Dawn.com
A PERSISTENT failure to deal with the canker of intolerance — one of the greatest threats to the Pakistani people’s mental health and their material well-being — is making the affliction day by day more unmanageable.
A young non-Muslim woman has been living in Lahore for quite some time. A few weeks ago she married an American citizen — a crime her neighbours apparently did not forgive. A group of hotheads raided her home at night early this month and on their inability to break into the house they damaged the car parked in the porch and pasted a notice on it: ‘kalima parh lo warna’ (convert to Islam or else).
This from a community whose religious mentors keep on proclaiming from every pulpit under their occupation — “there is no compulsion in matters of faith”. And this is not happening in one of those parts of Pakistan where lawlessness is the order of the day — such as Balochistan, Fata or Lyari — but in the capital of the land of peace and amity, whose redoubtable rulers are feared so much by terrorist organisations that they have migrated to Balochistan and where laptops float on rivers of milk and honey.
It is possible that the purpose of the assault on the vulnerable woman is not a desire to increase the numerical strength of the Muslim community — already a preponderant majority — and the idea is only to secure her release from marriage to an American man. But no law permits any vigilante squad to interfere with the right of adult men and women to marry of their free will and raise their families. And if the cause of provocation is the bridegroom’s nationality, then the message to the world is that the Pakistani people belong to the lunatic fringe that victimises the citizens of a state with whom their state has some temporary quarrel, a proposition no Pakistani in his or her right frame of mind will endorse.
Categories: Asia, Extremism, Faith, Interfaith tolerance, Islamism, Law and Religion, Pakistan, Religion, Religious persecution, Religious Values