The Pakistani metropolis of Lahore is legendary for an awesome many issues: stunning Mughal structure, scrumptious avenue meals, eye-pleasing greenery and, of late, air air pollution that ranks amongst the worst on the earth.
However as harmful as that final distinction is, Lahore not too long ago averted being recognized for one thing far worse: mob lynching.
Right here’s what occurred: A married couple was out procuring, peacefully going about their day, when a passer-by noticed one thing that he discovered offensive – on this case, the lady’s clothes.
It’s not that her garments have been revealing — one thing frowned upon on this tradition — or in any other case morally offensive to this worthy gentleman. No, he grew to become enraged as a result of, to his eyes, the lady was sporting a gown coated with Quranic verses.
Besides he clearly couldn’t learn Arabic.
The girl’s clothes actually carried Arabic writing, however these weren’t derived from the Quran or any holy scripture. The product of a Kuwaiti design firm, the calligraphy on the gown repeated the Arabic phrase “Hilwa”, which merely means “good” or “stunning”.
And even when her gown did carry Quranic textual content, I enterprise a guess that almost all of Muslims wouldn’t assist what occurred subsequent.
Sadly, although, with regards to blasphemy in Pakistan, accusation is proof, and the sentence is nearly at all times dying.
This was blasphemy, the person screamed in his ignorant self-righteousness. Quickly a crowd gathered, and the lady was trapped within the store because the mob referred to as for her to be beheaded. Knives have been drawn and bloodshed was however a second away. Fortunately, the shopkeepers and another members of the general public intervened in numbers giant sufficient to maintain the mob from attacking the lady earlier than the police arrived on the scene.
Main the contingent was feminine Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Shehrbano Naqvi, who bravely rescued the lady and led her to security at nice private danger.
Previously, now we have seen no much less a personage than Salman Taseer, the Governor of Punjab himself – of which Lahore is the capital metropolis – gunned down by his personal safety guard as a result of he opposed the flawed implementation of Pakistan’s draconian blasphemy legal guidelines.
The guard, Mumtaz Qadri, was lionised by religio-political events and important segments of the inhabitants and, after his execution by hanging, was just about beatified by the identical events. His execution additionally launched the political profession of Khadim Rizvi, whose ultra-right-wing political occasion, the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, turned the persecution of purported blasphemers right into a trigger celebre. The TLP can typically be discovered on the forefront of such mob frenzies.
Then there’s Mashal Khan, a vivid younger faculty pupil who was brutally crushed to dying by his personal fellow college students over a Fb submit they discovered blasphemous. Later, it emerged that the precise trigger was private enmity. Priyantha Kumara, the Sri Lankan supervisor of a sporting firm within the Punjabi city of Sialkot, was crushed to dying by a mob numbering within the lots of after which his damaged physique was set on fireplace, with members of the jubilant crowd stopping to take selfies in entrance of this human bonfire. Later, it emerged that Priyantha was solely responsible of disciplining errant manufacturing facility employees, who then used the excuse of blasphemy to get him out of the way in which.
Blasphemy is the blade, however those that swing it typically have something however faith on their minds.
Officer Naqvi will now be awarded honours for her braveness, and whereas one may say that this was merely a case of the police doing their job – the naked minimal as some have stated – the fact is that when confronted with a charged crowd of this nature the police is commonly helpless and vulnerable to dropping their very own lives.
In 2020 a safety guard murdered the supervisor of the financial institution he was employed at over a private dispute within the city of Khushab and claimed that the supervisor had dedicated blasphemy. With out ready for any sort of proof a jubilant mob led him by the streets in a triumphal procession that ended with them taking up the native police station and having the assassin tackle the mob from the roof of the police station itself.
There are additionally those that get entangled within the labyrinth of Pakistan’s judicial system. Decrease courts, typically out of concern of the mob and their allies within the authorized neighborhood, impose strict sentences regardless of having solely spurious proof.
Wajih-ul Hasan spent 18 years on dying row and was acquitted solely when his attraction lastly reached the Supreme Courtroom. Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagufta Masih have been sentenced to dying over a purportedly blasphemous textual content message exchanged between the married couple. They have been launched after seven years; Emmanuel’s imprisonment turned him right into a paraplegic resulting from a spinal damage that remained untreated in jail.
The identical goes for the well-known case of Aasia Bibi whose conviction was overturned after eight years. In all these instances, the Supreme Courtroom dominated that the proof supplied was both inadequate or fully false, and that the accusers have been motivated by greed or private enmity. The false accusers have been by no means punished.
So, on this darkish and harmful context, the lady is fortunate to have escaped along with her life, and officer Shehrbano, her staff and those that tried to guard the lady are actually heroes for having risked their lives.
However what does all of this say about Pakistan?
Even after it was revealed to the ringleaders of the mob that the lady’s gown didn’t carry any phrases from a scripture, they weren’t happy and demanded that the lady apologise on digital camera, which she did.
Visibly terrified and coated in a big scarf, the lady – flanked by grim-looking clerics on both aspect – needed to reaffirm her credentials as a Muslim and beg for forgiveness. All for sporting a easy gown with Arabic writing on it.
In the meantime, the boys who threatened to kill her are sticking to their literal weapons and in flip giving interviews through which they blame the lady for sporting a gown that might mislead (in their very own phrases) the “ignorant” public. In one other video, they’re seen analyzing the gown, which is laid out on a desk like a homicide sufferer awaiting a autopsy, and discussing how you can file a police case in opposition to the lady. In addition they keep that if any hurt had befallen the lady, it will have been her personal fault. In brief, it’s her fault that they’re bloodthirsty, and her fault that they’re ignorant.
Pakistan’s blasphemy legal guidelines are a colonial construct imposed by the British which have, through the years, been made extra harmful by successive governments.
And so, whereas the outrage in Lahore has been roundly condemned in Pakistan’s parliament and within the media, the actual fact is that the culprits will stroll away free and emboldened, in a position to additional their agendas and enhance their private and political energy on the expense of society and sanity itself.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.