Today, Pakistan’s Supreme Court acquitted Asia Bibi, a Christian peasant woman, of blasphemy. She had been accused by two of her Muslim neighbours after they quarrelled when she brought them a drink of water and they refused to drink from a cup that a Christian had drunk from unless she converted to Islam on the spot. A quarrel broke out and they accused her of insulting the Prophet (PBUH) which is punishable by death under Pakistani law (no one has ever been executed through judicial means but many people, mostly the poorest and most disadvantaged, have been strung up by lynch mobs often with police connivance).
Asia Bibi spent nine years in prison, on death row, most of it in solitary confinement. The Muslim governor of the province to which she belonged, Salman Taseer, advocated for her and for revising the blasphemy law, and was shot dead by his bodyguard. The bodyguard was later executed but his supporters built a shrine to him outside Islamabad. No one dared do anything about it. Shahbaz Bhatti, a Christian government minister who also advocated for revising the blasphemy law, was killed soon after.
Last year, Islamabad, the capital, was shut down by the newly formed extreme right-wing religious party, the Tehreek Labbaik Pakistan (the Here-I-Stand Movement of Pakistan) (in passing I note that the Wikipedia articles on the subject do not take the angle I would). They were protesting planned changes to the electoral laws that very slightly changed the wording of the oath parliamentarians take that they felt insulted the honour of the Prophet (PBUH). After weeks of shutting down the capital and blocking its main highway, the protest was shut down by the army. Army officials were filmed giving out cash to protesters. The Law Minister resigned. No further action was taken and this repellent party contested the general elections earlier this year and had the normal platforms on television etc.
A quick note on shutting down cities for weeks on end. Pakistan has a strong rent-a-mob phenomenon thanks to a huge under-employed, under-educated and unempowered population that feels at the mercy of local and global forces in a way that many of us could not begin to comprehend. They don’t have jobs to go back to anyway, many are either peasants who leave other family members to take up the burden, or are day labourers who are ‘paid’ for participation by being given three meals a day. I really have no idea whether the ordinary participant believes in the cause he is burning tyres for, but suspect that the answer is more complicated than a mere yes or no and emerges from the country’s longstanding economic and employment crisis, and the desire to hold on to something, anything that supports a sense of self-worth and gives a voice and bring excitement. Within this, I suspect the true believers are a fringe, a minority of a minority. But then they always are.
In this context Asia Bibi’s acquittal by the Supreme Court is a cause for celebration. In particular, the opinion given by one of the three judges, Asif Khosa (starting page 35), is fair-minded and acknowledges both the fact that Pakistan is an Islamic Republic, and that it has a duty to protect all its citizens. It should be a manifesto for Pakistan’s future, and encouragingly, Imran Khan’s short address to the nation after the verdict took a stand against extremist mobs in a way that his predecessors never really did.
But I still find it hard to celebrate. Asia Bibi, assuming she survives her release, will have to be smuggled abroad with her family to start a new life somewhere else under a different identity. She is uneducated, poor. Her lawyer and the three brave judges have targets painted on their foreheads. Members of the TLP are rioting across Pakistan – not in large numbers, but violently, and there is such terror of being seen to oppose their aims (and vulnerable to charges of blasphemy in turn) that they are unlikely to be decisively checked. And meanwhile the space for open-minded thought and conversation thought continues to shrink. Right-wing trolls are very strong in Pakistani social media and there is not one but a dozen Fox News equivalents that chase ratings by whipping up nationalist and religious fervour and even inciting murder.
Asia Bibi’s case is an example of what can happen when the crazy fringe of the right is pandered to, indulged, used for its ability to excite thoughtless emotion, and allowed to shut down debate. Pakistan does not have the strong institutions and rule of law that Western countries have, so it is an extreme case of what happens when the right runs amok and holds the rest of society hostage amidst fear of a changing world in which you feel threatened economically, politically, and more, by ideas.
Anyway, this is why, along with relief at Asia Bibi’s acquittal and forthcoming release, I would like add a resounding FUCK that we ever got to this point in the first place.