BBC: A country where liberal journalists risk death

By Mohammed HanifPakistan

Shoaib Adil, a 49-year-old magazine editor and publisher in Lahore, has many well-wishers and they all want him to disappear from public life or, even better, leave the country.

Since blasphemy charges were filed against him last month, the police have told him that he can’t return home, he can’t even be seen in the city where he grew up and worked all his life. It wouldn’t be safe.

As a journalist, Adil has been a vocal critic of religious militarism. But the threat to his life doesn’t come from the Taliban.

He is the victim of an everyday witch hunt by Pakistan’s powerful religious groups – the kind of witch hunt that’s so common and yet so scary that it never makes headlines.

For the past 14 years, Adil has been editing and publishing a monthly current affairs magazine, a rare liberal voice in Pakistan’s Urdu media. Back issues of Nia Zamana read like a catalogue of human rights abuses.

The June issue’s cover story, for example, reports on the murder of a human rights lawyer, Rashid Rehman in the city of Multan in central Pakistan. Rehman, defending a literature professor accused of blasphemy, was told in the court by the prosecuting lawyers that if he didn’t drop the case he would not live to see the next hearing.

Sure enough, Rehman was gunned down in his office before the next hearing.

Adil had just published this issue of Nia Zamana when his crusading journalistic enterprise came to an abrupt end – and he was lucky to avoid sharing Rehman’s fate himself.

He was sitting in his Lahore office when a contingent of police arrived with a dozen religious activists, people Adil simply calls maulvis – teachers of Islamic law. They waved a book at him that he had published seven years ago – an autobiography of a Lahore High Court judge, titled My Journey to the Higher Court. The author, Justice Mohammed Islam Bhatti, had written that he belonged to the Ahmedi faith – a former Muslim sect that was declared non-Muslim in Pakistan exactly 40 years ago, and whose members have since then been prosecuted by the state and hounded by religious groups with equal gusto. He had then gone on to say some complimentary things about the founder of the faith.

“The maulvis ransacked my office looking for more copies of the book or any other material to pin blasphemy on me,” says Adil. Police officers meanwhile explained that the group the activists belong to, the International Council for the Defence of Finality of Prophethood, had demanded the registration of a blasphemy case against him.

Adil, in hiding, reads the last issue of Nia Zamana

The Council is a much feared entity. Its sole purpose is to hunt down Ahmedis in Pakistan and to look for suspected sympathisers. They don’t have to work very hard. The laws against Ahmedis are such that there is almost nothing that they cannot be accused of. They have been imprisoned for saying a casual Muslim greeting like “Asslamu aliakum”, for printing a verse of the Koran on a wedding invitation, for calling their prayer a namaz and for calling their mosque a mosque. In Pakistan if you want to tarnish anyone in public life all you have to do is to insinuate that they are Ahmedi. Or an Ahmedi sympathiser.

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