One of the basic rights of a free society and indeed of a civilised society is that there be freedom to believe what the hell you want, provided that it has no adverse societal effects such as promoting and carrying out something like human sacrifice for example. Ideally the State should not have windows onto men’s souls and dictate to them that they believe something that they disagree with or that which they find abhorrent.
Pakistan is not such a country. In fact due to its naked and violent intolerance of religious minorities, it barely counts as civilised at all. For me, Pakistan is a cautionary tale of what happens when the very worst, most backward and intolerant forms of Islam are allowed to run an entire country. In Pakistan extremist Islam rules the roost from the lowliest village to the commanding heights of political power and the effects of that can be clearly seen by all who make the effort to look.
Pakistan’s ‘blasphemy’ law which protects Islam from debate and criticism is routinely used to attack religious minorities and by individuals and families to settle scores with those that they are in dispute with. Pakistan’s ‘blasphemy’ law functions in a similar way to how accusing someone of being a Witch worked in medieval England, in that it was a handy and sure fire way of getting a mob up against an individual or a community.
Sadly in Pakistan some people do not even get a chance to defend themselves in what laughably passes for Pakistan’s justice system. Some get killed, in this case in a courtroom itself, by extremist Islamic savages who want nothing more than to kill a man whom they saw as ‘kufar’.
The Guardian newspaper said:
A Pakistani man on trial for blasphemy has been shot dead in a courtroom, in the latest violent incident connected with the country’s blasphemy laws.
Tahir Ahmed Naseem had been in prison since his arrest in 2018, allegedly after claiming he was a prophet. He is a member of the Ahmedi sect, which is persecuted in Pakistan where they have officially been declared non-Muslims.
The shooting took place at a high-security complex next to the Peshawar high court.
“I was sitting on my seat in the office around 11.30 when I heard the firing,” said Saeed Zaher, a lawyer, who rushed to the site of the attack, and said the victim appeared to have been shot once in the head. “The killer was caught by the police and the body was lying on a bench within the courtroom.”
Members of the public are allowed to observe trials, but for his attacker to smuggle in a weapon represents a serious security breach. “A person entering with a pistol and murdering someone within a courtroom is very disturbing,” Zaher added.
Something about this case smells really badly and it smells of corruption. If the security at this court is as tight as it should be then how did the murderer get a weapon into the court? As we are dealing with Pakistan here this could either be laziness on the part of the security team of more likely someone was paid to look the other way and allow the weapon into the court.
Whilst this case has made the news in papers like Guardian because it happened in a courtroom, it’s all too easy to fall foul of Pakistan’s ‘blasphemy’ law or mobs whipped up by Islamic clerics aimed at an alleged ‘blasphemer’. Hundreds if not thousands of ordinary Pakistanis, whether from relatively peaceful sects of Islam such as the Ahmediyya or members of minority faiths in Pakistan such as Hinduism, Sikhism and Christianity, live in fear of Pakistan’s culture of sniffing out ‘blasphemy’. At any moment an innocent farm worker or a toilet cleaner could find some innocent comment turned into a ‘blasphemy’ allegation and all that goes with it.
Pakistan is a shithole of that there is not a shred of doubt, but it is also a shithole where free thought as we know it and the ability to follow what ever deity we choose, just does not exist. It is this factor in the culture of Pakistan along with much else besides, that should bell sensible people that should not be considered as part of the family of free nations.
