Victims of Blasphemy Laws: New Age Islam's Selection, 04 March 2016
New Age Islam Edit Bureau
04 March 2016
• Victims of Blasphemy Laws
By Zeeba T Hashmi
• How Did Nawaz Sharif Become A Liberal?
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
• Where’s Our Female Narrative?
By Ayesha Hasan
• This Law May Be Late, but It’s Great
By Aisha Sarwari
• Science Education in Schools
By A.H. Nayaar
Compiled By New Age Islam Edit Bureau
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Victims of Blasphemy Laws
By Zeeba T Hashmi
March 04, 2016
While Mumtaz Qadri has been hanged for his confessed crime, Aasia bibi’s position has become more vulnerable, and Salmaan Taseer’s name has come to life again. These three names will always be remembered in history for being an integral part of the complex web of the dreaded blasphemy laws of Pakistan Penal Code.
Qadri assassinated Taseer for his criticism of these manmade laws that were hardened during Zia-ul-Haq’s tenure. Taseer had referred to them as “black laws” and called for their reforms. It is important here that we remind ourselves that the author of this very law, Advocate Ismail Qureshi, also acknowledged problems in the laws he introduced. But not only have hardliners abused this law over and over again, they do not let anyone raise their voice against it either. They have classified any such criticism to be tantamount to committing blasphemy itself, hence deeming criticism itself to be a capital offence. They have created and perpetuated a culture of anarchy where the state feels absolutely helpless.
Not long after Taseer’s murder, the then federal minister for national harmony and minority affairs Shahbaz Bhatti was also killed for raising his voice over this issue. Lawyer Rashid Rehman was shot dead for taking up a case to defend a professor in Multan who was accused of blasphemy. Sherry Rehman was harassed for preparing a bill on reforming the laws. Additionally, the police is intimidated and pressured by the hardliner clergy to file FIRs on false charges of blasphemy against their mostly non-Muslim victims. The judges hearing blasphemy cases are threatened with their lives if they do not cede in to demands of the clergy. Most damagingly, this problematic law puts the burden of proof on the accused, while permitting the accuser go scot-free even if the heinous charges he levelled are proven to be false. Let us not forget that in Rimsha Masih’s case, a minor, mentally unstable Christian girl, was wrongfully accused of committing blasphemy by a cleric. Had it not been for one of the seminary boys testifying against the cleric and revealing that the cleric put in the charred pages of the Quran in Rimsha’s bag himself before accusing her of its desecration, this poor, helpless girl would still be languishing in jail. Despite that, he was never prosecuted in the court. And in the end, he was jubilant in achieving his aim of getting rid of minorities from his locality when the innocent Rimsha Masih and her family had to flee from Pakistan for security.
So why is it that the powerful are easily able to accuse the vulnerable of having committed blasphemy, and get hyper violent if one talks about reforms needed in the law? They get violent because a reform would take away from the clergy the power of grabbing property and settling personal scores against the weak. The case of Joseph Colony is reflective of it, when the Christian families were driven away and their houses burnt after some Muslim businessmen accused a Christian man of committing blasphemy, all because he and his community members were denying their pressing demands to sell them their hard-earned property at throwaway prices.
Given the loopholes present in a system that is easily exploited to target the weak, any assertion that the said crime had actually taken place is hard to believe. The pattern in which the religious mobs gather and chant slogans against the person they have alleged to a blasphemer is similar in almost all other incidents. Though the Islamist groups do not have legislative powers, the only thing they can rely on to further their causes is through street power, which traditionally would not have been possible in Pakistan without the support of the very powerful establishment. Renting mobs is a highly commercial business of the seminaries whose major part of income, besides charity they receive in the name of ‘mosque construction’, comes through this venture. The common assumption that charging mobs are the very locals is not always correct, as in many cases, the accused standing trial had not been able to recognise people in the mobs that had attacked him/her.
It is also not surprising that wide range of protests held by the religious parties spill over into cities where they go vandalising shops, destroying public property, and smashing every passing car that comes in their way with bamboo sticks. Such acts done in the name of Islam are actually doing great disservice to Islam. Instead of becoming role models for others by adopting and exhibiting the essence of peace and tolerance of Islam, they have resorted to blind violence. Islam gets more ridiculed because of those who use it to justify their menace against the weak and vulnerable. These miscreants are least concerned about the image of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), of what his greatness was, and how tolerant he was. Let us be fair: can we really blame those who ridicule Islam when its own followers show themselves to be bloodthirsty?
Where we have a Qadri who has portrayed Islam to be violent and regressive, and Aasia Bibi who has become a helpless victim of it, we should be thankful for a Salmaan Taseer who upheld the value of Islam for human rights, even at the cost of his life. We need more such heroes who embody the principles of tolerance heralded in Islam.
Zeeba T Hashmi is a freelance columnist.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/04-Mar-2016/victims-of-blasphemy-laws
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How Did Nawaz Sharif Become A Liberal?
By Syed Kamran Hashmi
March 04, 2016
On February 29th, Mumtaz Qadri — the ELITE Force commando who shot down the then governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer — was hanged after the Supreme Court (SC) of Pakistan upheld the decision of the lower courts in favour of execution and the President of Pakistan turned down his plea for mercy. With that, we can conclude that justice is finally served and the soul of Salmaan Taseer can now rest in peace.
On February 24th, Punjab Assembly passed a comprehensive bill for the Protection of Women against Violence. The bill not only redefines violence unleashed upon women, it also promises to provide shelters for them and set up a system to resolve the conflict between the couple through mediation. It will also open a 24/7 helpline where any female can file a complaint.
A day earlier in Islamabad A Girl in the River: the Price of Forgiveness — which on February 29 won the Academy Award for Short Subject Documentary Film — by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was screened in the Prime Minister House upon the request of Mian Nawaz Sharif. After watching the movie he said, “There is no honour in honour killings,” and promised the audience that he would do everything to end all kinds of discrimination and violence against women. When Obaid-Chinoy won her second Oscar, she repeated his promise during her victory speech to a multi-million global audience.
Can you believe it? It would have been easier to imagine someone like Benazir Bhutto acting on the manifesto of her party and putting forward the agenda of women’s rights, religious tolerance and the rights of minorities. However, who would have imagined it would be Nawaz Sharif leading this charge? I could not have believed this in a hundred years. Throughout his political career, I have found him standing on the right of the centre, e.g. hugging the former Ameer of Jamaat-e-Islami Qazi Hussain Ahmad, and reassuring him that he intended to implement Shariah Law.
So, what has happened to him? How did he transform himself into the flag bearer of liberal values? I have tried to unfurl the mystery for a while, but unable to find a definitive answer, unfortunately, I had to rely upon conjectures in building my theory.
At present, what we know so far is that this change in Sharif is neither new nor temporary. We began to see the glimpses of a modern man almost a decade ago when he went to England and signed the Charter of Democracy with Benazir Bhutto after living in Saudi Arabia for five years. Before Saudi Arabia, he spent almost a year in jail. We do not know much about that time, except for rumours that he was depressed and broken. However, prior to his incarceration, he was committed to follow his Islamic agenda, pushing the Senate to pass the 15th Amendment in the constitution that would have resulted in the implementation of the Shariah Law. But that did not happen, thanks to the Pakistan People’s Party and other parties of the opposition, and he had to back off.
So, in my opinion, this miracle of ‘moderate enlightenment’ must have happened either in Adiala Jail or in Saudi Arabia. Though he must have had a lot of time to ponder in jail, if you ask me I would say the seed of his ‘enlightenment’ was sowed in the Kingdom rather than the solitude of confinement. That is because he must have closely observed the real implementation of the Shariah in Saudi Arabia, the duplicity and lavish lifestyles of the royal family, and their arrogance and absence of morality. Looking at the empty rhetoric and watching the human rights violations carried out by the Kingdom in the name of Islam, he must have imagined the future of Pakistan under a similar regime. It could have been the future in which he was not carrying the stick himself, and instead it was held by one of his rivals. That must have caused him to shudder and would have opened his heart and eyes. Or perhaps, he found the royal family’s tunnel vision of Islam to be the source of destabilisation in the Muslim world and decided to do just the opposite if he came to power, who knows.
If my theory is true, then we should also send the chairman of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, Imran Khan, on a pilot project as the state guest of Saudi Arabia and let him watch the atrocities of the state unleashed on the common people. I am thinking, on his return he would also have transformed into a more rounded politician, a person who considers feelings of others before he calls them names and hurls unfounded accusations at them. He may also come back as a politician brave enough to speak up in favour of the rule of law even if it means standing up to religious authorities, whom he currently wishes to appease at all turns.
Anyway, Sharif, to my surprise, is filling up the political vacuum of representing the centre-left of the country that was created after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Right now, he is building his résumé as a defender of rights without bringing attention to it himself. However, as elections loom close, he would no doubt talk up his credentials, and if he treads carefully he may even translate that good will into votes. From an electoral point of view, this move can dent Khan’s hegemony on the support of Pakistan’s middle class, which by and large supports liberal values but likes Khan because of his clean financial record.
Syed Kamran Hashmi is a US-based freelance columnist.
Source: dailytimes.com.pk/opinion/04-Mar-2016/how-did-nawaz-sharif-become-a-liberal
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Where’s Our Female Narrative?
By Ayesha Hasan
March 4, 2016
The underrepresentation of female voice in the country’s newspapers’ op-ed sections is alarming, yet it is not the biggest worry. What’s more concerning is the silence over the problem, especially by women themselves.
Over 90 per cent of the editorial content in Pakistani media comes from men. Our op-ed pages are no exception, echoing the male stance over and over again. For instance, rummaging through the last few days of op-ed pages in the three top newspapers in Pakistan recently, I discovered that 99 per cent of the op-eds were by male writers. Reiterating my utter respect for their opinion and deportment, I have to say I was not happy to see a male majority on the pages. I find this lack of female narrative from Pakistani print and online media extremely reprehensible.
The frequency with which the female narrative makes it to the Pakistani media, specifically the op-ed sections, is dichotomous with the liberal feminist theory. Not only is it way less than a minimum level that can be considered acceptable, there are instances when it is entirely missing; and the editors are clearly not doing anything about it.
The power and influence of the female narrative in journalism is inevitable and dates back to nineteenth century journalism. It has shaped public opinion and affected governments in the hardest and most improbable times, in some cases challenging and changing gender stratification in the media, like what happened in the 1980s in the Philippines. After the 1972 Martial Law in the country, female op-ed writers surfaced to create a stir in President Ferdinand Marcos’s government and policies. The country’s media, which at the time, boasted of being the ‘freest in Asia’, was witnessing something it had witnessed never before. Through their columns, these women writers turned tables on their interrogators and defied political repression, traversing the dictator’s fickle reception of their writing to an extent that the country’s largest newspapers started hiring more female writers for their op-ed sections. The 1980s saw the emergence of a handful of women editors, writers and investigative reporters in the Philippines that changed the shape of the media and the audience for times to come.
The Pakistani media needs to undergo a similar metamorphosis; especially now that women and their issues are at the centre of the government’s, the public and the media’s attention like never before.
Op-ed sections are a newspaper’s most powerful pages, reflecting what and who is important and what and whose voice matters; and those who are aware of the impact of what gets published on these pages know how words can shake governments, trigger debates and generate response from those the words are aimed at; and it’s no less than a pity that editors are keeping women away from such powerful pages of their newspapers, excluding them from becoming part of history and socio-political evolution.
At least progressive news organisations need to end this conflictual divide and put an end to a paradoxical media standing on gender representation, especially those advocating women empowerment and liberal feminism.
Ayesha Hasan is a former sub-editor of The Express Tribune and is now pursuing a PhD in women and peace journalism at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1058843/wheres-our-female-narrative/
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This Law May Be Late, but It’s Great
By Aisha Sarwari
March 4, 2016
When attacking a woman becomes a crime — sticks, stones or even punches — people call it a landmark law. Perhaps we will award the same grandiosity to outlawing sticking pikes in the eyes of defenceless children. The Punjab Protection of Women against Violence Bill is not a landmark law, it is a law that has come to the largest province of Pakistan with glacial crawl. That is shameful. The resistance it faced is even more telling of the state of denial this country is in, in terms of where it stands on the global gender equity scale — third-worst.
We often deploy the word ‘property’ when depicting how women are mistreated in society. I am willing to bet some public toilet doorknobs have seen better days than most women in Pakistan. A country that is so haunted by the image of the respectable woman that we often leave her worse off than an ancient slave — bare-footed and scalded. Over 5,800 women faced violence in Punjab alone, in 2013. Those that go unreported are multi-fold. The province is black and blue. At least its women are, and yet we have only now gotten legislation that matches the horror on the street corners and stove rooms of our country.
The law not only caters to addressing psychological and emotional harm to women, but also includes stalking and cybercrime as punishable offences. The reason why this is important is because there is a tremendous momentum to silence women online — not just their sexuality but their very presence on social media as well as in terms of their freedom to have an email. For women, the Internet is not just about access, it is about escape. It is the gateway through which they learn skills and rights — all of which lead to empowerment and a shift away from all pervasive abuse.
The law also has upped the fine for transgressing against a woman. As a society, we need to put a value on women and the way to do that is when the state fixes a cost on hurting them. There is a reason why women are respected in the West — they are feared, both for their ability to extract a grievance fee when harmed and also because they have the ability to counter-attack legally. There is much to emulate, despite the conservative brigade convincing us that women are respected in honour-frenzied cultures like ours. No, thank you. We will take the real value as opposed to the one that is dished out by any mould mouth.
Then there is the well-meaning feminist brigade that feels this is a toothless law, only to be shamed. For one thing, it is really difficult to get laws passed in this country, let alone laws that demand more assurances and rights for women. Reminder: the Council of Islamic Ideology endorses child marriages and just recently said women cannot divorce unless they get consent from their husband, even when they want a khula. So, in all fairness, some hard work has been done, some spine has been shown by the legislators and some people deserve congratulations. Also, let us take what we can and have — perfection in increments rather than truckloads — it is more difficult to roll it back in the former case.
Laws can always be designed more intelligently, drawing in better from technology and research and I am sure this law is lacking in some instances. What is important, however, is that a benchmark is set to define acceptable standards of society and that those standards are effectively enforced. We can have masterpieces but they will just be that sitting in a legal, dusty cabinet of law stacks if there is no will to bring them to life though our law-enforcement agencies. This law needs an efficient funding for both, the training of law officials and awareness campaigns for serial aggressors. Someone needs to give aggressors a memo that the party is over. They need to sober up and wear the invisible cloak because the victims just got a dagger placed in their hands.
Film after film in Bollywood and Lollywood makes a hero of the man who saves the woman’s honour. But hardly any credit goes to the woman who uses the law to save herself. It is time to change the script. Here’s to a Pakistan where women don’t need to be saved. This law in Punjab helps towards that.
Aisha Sarwari is a freelance writer based in Islamabad.
Source: tribune.com.pk/story/1058851/this-law-may-be-late-but-its-great/
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Science Education in Schools
By A.H. Nayaar
March 4th, 2016
We have a new national hero in Nergis Mavlavala — a brilliant experimental astrophysicist, a professor at MIT, and a front-seat explorer of the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. Her contribution in designing the interferometer that detected the slight murmur of space-time given out by two merging black holes over a billion years ago has put her among the pioneers of such exploration.
The event happened so far away that if light were to come from there, it would take over a billion years to reach us. We take pride in Mavlavala because she is one of us and had her schooling in Karachi before she went to face the challenges of higher education in the best institutions of the world. We take pride in the fact that a person educated in Pakistani schools can be among the best in the world.
That science education in Pakistan is inadequate is saying the obvious. In fact, it is bad enough to scare students away. There is a long list of problems with science education in the country. Textbooks written for Pakistani textbook boards and colleges are dreary and uninteresting, and only overload students with facts. Badly printed, they are terse in their explanations, and care little for graphic presentations. Teachers are either untrained or poorly trained, and hence uninspiring. Many have poor knowledge of the subject they teach, and hence discourage questions, and kill curiosity.
When it comes to teaching science, the biggest issue is the medium of instruction
Examinations demand memorisation, so that students have no reason to understand and internalise the subject matter. Laboratory facilities are not available except in private elite schools or a few well-looked-after public schools. In most public schools, where lab equipment exists, students are not allowed to handle it for fear of causing damage, and the equipment is used by teachers to only demonstrate experiments to the students.
There is no reliable survey data available, but it is safe to say that Pakistani students are in general scared of studying science in schools and colleges. Most students in the higher classes opt for subjects in the arts and commerce. All of this is because of the way science is taught.
Teaching science requires special attention and special training of teachers in teaching methods that invoke reasoning and curiosity. It also requires laboratory equipment to let students explore and verify phenomena and learn methods of scientific inquiry. It requires textbooks that make scientific phenomena understandable through systematic exploration. End-chapter exercises in textbooks must not ask recall questions, but demand thinking, reasoning and analysis. The same is true for examinations.
Sadly none of this is evident in the vast majority of Pakistan’s schools, public or private, except in some expensive elite schools. So only a small fraction of the total number of students gets to learn science properly; the rest are left struggling.
The biggest issue in science education in Pakistan, however, is the medium of instruction, an issue on which our policymakers have been vacillating when it comes to teaching in Urdu or English. Not long ago, it was decided by the Punjab chief minister that English would be the language in which science and mathematics would be taught in his province from class I. It transpired that it could not be done because the teachers at that level were unable to employ English as the medium of instruction.
The issue of the medium of instruction in science education is a complex one. Concepts and their explanations can be best conveyed and received in an easily understood language. In this respect, texts written in Urdu or mother tongues should be the best. But the problem arises with terminologies. The latter convey not only concepts behind phenomena but also interconnections between related phenomena through words that are derived from the same root.
The language of science instruction has to have the capacity to allow the formulation of terminologies that possess these two qualities. If a language does not have that capacity, it has no recourse but to borrow words from other languages. In borrowed terminologies, however, that interconnection can be lost, which is not an insignificant loss.
If we are to teach in Urdu and yet desire that the interconnectedness of terms, for example, oxygen, oxide, oxidation, oxidisation, oxidised, of the English language be preserved, the solution would lie in using Arabic and Persian vocabulary and grammar, as was done some decades ago. This for students today would be as unfamiliar as English words. An added problem for students would be to make the transition from Urdu vocabulary to English upon reaching higher classes.
Coupled with this is the seemingly perennial problem of poor teaching of English in public schools. A vast majority of students from public schools can hardly understand English. We observe this even at the university level where we see blank faces when we deliver lectures in English. Students often admit not being able to fully comprehend lessons in foreign textbooks, or even the questions at the end of the chapter.
No one familiar with this problem can agree with the assertion that science and mathematics be taught in English from early schooling. Teaching science and mathematics in English to those students who do not understand the language is tantamount to denying them the means to understand and hence enjoy learning these subjects. It also amounts to forcing them to memorise the text.
But even more painful is reading those science textbooks in Urdu which retain English terminologies transcribed in Urdu. It is not hard to imagine the difficulty faced by a class V student reading terms like ‘endangered species’ or names of complex organic molecules in Urdu, and understand why children get scared of science.
The answer eventually lies in increasing the English language skills of students — of all the students. Teaching of English in schools is a major unresolved problem of our educational system. One wonders why we cannot resolve this problem at the national level once and for all.
A.H. Nayaar taught physics at Quaid-i-Azam University and Lums.
Source: dawn.com/news/1243391/science-education-in-schools
URL: https://newageislam.com/pakistan-press/victims-blasphemy-laws-new-age/d/106543