Very interesting article by Praveen Swami, from The Daily Telegraph, 6 January, in which he discusses radical Islam in Pakistan and the place of the Barelvi sect of Islam:
"...often claimed to represent a tolerant anti-Islamist tendency in south Asian Islam".
So, another couple of "moderate Muslim" elements bite the dust. How shall we ever know them? If we can't even trust the ones we believed were sound moderates? And don't you notice just how many "moderate" elements there are that turn out to be violent?
And how do we know that the allegedly moderate elements in the west are not going themselves to be violent when push comes to shove, or when bullets come to back? The answer is, of course, that we don't. We don't know this and we can't know this, so that the manifold Muslim sects and organisations must, by rights and logic, be closely monitored at the very least. Or further, it is logical - even if it may be sad and frustrating for any genuine moderates in them - that they should be viewed with suspicion. It's only Elf 'n Safety, really...
Swami also gives a great overview of Pakistan's slide down the radical Islamist [1] path
• 1956: Bhutto declares Islam the state religion. [PF: Too bad for the 3% Pakistanis who are not Muslim]
• 1970s: Zia ul-Haq deposes and later executes Bhutto (a pattern, here, what?). He makes Islamic Sharia laws tougher and introduces harsh penalties for criticism of The "prophet" Muhammad.
• 1990s: Nawaz Sharif makes blasphemy punishable by death.
• 1990-2000s: Pervez Musharraf sidesteps the Hadood laws which enshrine the punishments for blasphemy. It is, incidentally, these Hadood laws which require rape victims to have four male witnesses, and which often lead to the imprisonment of the victim on charges of adultery.
Nearly 1,300 individuals have been accused of blasphemy between 1986 and 2010, up from only three in the previous fifty years. Many have been killed by lynch mobs.
Meantime the penalty for murder, especially murder in the name of so-called "honour" - that is, killing a female relative for any one of a number of alleged slights the family "honour" - is reduced to a civil offence, under Pakistan's Qisas and Diyat laws [2].
So, get this. In Islamic Pakistan, ruled by Sharia law:
• Blasphemy is a criminal act, punishable by death.
• Murderer is a civil act, punishable by minimal (if any) jail time.
Sharia for the west, anyone?
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[1] keep to our New Year's resolution we should really call them "orthodox Muslims", as suggested by Roland Shirk [ref], rather than "radical", for it is by hewing to the orthodox teachings that they commit acts we view as radical or terrorist.
[2] Note to self: there are some learnings, for me, at least, in Swami's article: the Barelvi Sect; their relationship with the Deoband movement; Hadood laws; the Qisas and Diyat laws and the civil nature of murder in Pakistan's Sharia.
