laws that are abused

Zubeida Mustafa, The Dawn, Karachi, March 5, 2004

Even in these hard times, there are days which bring glad tidings. Last week we received an e-mail from a former death row prisoner who has won his freedom after being acquitted by the Sessions Court, Islamabad.

Dr M. Younus Sheikh, a doctor and a teacher, had been accused of blasphemy - falsely, it is now clear - in October 2000. In September 2001 he was sentenced to death. He had denied the charges.

A slow and protracted process of appeal and retrial followed leaving him languishing in solitary confinement on death row for more than two years until his release in November 2003.

Although found innocent, Dr Sheikh had to remain in hiding even after he was a free man because he continued to receive death threats. He has now left the country to take asylum in Europe.

There is a positive dimension to Dr Sheikh's case. It shows that the judiciary in Pakistan still has judges who are fearless and conscientious and who are prepared to hand down judgments based on their sense of justice and fair play.

But one cannot overlook the fact that this country continues to have laws on its statute books which were instituted in the name of Islam by an autocratic ruler and are all too frequently misused by unscrupulous persons against those they perceive as their enemies for not sharing their dogmatic interpretation of Islam.

The blasphemy law is one of them. According to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IEHU) today more than 100 people are in Pakistani prisons accused of blasphemy.

There are also the Hudood laws which are a travesty of justice. Today a large number of women are in prison because they have been charged with adultery under Zina Ordinance.

The law has been so much abused that the National Commission on the Status of Women last year issued a report after much deliberation by jurists and experts recommending the abolition of the Hudood laws. Its chairperson, retired justice Majida Rizvi, has been campaigning relentlessly for their annulment. She has so far failed to succeed.

The mere fact that many people arrested under both the laws are later acquitted shows that the laws offer ample opportunity for abuse. Many a times, blasphemy charges are brought against a man on flimsy grounds and he finds himself in prison under the shadow of death.

He wins his freedom only after a long judicial process and the judge is brave and fair. Similarly, an innocent woman is charged and thrown into jail on baseless allegations that hold no water in a court of law.

Until the poor woman is acquitted as no adequate evidence is found, a few years have passed during which her reputation is totally ruined, her family scattered and she herself is so thoroughly demoralized that her acquittal hardly brings any relief to her.

Since we do not have an activist social scientist such as Asghar Ali Engineer in our midst, no one has analyzed the real factors behind the cases brought against various people under these laws.

Obviously, the reason would vary from person to person. For instance, many women are charged by their former spouses out of anger or vindictiveness. Even in blasphemy cases, at times economic factors play the main role.

Why should we have laws which can be so misused? Why can't these laws be amended or, better still, dropped so that there is no room for abuse? President Pervez Musharraf tried to amend the blasphemy law a few years ago.

It was a very minor amendment which he had suggested that would have only modified the procedure of registering an FIR for blasphemy.

The police would have been required to carry out preliminary investigations to see if there were any grounds for a case of this nature. Even that was unacceptable to the religious leaders who were so vocal in their protest that the president had to backtrack.

As for the Hudood Ordinances, they have never attracted any attention except from the women's groups and the human rights activists. Is it because most women who are jailed under this law are poor and illiterate and have no political clout and have no connections with the centres of power.

The sufferings of the voiceless in our society generally go unnoticed. Hence it is now for the women's groups, human rights activists and international bodies such as Amnesty International and the IHEU (who took up Dr Shaikh's cause) to struggle for a change in such laws.

Why do those who have the power to introduce changes and want Islamic precepts to govern our public life, opt for the obscurantist and narrow interpretation of Islam? Why is it that Islam is presented as a religion that is repressive, harsh and devoid of humanism? In the absence of any resistance from any quarters, the obscurantists get a free hand.

Even though most people would not subscribe to these views and would never uphold the brutal punishments prescribed under these laws, they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated that they do not want to challenge what the so-called purveyors of Islamic teachings have been propagating.

The SPDC report which made a detailed study of education in Pakistan found the madressahs producing students who are "unable or unwilling to be amenable to conduct that does not conform to prescribed norms".

The curricula of the madressahs are heavily indoctrinated by religious subjects and at the higher level comparative religion is taught in the form of theological debates wherein the student learns to refute the beliefs of other doctrines (radd) rather than tolerating them.

As such the products of the madressahs tend to be doctrinaire and intolerant of pluralistic ideas. Their mindset is "one-sided and exclusivist" and "insular and self-righteous".

The madressahs have always been there with their rigidly orthodox curricula. How come they have assumed such an important role now as to worry all sensible people? True their numbers have grown enormously. What is more, the products of these institutions have now gained ascendancy in state policymaking in many areas. Hence laws such as the blasphemy law and the Hudood Ordinances.

Yet the number of children passing out of secular institutions is much higher. What should cause greater concern is the fact that education in general schools (which are not madressahs) is equally doctrinaire in its contents.

An analysis of the textbooks clearly establishes that children are taught to be proud of war, intolerant of other religions, nationalist to the extent of being jingoistic by distorting history, teaching it selectively, drumming in the greatness of our own religion while by implication showing no respect for other faiths, the school textbooks produce students who, according to the SPDC, look at the world in terms of "black and white" and "us versus them" with a mindset that is "single-dimensional" and "exclusivist".

Then above all, the majority of the people are illiterate. In these conditions, there might be some people who have managed to develop an independent mode of thinking - their own personal experience may have taught them that other religions also teach virtues and goodness. But they never have the confidence and intellectual capacity to challenge the prevailing mindset.

Of course the ideal approach would be to correct the curricula in all the schools so that the mindset of the entire nation changes. But this is a slow process for it would take a generation to change this outlook. Besides, who would bell the cat? The problem is that many who can bring about changes have their own hidden agendas which do not always coincide with their public positions.

Meanwhile, it is important that we do not provide any opportunity to unscrupulous elements to misuse the laws and brutalize the people in the name of religion.