There are dozens of English-language op-eds bemoaning the state of Pakistan and condemning the murderer. My own immediate reaction was how it exposed yet again, the desperate incapacity of the Pakistani state to do simple things – like keep governors of provinces from being shot – 27 times. In broad daylight. By state employees.
We can write and speak volumes about the extremism and insanity on display in this murder. There are other Pakistanis who can write and speak volumes about how deeply victimized Pakistan’s religious traditions are. Sure, one group is mostly right – the group condemning daylight murder, and one group is mostly wrong – the group equivocating about how the victim deserved it. But really, if we just take one second to step back, we have to ask ourselves, what is the point of normative arguments in an environment that celebrates murder? It is pretty clear we are way, way past even a basic consensus about right and wrong. Even on a black and white issue like the daylight murder of an unarmed person.
How deep and wide is the chasm between Pakistanis for whom Qadri is a murderer, Pakistanis for whom Qadri is a moral enigma, and Pakistanis for whom Qadri is a hero? I suspect all of the Chagai mountains could not fill the space between us.
The instinctive impulse is to demand an end to the exploitation of faith in Pakistan. Pakistanis of all shades have turned Islam into a form of capital. It is invested to reap rewards – whether it is social mobility for a village pesh imam, political power for Fazlur Rehman or financial gain for Hamid Kazmi and Co. However, banning Islamic parties or banning the use of Islam for personal gain would represent an unmitigated disaster. It is exactly the kind of thing that will transform one flame into a raging forest fire.
Though the Pakistani right wing is simply instrumentalising Islam, it is tapping into and channelling a political and social force whose appeal and power is unquestionable. Sure, it is unable to translate this appeal into electoral outcomes – but that is because this appeal is not located in the disbursement of patronage, or in administrative prowess. Pakistanis vote for the PPP, the PMLs, the MQM and ANPs because of the certainty that these groups can disburse resources as patronage. They vote for them because of the certainty that these groups can leverage administrative power in specific ways, ways that will benefit them.
In total contrast, it is clear that the religious right wing in Pakistan, while electorally impotent, has tremendous appeal. This appeal is not just on the street, and does not just involve innocent and misguided young men from the lower middle and lower classes. It is much wider. Across television news rooms, and on editorial desks. Within the bureaucratic maze of Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Peshawar, and Quetta. In the financial sector, in manufacturing and in agriculture. Across every nook and cranny of the country, the religious right has an appeal that we ignore at our peril.
It is not a permanent or universal appeal by any means. You won’t find it pontificating at mehndis, or at Sufi shrines. It knows its limits. It is an appeal that is limited to a narrow band of specific issues, and an appeal that can only be triggered infrequently. In fact, over the course of the last quarter century, every ascendant moment for the religious right wing in Pakistan has been wrapped up in the issue of dignity.
Think of the biggest rallies that the religious right wing manages to pull off and find one common theme. From the Satanic Verses protests in 1989, to the US invasion of Iraq in 1991, to the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, to the Danish cartoons in 2006, to what is now in 2011, promising to be a weekly show of strength in favour of the PPC provisions relating to blasphemy. At the heart of each of these political performances is the kernel of Muslim indignity.
Now, the common course for many Pakistanis, indeed, many Muslims around the world is to ask that the root causes for indignity be removed. On Sunday, Imran Khan made quite a reasonable case in The Guardian for why the US presence in Afghanistan for example, is fuelling the blinding rage of Pakistan’s dignity-warriors. There is little fault in Khan’s argument, except one deeply disturbing fact. The removal of the causes of indignity is based on a completely and deliberately warped and illogical reading of the world we live in.
The PPC, Pakistan’s legal community, and Pakistan’s judiciary are not exactly beacons of functionality. They do not deliver what an Islamic Republic should be delivering. Insaaf, aman and istehkaam. Instead, the compendium of laws, law enforcers and law interpreters are presiding, in some cases, helplessly, over a situation that resembles loot, maar and fasaad. For the Pakistani right wing to pick out this one set of provisions of law from the entire and entirely dysfunctional legal order, and defend this set of provisions seems awfully strange. It is strange, but it isn’t inexplicable.
The truth is that right-wing rage over the provisions of Pakistani law that deal with blasphemy is really an opportunity for socially dispossessed and globally disconnected Pakistanis to slap the rest of the world back in its face. It is the day-labourers’ way of saying, you can take everything, and you have, but you can’t take the liberty of dissing my faith. The genius of the Pakistani right wing is that between the Rushdie affair, in which the antagonists were thousands of miles away, and the Aasia Bibi case, which is in the heart of Punjab – groups like the JUI and Jamaat-e-Islami have successfully transformed the villain from a faraway alien to a domestic violator. For Qadri and his supporters, that violator was Salmaan Taseer. It didn’t matter that Taseer never uttered anything resembling blasphemy. It mattered that Taseer was a poster child of the socially possessed and globally connected Pakistani. This is, unquestionably a problem of religious extremism. But it is also a full-blooded manifestation of how Pakistan’s Rush Limbaughs and Pat Robertsons conduct class and cultural warfare.
Pakistan will never be a country in which blasphemy is a legally protected right. But having a debate about blasphemy or how the law treats it is having the wrong debate. It is like handing over the microphone to Syed Munawar Hasan. Since Hasan can’t win an election, he’ll do what comes naturally, which is to milk the opportunity for everything he can. Pakistanis interested in challenging and changing the status quo and re-inserting reason into the public space have to define the terms of the debate themselves, rather than handing the right-wing an undeserved victory.
Insisting on talking about the one, single issue where the right-wing has a political advantage is a tactical blunder of epic proportions. If we are going to live up to Islam’s principles and the teachings of the Holy Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him), if we are going to help protect the poor and the weak, and honour the memory of those of us that lived courageously, we have to do much better.
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