Quivering shapes help documentary explore fixed ideas of Pakistan's blasphemy law
When confronted in 2013, the man who claimed scholars agreed on the death penalty for blasphemy told his interrogators that he could not actually read Arabic.
This man, Advocate Ismail Qureshi, is at the centre of a new documentary by the Alliance Against Blasphemy Politics Pakistan (AABP). It hosted an early screening of The Inevitable Misuse of Blasphemy Politics (2024) and a new episode titled Blasphemy as Biddat: Intra-Muslim Difference in the Age of Empires on Sunday, August 17, at Kitab Ghar. A small group of students, teachers and journalists gathered to watch the documentaries and have a Q&A with the team at the modest public library in Karachi.
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The documentaries are on Section 295-C of the Pakistan Penal Code or the country's blasphemy law which came about in 1986 and were reinforced by the Federal Shariat Court in 1991. Section 295-C says death is the sole punishment for blasphemy against the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and the law makes questioning its authority an act of blasphemy itself. What the authorities describe as the "misuse" of the law is, in fact, its only possible correct application. The legislation's limitless definitions transform any action into potential blasphemy.
An estimated 767 people are currently in custody on blasphemy charges (as of mid-2024), according to the National Commission for Human Rights.
The law claims legitimacy through centuries-old Islamic tradition and scholarly consensus (ijma). Yet, this supposed continuity of divine command has produced a striking statistical anomaly: whilst blasphemy accusations have risen 20,000% since 1986, not a single conviction has been upheld by the Supreme Court. Perhaps the most well known case is that of Asia Noreen, a Christian farm worker, who was convicted in 2010 and sentenced to death. After eight years in custody, she was acquitted by the Supreme Court on October 31, 2018, and left Pakistan for Canada.
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Given the fraught nature of the subject, the AABP decided to use 2D flat symbolic animation rather than conventional documentary footage. This aesthetic choice created intellectual distance from what is extremely emotionally charged material, which makes space for rational analysis rather than just reactions. “Animation offers abstraction and safety,” explained a member of the team. “It lets us sidestep familiar tropes and charged imagery that often provoke defensiveness around blasphemy politics.”
So, instead of real faces or locations, animation of quivering shapes and merging boxes set to a calm voice over keeps the viewer concentrated on the ideas behind blasphemy politics. “In a context where blasphemy politics thrives on spectacle and naming,” another member added, “animation becomes a powerful medium to recentralise discourse over drama.” Complex legal concepts are broken down with shifting lines, blobs that swell and shrink and shapes that bleed into each other. Using real-life television or amateur social media video would have risked turning the documentary into trauma voyeurism.
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The documentaries sift through meticulous scholarship to distinguish authentic tradition from its colonial and contemporary distortions. “The first step is to demystify the law to show that 295-C is not sacred, not divine, and not rooted in Islamic legal consensus,” said the team member. “It is a very modern law based on culture wars in the 80s.”
For this member of the team, making the film deepened his respect for Islamic legal tradition. “I saw how careful, nuanced, and ethically aware classical jurists were, especially in contrast to the hyper-modern, one-size-fits-all laws passed in the name of Islam."