the notion of the apex Court. It was when faced with this kind of lawlessness that Hobbes described life as brutish and short.
With the Supreme Court’s verdict and the rejection of Qadri’s appeal, we can rejoice that there is still some spine left in our country. "It is our responsibility to safeguard the law and stand by our oaths,” says Justice Asif Saeed Khosa. He also said that criticism of the blasphemy law did not amount to committing blasphemy. Sometimes, in this country even common sense can sound revolutionary.
What is necessary is to carry out a reflective inquiry into why a member of the Punjab police’s Elite Force turned against the man he swore to protect. The failure is on many levels: the lack of psychometric testing of our law-enforcement officials; the widespread intolerance that our schools and mosques impart; the media’s feverish need to sensationalise and create hype around an imagined breach of sensibilities to get better ratings; the pathetic backfoot that Taseer’s political party played on when he was campaigning for Asia Bibi.
As a people, we fail to classify our heroes accurately, erroneously placing the crown on the one who killed an unarmed man. We also need to work towards re-educating our youth. Unlearning is a mighty hard task. We need to have greater understanding of this false sense of persecution that Muslims globally have to enable our country to progress. These insecurities need to be addressed and not allowed to fester. We should also have the ability to explain in detail what it is that led to Qadri’s conviction. It is an opportunity to inculcate, not just the fear of the state in those who seriously consider taking the law into their own hands and think nothing of persecuting the downtrodden, but also the state’s love for those who continue to stand up to fight for the empowerment of minorities, particularly women minorities, in this country.
Pakistan’s educated Twitterati has all the time for initiating #FreeMumtazQadri trends. Trends for persecuted minorities, however, never have their day. Till now, the Salmaan Taseer narrative was told to our people from the Mumtaz Qadri angle. It is now time to do the reverse and tell Pakistanis about the Mumtaz Qadri narrative from the Salmaan Taseer angle.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 21st, 2015.