by AYESHA SIDDIQA
Ambulance, carrying the body of security guard Mumtaz Qadri, is surrounded by the mourners. Qadri was hanged for murdering his boss, governor of Punjab Salman Taseer who wanted some kind of a change in the blasphemy laws. PHOTO/Reuters/Dawn
The (late) Salmaan Taseer’s son Atish’s anxiety and horror expressed in the article he wrote for The New York Times was natural. How was it that there were hundreds of thousands who supported Taseer’s killer? To the younger Taseer, this denoted a contest between a modern and unprecedented form of violence versus the liberal modernity symbolised by his father. But did Mumtaz Qadri and Taseer offer such opposing formulas?
Despite the Pakistan government trying its best to punish Taseer’s killer and also burying the idea he represented through a total media blackout of Qadri’s funeral, there were more than 200,000 people that turned up for it, which was a sufficient indicator that the idea wasn’t dead. Perhaps, everyone who took part in the funeral wanted to be there in Qadri’s place just like a lot of people felt envious of Ilm Din, the young man who killed a person accused of blasphemy in 1929. This included Atish Taseer’s grandfather MD Taseer and Allama Muhammad Iqbal, two Western-educated and modern men. In fact, Iqbal played a leading role in convincing Muhammad Ali Jinnah to contest Ilm Din’s case. Fighting blasphemy or defining religion according to the fundamentals of Islam as laid out in the Holy Quran and Hadith were part of how these men defined the political ideological perimeters on which the new state of Pakistan was visualised. So, contrary to what young Taseer thought about Qadri’s funeral procession being new and unprecedented, it was none of the above.
The modern state, which Allama Muhammad Iqbal dreamt off and for which he managed to find a sole spokesman was to reject the traditional religious framework represented by pirs and sajjada nasheens. This formula, in his view, was archaic. The sharia-based interpretation or following of the Holy Quran and Sunnah in letter and spirit was viewed as a modern formula that would replace ethnicity in the making of a nation-state.
In Pakistan’s case, this particular recipe was followed throughout history. The individual personal liberalism never forced any kind of leadership to reconsider the approach. Even the party that Salmaan Taseer represented up until his death did not deviate from following the ideological framework that Iqbal or MD Taseer cherished. This was most obvious in the passing of the Second Amendment to the 1973 Constitution, which was never seriously questioned by any of the PPP’s senior leadership. It is another matter that this particular alteration led to other changes but eventually cost many innocent lives. The key issue is that once religion replaced ethnicity as the legal order, then alterations become a herculean task. Eventually, Salmaan Taseer had hoped for some adjustment in the law, not its total abandonment, which, in any case, was inconceivable.
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