The nation of Pakistan, if it serves but one purpose in the world, is that of a cautionary tale. An example of what horrors would emanate from a society that was run by a bad ideology, in this case the bad ideology of Islam. We can listen to and read the life histories of those who suffered under Communism and Fascism and see just how nasty, brutish and inhumane the nations run by these ideologies were and be thankful that they lie in our past. Pakistan on the other hand is a very contemporary and present nightmare and one which allows us to plainly see what happens when Islam rules a land and what’s more worrying, rules that land for only a relatively short amount of historical time, 72 years.

Yes, it’s only taken less than three quarters of a century, since the independence of Pakistan from Britain, for the ideology of Islam to turn a Pakistan into a shithole of monstrous proportions. The sort of things that go on in modern Pakistan are the sort of things that are mostly confined to history when it comes to the West. Pakistan is the home of a lot that is bad. It is a nation blighted by rampant child marriage, the murder and oppression of religious minorities, women treated as if they have slightly less value than cattle, violence, intolerance and fear. All these horrors have been either created or exacerbated by the Islam that the country was founded on and continues to influence.

As well as the aforementioned horrors, Pakistan is also the home of violent mobs of uneducated people who are easy to whip up into a frenzy by unscrupulous clerics or through the conspiracy theories about ‘attacks on Islam’ or ‘Hindu-Zionist plots’ that circulate freely and without question in Pakistani society.

One of these mobs has recently beaten and tortured seven people that the mob accused of burning pages from the Koran. According to a report that was published in the Pakistan news source The Daily Times (h/t ROP), a passer-by spotted men burning something which they later identified as pages from the Koran. A mob them formed, a mob fuelled by the sort of retarded religious zealotry that should have no place in civilised societies, who fell upon the men, torturing them until police arrived to break up the melee.

The Daily Times said:

A blasphemy case has been filed against seven people who have allegedly burnt pages of Quran at Harihar Village in District Kasur today (Wednesday).

The locals tortured the suspects who were rescued and taken into custody by police.

After being informed, District Police Officer Shahzad Asif involved the members of the district peace committee in the matter. The peace committee immediately mediated to calm down the enraged people by delivering speeches and helped police in getting custody of the suspects from them.
The case was filed against the seven suspects, who were accused of burning the pages of Holy Quran near the village graveyard on Monday evening, under section 295-B of Pakistan Penal Code (PPC).

The complainant has said that he saw fire on the other end of the graveyard while he was crossing the graveyard along with two others – Munir Ismail and Shabir Asid.

He said they rushed to the spot and saw that the prime suspect was burning a large quantity of “holy pages”. He said when they tried to stop the suspect, he snubbed them harshly.

The complainant said when they raised hue and cry to gather the locals and bring the matter to their attention, the mob started beating the prime suspect. Six others nominated in the FIR registered against the seven people, have said that the prime suspect was burning the pages on his own will.

This is a horrific story and the image of angry mobs torturing people over alleged ‘blasphemy’ brings to mind images of the West in less modern times, images of the Spanish Inquisition, of pogroms and mass murders of people who had different opinions as to the nature of Jesus and of witch panics. However, those things that I have mentioned are in our past and firmly belong in our past, but Islam has made similar horrors a contemporary feature of modern day Pakistan.

It would be easy to think that this terrible attack and the culturally and socially retarded charge of ‘blasphemy’ that was levelled at the victims of this attack by the mob was a one off, a sad aberration from some distant, backward and isolated tribal village. Sadly it is not. This is just one of a number of horrors perpetrated by Pakistani Muslims on other Pakistanis, some Muslim and some not, in the name of protecting Islam from ‘blasphemy’.

In early March of this year a professor of English at a college in the Punjab region of Pakistan was stabbed to death by a young student who accused the professor of ‘blasphemy’. The professor’s ‘crime’ was to hold a welcome party for students where both men and women were invited. The Italian news source Asia IT carried the story of yet another tragic and senseless killing done in the name of Islam and to protest against alleged ‘blasphemy’.

Asia IT said:

A Pakistani professor was stabbed to death by one of his students over a welcome party that the lecturer had organized: the party was in fact open to all new students, male and female, as a moment of aggregation in the first year of College.

However, for Khateeb Hussain, the young assassin, the party was “against Islam”. Thus, armed with a knife, he went to the professor yesterday while he was in his study and stabbed him to death accusing him of blasphemy.

Khalid Hameed, the victim, was an English teacher. His assassin attends the third year of school at Sadiq Egerton College in Bahawalpur, Punjab province. According to investigators, the boy is a radicalized student and would not have expressed any remorse for his gesture. He firmly believes that the killing of the teacher is the right punishment for those who organize events that would be contrary to the dictates of Islam.

Activists and human rights defenders strongly condemn the brutal murder and call for a Pakistan free from terrorism and fundamentalist ideas.

This and other similar ‘blasphemy’ related incidents in Pakistan are highly visible examples of the intolerance and violence that run through Islam like the name of a seaside town on a stick of rock. Like the human rights activists of Pakistan I would also love to see that nation free from terrorism and religious fundamentalism, but that will be almost impossible to achieve whilst Islam plays such a major part in Pakistani society.

As I said earlier, Pakistan should serve as a cautionary tale as to what happens when Islam takes control of a nation. In particular the attacks on ‘blasphemers’ should also be an indication of what may happen if the governments of Western nations continue to cave in to the demands of Islamic activists to suppress criticism of Islam. The demands of these activists will not stop at merely the forbidding of critical speech about Islam. These activists will continue their demands until they get all their own way and bring about a situation where those who criticise Islam or act in manners that some Muslims say is counter to Islam face not just prosecution, but death by enraged Muslim mob.

Islam it has been said by some is a ‘civilisation killer’, the ideology that destroys or warps whatever culture it comes into contact with. It destroyed the Christian and Jewish tribal kingdoms of ancient Arabia, destroyed the culture of the Iberian peninsular, replacing it with Islam and rampaged with extreme violence through the Hindu culture of India. Just as in those examples, Islam has also destroyed Pakistan. When the Islamic constitution of Pakistan was instituted in 1949, Pakistan had healthy levels of religious minorities and those who could broadly be said to be secular in thought and opinion. Pakistan could have been a welcome member of the international community, looking forward from Independence to a life of peace and prosperity, unfortunately the Pakistanis chose Islam instead. Seventy years on, the Islam that was given primal governance over Pakistan has turned that nation into a hell hole of monstrous proportions. If we want to see how bad things could get if Islam was unchecked by civilisation, then we only need to look at Pakistan to find out what sort of hell on earth awaits us should we treat Islam as a religion of peace, rather than a existential cultural and societal challenge.