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To those who continue to venerate Qadri, all we can really do is point out the blatant falsehoods and contradictions that riddle the path of this entire blasphemy debacle.

There is something very sobering about Mumtaz Qadri’s death sentence. It is the indictment of a sentiment, of a moral position, of a people’s understanding of their faith. It is a proclamation, by the State, that this moral position is wrong. It is sobering because it is an indictment that is true.

There is a set of us that consider people opposed to our own faiths as senseless, as irrational, as non-beings. That is not true.

In all senses, those who stand against Mumtaz Qadri’s indictment, who venerate him as a living saint, who declare themselves ready to sacrifice themselves for him, are humans. And it is this that is troubling, most troubling, and most sobering, when we attempt to absorb the death sentence, as a collective, given to Mumtaz Qadri.

The death sentence has been awarded to a form of social thought, a popular, feared and State-sanctioned ideal.

Some consider it a cause to celebrate. The celebration takes root in the belief that it is possible for the State to dispense justice. To them, I would say there is more than enough reason to hold off on cutting the cake.

Some consider it a cause to condemn. To them, I can only attempt to offer some of their contradictions and maybe attempt to critique some of the arguments they put forth. But I have serious doubts that those protesting on the streets, however few, have any tolerance left for listening.

From the fields of Itanwali

While they stood at The Mall, Lahore uttering naats and tributes to their Prophet, threatening vehicle drivers with violence, chanting slogans proclaiming their ready-ness to die for him, I stood thinking about how ignorant they were of the details of the petty squabble that had sparked this entire ‘save the blasphemy laws’ campaign.

In a falsa field in Itanwali, over 70 kilometres away from Lahore, a group of Muslim women and a cleric (who proclaims Muslims cannot share plates with Christians) accused a Christian woman, Aasia, of offending the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). At the village, the people I spoke to, quite frankly admitted that the entire subject was political and manufactured, but no one was ready to testify so in court.

The court testimony itself, something never read by those protesting, offers a plethora of contradictions: six different witnesses identify six different locations where Aasia reportedly admitted her guilt. The District and Sessions Court gives her a death sentence in October 2010.

A year from then, in October 2011, an Anti-Terrorism Court gives a death sentence to Mumtaz Qadri, the assassin of Punjab Governor SalmaanTaseer. In summary, a governor, a minorities minister have been assassinated, and no judge is willing to take up the Aasia case appeal.

Again, a campaign to venerate the assassin has begun to sprout. The current protests are negligible. On the first day, not more than 1500 protestors were seen country-wide. But it is the ability of madrassa-educated protestors to hold the government machinery hostage over the issue of the blasphemy law, no matter what their number, that is worrying.

Modern States and Religious Law

The modern state and its obsession with codified laws had the unfortunate effect of stifling the rich legal tradition already present in societies. This meant a denial of the multiple sources of jurisprudential thought already present in Islamic fiqh. A “death warrant” was issued against all alternate jurisprudences. And thus a contest was given birth to – where, hoping to avoid a violent death, carriers of other jurisprudences began to struggle to be codified within State Law.

When Pakistan was created the Objectives Resolution 1948 gave legitimacy to the struggle to preserve Islamic jurisprudential thought by codification within the new Pakistan Penal Code. And it is through the convoluted process this struggle produced that the radicalization of religious juridical thought we see manifested within our laws took place. And it is within this that one needs to place how the Blasphemy Law entered the PPC during the Zia era. And how the debate around the punishment for blasphemy, was resolved through a petition before the court, by Ismail Qureshi.

Once codified in law, the story of Ilam Din was also adopted by the State. Streets were named after him, his grave developed into a tomb, and second grade textbooks were adorned with his story. The Pakistani state quite readily accepted the Ilam Din narrative, since it fell neatly into the Two-Nation theory matrix and allowed children to imagine the radicalised Hindu.

To some it may appear, the judgment to sentence Mumtaz Qadri appears a rejection by the state of Ilam Din too. However, it is a slippery slope to tread. The Ilam Din story itself is beset with a different set of contradictions to the Mumtaz Qadri story. I suppose a comparison here can offer more insight.

How Ilam Din differs

The Ilam Din case, situated in 1929, is an interesting moment. In fact the entire corpus of religious defamation cases during the 1920s in northern British India is fascinating. In a tense communal climate at least three books were being tried before the court through Article 295, “inciting the feelings of a class.” Before the court, defence and prosecution lawyers would bring scholars and historical Muslims texts, having accepted its authority to offer a stable verdict over the truth of the texts.

The Ilam Din incident itself contains so much falsehood in its narration that one does not know where to begin. One: the myth of Ilam Din having accepted the murder before the court is false. The case record shows the only place where Ilam Din admitted to killing Hindu publisher Rajpal was the Zimni report, legally inadmissible under normal circumstances. The entire legal record and court proceedings are based on his denial.

Barrister Muhammad Ali Jinnah defends Ilam Din on the basis of his claim to innocence.

And in certain ways it is here where Mumtaz Qadri differs from being an Ilam Din incarnate. Qadri has no trouble accepting that he killed Taseer. It is, in fact, his next argument to the court that is most astonishing, in which he claims the murder was a position sanctioned by Pakistani law. Before the court, he is reported to have submitted 40 pages of references to claim, “anyone who commits a blasphemous act or supports a blasphemer or doubted the punishment for a blasphemer was death or tried to abolish the sentence, was liable to death,” a statement that is now preserved in court record. That argument is also the basis for his legal defence. The defence lawyer called the courts’ execution order “unprecedented.”

Assuming the defence lawyer’s intelligence and awareness of the Ilam Din case, he is acknowledging that the legal context of both trials was different. The two incidents are by no means replicas. Qadri’s case operates in a legal context where the punishment for an offence to Prophet Muhummad is sanctioned by the State as death. To the defence, it is only a case of seeking legal sanction for an individual to do what the State already considers itself legitimate in doing.

The defence of Mumtaz Qadri, differs from Ilam Din’s defence, in so far as it in fact bases itself upon Qadri’s admission of guilt.

Of course, there is a second stream of arguments which can imply Taseer falls outside the ambit of the Blasphemy law. His ‘crime’ was that he “blasphemed against the Blasphemy laws.” However, this does not factor in when the Sunni Ittehad Council brings together 500 clerics to proclaim a fatwa declaring the court judgment to hang Qadri un-Islamic, or for the cleric who led Taseer’s funeral to fear for his life, or for a Rs. 5 million bounty to be placed on the judge who sentenced Qadri.

Beset by contradictions

The trouble, as an activist and researcher on the application of the blasphemy laws, is that the contradictions are far too obvious. When I began work on the Ilam Din case, I never expected a falsehood at the centre of the case that had the potential of de-centering the entire case. It is similar when working on the Aasia and Qadri cases. The contradictions that beset them are too obvious, too plain, to think that someone could ignore them, if they just scratch the surface of the subjects. But no scratching of the surface has been done amongst those who matter in this debate: religious clerics and the common populace.

Amongst these, there is the part where, a few friends of mine, found a number of fatwa by the founders of the Barelvifiqh which both opened the possibility of a retraction of an insult to the prophet and exonerated non-Muslims from the punishment. There is the part where, the same set of friends, had Ismail Qureshi, who filed the 1991 reference to the Federal Shariat Court, admit he had not checked the secondary references he had quoted in his reference to the FSC.

There is the part where, the Aasia Bibi case, is beset by contradictions including the on-record statements of the accusers that it was an Islamic position not to share plates with a Christian and a reference to six separate locations by six separate witnesses as to where AasiaBibi was when the confession, on which she was convicted, took place.

There is the part where, no judge is willing to hear the Aasia Bibi case, and the judge who sentenced Qadri has a Rs. 5 million bounty put on his head.

None of these contradictions has changed anything substantively in the discourse around the blasphemy laws in Pakistan. And the only solution appears that a point comes when those claiming to be venerating the personalities that they esteem will need to decide that these personalities have a value beyond petty worldly contestations. At that point, any faithful person claiming to be offended by a particular utterance and urging retribution, shall be told by another equally faithful person, “Do you think he who you respect can be disrespected?”

Hashim bin Rashid

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