Kill a human being who does not share your faith and voila, as per your
religious gurus, you have earned the title of ‘ghazi’
My 12-year-old son is a Muslim. He knows the Namaz, reads the Quran with a
teacher, and recites the Kalima before going to sleep. He understands the basic
concepts and has no problem lowering the sound of TV when one is saying
prayers, or when asked to put the Quran in a clean, protected space. Asked why
he does all these things, his answer would be simple: “My mom taught me to.” My
12-year-old is a Muslim simply because I am a Muslim. His faith is not
something he was born with, and all he knows is imbibed through parental
influence. The only thing noteworthy is his perception about the world: how
unfair some things are, how people unleash cruelty on one another. His
unfaltering empathy, his profound concern for people are things probably no one
taught him. When I tell him about painful events, there is no recoiling in
unease; there is merely a rapid fluttering of eyelashes, a telltale sign of an
attempt to hide his tears, this time about the
11-year-old Christian girl who is the latest victim of Muslim ruthlessness.
Islam is a commodity today. It is a commodity for those who practice it in
mosques, chanting what they learned as children without full comprehension of
what the Quran connotes. It is a commodity for those in madrassas where hoards
of pupils, hunched over their religious books, learn as much from the text as
their teachers see fit. It is a commodity for those who, to monopolise a few
weak souls, roar into their microphones how one faith is better than the others
— be it Sunni or Shia. It is a commodity for those who pen reams of hate
literature without any consideration for the historical context of the events
open to them for distortion, thus providing more opportunities for those who
look for an excuse to unleash cruelty on fellow beings.
It is a commodity for those who have primetime slots on TV channels, with
a unilateral agenda to top the ratings game, with no thought that their biased
pronouncements become sacred to those in need of props to strengthen their
faith through tele-scholars. Religion is a commodity for many enfeebled minds
who have mastered a simple principle: you can never go wrong if you have a
beard, your shalwar is above your ankles, you have a rosary wrapped around your
wrist, you can quote Quranic verses as and when required and you have an
epithet — mullah, maulvi, alim, maulana — attached to your name. Now you are
invincible. Who in his right mind would raise a finger at you when your hands
are humbly joined to pray to Allah? Whatever you do is in the name of religion;
which mere mortal has the right to see you for what you truly are?
In no way this implies that all religious people are identical. There are many
who practice what they preach and to them Islam is to be believed in and
not imposed. Unfortunately, they are the minority. Their messages of tolerance
and brotherhood are constantly overwhelmed by the incoherent cacophony of the
fanatic hate-mongers, the bigoted, the unforgiving. Mosques, the only
entity to invade our houses through microphones and loudspeakers, armed with
sermons and rants about sin and sinners, have become more than assembly places
for prayer and the transmission of Azaan.
Now, for some, these are the licensed areas to spew venom, incite violence and
invoke vengeance for all those not walking the straight line of Islam — their
interpretation of Islam. Not the Islam of Mohammad , but the Islam that
teaches one faith to persecute another, one faith to proclaim superiority over
others, one faith to decide who is a better Muslah, one faith to choose who
lives or dies, one faith to even decide who gets to be a Muslim. The Islam of
Mohammad — the only person I believe in other than what I read in the
Quran — is not the distorted version full of persecution, fanaticism and
outright barbarism that some vigilantes of Islam unleash on their own, leave
alone on those who are of different religions.
Convert a Hindu into a Muslim; you buy yourself a seat in heaven with 72
virgins. Kidnap a crying Hindu girl and marry her off forcibly to a grinning
Muslim hick; you have marked yourself as a true follower of Mohammad. All your
sins are cleansed. Erase the word Allah from the grave of the only Nobel
Laureate of Pakistan and you deserve a standing ovation. Stop the Ahmedis from
going to their places of worship and you have fulfilled your religious
obligation for the day. Demolish parts of those buildings, thus making them
indistinguishable as mosques, and you houour Islam. Kill a human being who does
not share your faith and voila, as per your religious gurus, you have earned
the title of ‘ghazi’.
The number of Shias forced off buses en route to their families, identified and
killed, is something I cannot sum up in hundreds of words. Innocent Muslims
killed by fellow Muslims who decided, on only God knows whose authority, that
only their faith mattered. These inhuman acts cannot be encapsulated in a few
words. The enormity of what happened in my country over the last few months is
beyond my capacity to make sense of, hence my inability to capture it in my
text coherently. Here, as a Sunni, I lower my head, offer a prayer, and
apologise — with all of me.
Hindus, victimised simply because they are born as Hindus --just as my son was
born a Muslim — are the ones to whom we owe another apology. For the love of
God, this is as much their country as it is ours. Any country that celebrates a
National Minorities Day validates the incongruity of its fundamental
principles. Hindu, Christian, Parsi, Sikh, Jew, anyone of any faith, colour,
creed, who has lived here for centuries, before we claimed it as only ours, is
as much a Pakistani as those who pray to Makkah. Jinnah said it, our religion
preaches it; when did we become the arbiters of faith of which only Allah is
the arbiter?
For all who saluted the assassin of the former governor, Salmaan Taseer, the
less said the better. Why waste words on those ignorant preachers of religion
who killed the one man who had the moral courage to stand up for a
condemned-to-death-on-a-
The mentally disturbed man in Bahawalpur
district, beaten to death and burnt by a mob that on the instigation of their
local mosque speakers saw blood, is the person we owe an apology to. He was a
‘blasphemer’; the verdict was given, but by whom? True Muslims? Faith apart,
how do you kill a man without a trial and get away with it? Of course, you can,
if you are a self-appointed vigilante of Islam in the Islamic Republic of
Pakistan. Rest assured, you would never be penalised.
The biggest slap on our tattered moral fibre comes in the shape of the arrest and
jailing of the 11-year-old Rimsha Masih. A pre-teen non-Muslim girl playing
near a garbage pile is a blasphemer? A girl who has no notion of the sanctity
of the holy text of another faith is a blasphemer? A girl who picked up pages
of a discarded Arabic language lesson book (qaida), taught to pre-Quran-reading
Muslim children is a blasphemer? Forget about her Down syndrome for a bit.
Which religion allows this treatment of a child based on some deeply flawed
interpretation of religion? Islam? To me, the answer is simple. And there is
just one example to follow: Prophet Mohammad (PBUH). Raise your hand if you
have read and believe the story of the woman who used to throw garbage on the
Prophet’s (PBUH) head as he passed her house every day. How did he treat her? I
rest my argument. Let us all think: who is the so-called blasphemer here? The
11-year-old Christian girl who
was playing with discarded pages or those who threw the pages there? What
happened to the Quranic injunction of aamal (actions) connected to neeyat
(intent)? There is no answer. We are all just imposters, hypocrites, cowards,
who hide behind the name of Allah, when there is nothing left to our moral,
social and religious discourses.
I apologise to Rimsha Masih, once again and hope Islam hangs its head in shame.
The writer is an Assistant Editor at Daily Times. She tweets at @MehrTarar and
can be reached at mehrt2000@gmail.