Thwarting Religious Cleansing in the Muslim World -by Farahnaz Ispahani & Nina Shea
Physicist Mohammad Abdus Salam was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim to win a Nobel prize in science. His discoveries continue to dazzle the world as demonstrated by the verification last summer of a theory to which Salam had contributed, on Higgs boson, or the “God particle.” But in his home country, Dr. Salam is without honor.
Throughout his lifetime Dr. Salam was a practicing member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, whose very existence was pronounced blasphemous by a 1974 constitutional amendment and by later criminal laws. In protest, Salam left for London in 1974 where he continued the groundbreaking work that won him the Nobel five years later. After his death in 1996, his remains were returned to Pakistan and buried in an Ahmadi cemetery, with his tombstone’s epitaph reading “First Muslim Nobel Laureate.” A magistrate ruled that the word “Muslim” on an Ahmadi grave was blasphemous and ordered it sanded off.
Dr. Salam’s case is a prominent example of a dangerous development that has been entirely overlooked by American foreign policy: Though few blasphemy laws are as explicit about it as Pakistan’s anti-Ahmadi ones, laws purporting to protect Islam, which are being increasingly applied in once-secular or “moderate” Muslim countries, typically target non-Muslims and liberal Muslims. Leaving such groups little choice but to seek safety through emigration, these laws are inextricably linked to what is shaping up to be slow-motion religious cleansing. The percentages of Pakistan’s Ahmadi, Christian, Parsi, and Hindu communities have all plummeted over the past 30 years, with non-Muslims declining from 5 percent of the total population to just 3.5 percent. If Shiite Muslims are taken into account, the number of those emigrating from Sunni-majority Pakistan as a result of religious persecution is even greater.
A crackdown on blasphemy reflects the growing influence of Salafists and other Islamist extremists whose demands to insulate Islamic symbols, leaders, beliefs, and practices from perceived insult appear implacable. A major problem with laws punishing blasphemy is that they are vague, depending as they do on a subjective interpretation of insult, and their parameters tend to be set by extremists. As former Malaysian finance minister Tengku Razaleigh commented on the move last year to adopt legal protections of Islamist sensitivities within his own, moderate country: “‘Sensitivities’ is the favored resort of the gutter politician. With it he raises a mob, fans its resentment, and helps it discover a growing list of other sensitivities.”.. Read more:
