Competing modernity

There are people who want to create some space in blasphemy law, which is what Salmaan Taseer was trying to achieve

The (late) Salmaan Taseer’s son Atish’s anxiety and horror expressed in the article he wrote for The New York Times was natural. How was it that there were hundreds of thousands who supported Taseer’s killer? To the younger Taseer, this denoted a contest between a modern and unprecedented form of violence versus the liberal modernity symbolised by his father. But did Mumtaz Qadri and Taseer offer such opposing formulas?

Despite the Pakistan government trying its best to punish Taseer’s killer and also burying the idea he represented through a total media blackout of Qadri’s funeral, there were more than 200,000 people that turned up for it, which was a sufficient indicator that the idea wasn’t dead. Perhaps, everyone who took part in the funeral wanted to be there in Qadri’s place just like a lot of people felt envious of Ilm Din, the young man who killed a person accused of blasphemy in 1929. This included Atish Taseer’s grandfather MD Taseer and Allama Muhammad Iqbal, two Western-educated and modern men. In fact, Iqbal played a leading role in convincing Muhammad Ali Jinnah to contest Ilm Din’s case. Fighting blasphemy or defining religion according to the fundamentals of Islam as laid out in the Holy Quran and Hadith were part of how these men defined the political ideological perimeters on which the new state of Pakistan was visualised. So, contrary to what young Taseer thought about Qadri’s funeral procession being new and unprecedented, it was none of the above.



The modern state, which Allama Muhammad Iqbal dreamt off and for which he managed to find a sole spokesman was to reject the traditional religious framework represented by pirs and sajjada nasheens. This formula, in his view, was archaic. The sharia-based interpretation or following of the Holy Quran and Sunnah in letter and spirit was viewed as a modern formula that would replace ethnicity in the making of a nation-state.

In Pakistan’s case, this particular recipe was followed throughout history. The individual personal liberalism never forced any kind of leadership to reconsider the approach. Even the party that Salmaan Taseer represented up until his death did not deviate from following the ideological framework that Iqbal or MD Taseer cherished. This was most obvious in the passing of the Second Amendment to the 1973 Constitution, which was never seriously questioned by any of the PPP’s senior leadership. It is another matter that this particular alteration led to other changes but eventually cost many innocent lives. The key issue is that once religion replaced ethnicity as the legal order, then alterations become a herculean task. Eventually, Salmaan Taseer had hoped for some adjustment in the law, not its total abandonment, which, in any case, was inconceivable.



One wonders if the thousands attending Qadri’s funeral realised that the Ilm Din and Qadri cases are fundamentally different. While the former killed a publisher, Rajpal, who had written a book insulting the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) and thus ostensibly blasphemed, Taseer was not found guilty of any such thing and yet fell victim. Taseer couldn’t have been saved as the man who killed him and the millions that probably hate him are victims of a peculiarly crafted communal-national ethos. Qadri and many like him carry the burden of a religious-political discourse that for centuries is mired in a sense of victimhood and being under siege. For these people, the only answer is revivalism of fundamental religious principles without any major or minor adjustment.

Those who believe that Salmaan Taseer committed blasphemy by terming a man-made law ‘black’ couldn’t think about his logic or that the man had no intention to challenge any core religious values. According to these people, the very act of anyone raising questions about the law is tantamount to attacking the basic principles and hence a conspiracy to destroy Islam through a fundamental act of subversion. Furthermore, because he was seen as part of an elite, who are considered agents of the West, there was little cause for anyone to even examine the case for his innocence. There is this constant divide between those seen as foreign to the local cultural ethos and others considered as belonging to the soil, which makes the battle even more intense. The radicalism that Atish Taseer talks about is an almost impregnable wall built on very deep-set suspicion. Those who do not denote indigenous culture cannot even be trusted with any minimal amount of negotiating a principle. In fact, the ideological formula gets hardened even more.



Today, there are people in Pakistan who want to create some space in the blasphemy law, which is just what Salmaan Taseer was trying to achieve. The idea is to have a system that ensures that people are not victimised and that those who try to do so can be punished. The state has the mechanism of the Council of Islamic Ideology (CII), which tries to impose itself on parliament every now and then. Surely, the CII or other institutional mechanisms could be used to develop consensus amongst religious clerics to address the victimisation that has resulted from the law. This would require greater resolve than what the government demonstrated in hanging Qadri. In fact, this is where it needs to invest its energy.

The task is not easy especially in the backdrop of a nation-state formed on a theocratic formula. Leaders giving assurances of religious freedom to minorities may be a good method to ensure some coherence, but the system of justice in such a state is not based on a secular formula. This means that religious minorities or those who are seen as challenging religious principles may be less fortunate in seeking justice. Perhaps, the younger Taseer and many like him may want to think about the fact that with this kind of nation-building formula, there is no real battle between what is ‘modern’ and ‘modernity’. The only form is revivalism, which is used repeatedly to re-invent the state and new forces of power. Violence and hatred is just its by-product.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 17^th, 2016.

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