Huff Post: Qanta Ahmad: The deliberate torching of 178 Christian homes in Joseph Colony, Lahore, in response to accusations of blasphemy posed to a single resident in that community is a stark example of the perils of a public space governed by an ‘official’ Islam.
Today’s Pakistan, originally founded to secure a religious minority and determined by its founder MA Jinnah to be a place where any religion was beyond the provenance of the State, has long abandoned its noble ideals. In present day Pakistan, the State gets to determine whose religion is valid, and whose is not and in doing so fuels the debased violence the world witnessed this week.
Face it: Pakistan is a democracy abducted. Six decades after its formation, through one of the most sustained examples of wholesale civil “lawfare” — the abuse of the law and legal systems for strategic political or military ends — Pakistan has rightly become notorious for domestic and international Islamist extremism.
Religious intolerance has become de facto a central component of Pakistani identity. This intolerance is legislated within Pakistan’s constitution, rooted in a Presidential decree, no less, when Pakistan introduced new legal definitions defining Muslim identity.
Zulfiqar Bhutto’s administration oversaw the passage of Articles 260(3) (a) and (b), defining the Pakistani legal context for the term ‘Muslim’ while delineating the boundaries of ‘non Muslim.’ At that precise moment, quite unnoticed, Jinnah’s vision of religion, caste or creed being beyond the provenance of the State died a legal and ideological death. Through this Islamist lawfare, the ground was now laid for a self-defined Muslim majority to disabuse any deemed ‘not one of them.’ Blasphemy had officially become a state-sponsored, legislated blood sport and would lead to the massacres Pakistan is now witnessing.
Categories: Ahmadiyyat: True Islam, Asia