You are free to burn their temples

Source: Pakistan Hindu Activists

Liberal Pakistanis are again ashamed of the state of religious freedom in Pakistan. And they often seem to wonder where things go wrong. Unfortunately, many of these unsuspecting patriotic nationalist liberals will never figure out that everything went wrong since the foundation of their beloved country.

A country that was supposedly built for the rights of a communal minority turned out to be a theocratic hell for its own minorities. Who is even surprised?

You are free to go you temple? Watch this brazen attack on a temple in the broad daylight.

Another bad day for #Hindus as Ganesh #Temple in Bhong city of Rahimyar Khan was attacked by miscreants. The beasts daringly live telecast the attack on Facebook: https://t.co/uVq8UYBkQB pic.twitter.com/SzGrtIxEzk

— Kapil Dev کپل دیو (@KDSindhi) August 4, 2021

Ironically, in the month of August, and days before the “national minorities day.” So what was the “real cause” this year, you would wonder? Oh yes, must be another property dispute. What really happened was that an 8-year-old Hindu child either defecated or urinated in a mosque and the Sunni mob unleashed their wrath on the first Hindu structure that they found. Here is the Urdu language report from the almost-state-run news channel ARY News.

As usual, there was some lip service from the “liberal faces” of the ruling PTI, namely Interior Minister Fawad Chaudhary and the Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari, who has the most pointless portfolio of all Pakistani ministers.

The attack on the Hindu temple in RYK is not simply condemnable but violates our constitution & the basic human rights of our citizens. MoHR in touch with RYK police since yesterday to ensure action ag perpetrators – got report – following up – our Parl Secy going to visit today.

— Shireen Mazari (@ShireenMazari1) August 5, 2021

However, it is important to remind that these same hypocritical figures were leading from the front with the ruling party’s Hinduphobic propaganda against India regarding the annexation of the Indian State of Kashmir. Both PTI and their liberal nationalist allies cannot deny responsibility for all the flames of Hindu hatred that they have stoked throughout their term. Of course, Pakistani conservatives are Hinduphobic by definition but the intellectually dishonest facade of PTI liberals must be challenged.

Surely, Pakistan has always been a terrible country for anyone who is not a Muslim. This is the very foundational basis of this Muslim Supremacist theocratic republic. However, the kind of disgusting Hinduphobia state propaganda that the PTI government has unleashed has not been seen in recent years. At least not since the 1999 Kargil War and its aftermath. The state-backed emergence of the Tehreek Labaik Pakistan which has now gotten out of control of their original masters has not helped the situation either.

It is too late for the disingenuous and ideologically confused PTI liberals and corrupt bureaucracy babus to do the fire-fighting against the damage done by the religious fundamentalists that they have enabled. It is too late for half-hearted efforts to fake a soft and enlightened image of a theocracy with mob rule.

It is only laughable when these nationalist liberals quote Jinnah on minority rights. They completely seem to miss the irony when they fail to see the consequences of creating a state motivated by communal hate. Probably what Jinnah really meant by his well-meaning August 11 speech was this.

You are free to burn your temples.

France is Hated for Honoring Its Free Speech Martyrs

Source: France24

Charlie Hebdo killings are back again. This time these killings cannot just be blamed on Islamist terrorists, as was the case in 2017 when I last wrote about it. Now, a broader behavior among the Muslim community has been brought to light in wake of the recent incidents.

These incidents involved otherwise good citizens and practicing Muslims randomly erupting into dangerous acts of violence, either seriously injuring or ending up killing their victims. Unfortunately, most people attacked in these attacks hardly had anything to do with the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. However, one person stood out and is hailed today as a Martyr for Free Speech, as titled by the French Imam Hassen Chalghoumi, much to the ire of the Muslim community in France and elsewhere.

Samuel Paty, the heroic teacher, who was simply killed for doing his job. Lecturing his history class on freedom of speech.

France honored this martyr of free speech, as well as the victims of a church attack in Nice. It was in honor of Samuel Paty that the French government projected the cartoon of the Prophet that he was killed for showing in the class on a municipal building. However, if you hear the criticism of France from the anti-Islamophobia Muslim critics, you might think that France routinely puts such pictures in public spaces to deliberately irritate the Muslim community, which is not the case.

Source: twitter/odishatv.in

Unfortunately, France is being hated today for honoring its free speech martyrs.

As a Pakistani, I could only wish that the Pakistani heads of state and government would have the sense to individually honor Mashaal Khan, our free speech martyr, like that. How is that possible in a country that only encourages its citizens to resort to violence in reaction to alleged blasphemies, and is now advocating such draconian blasphemy laws on an international level.

The brutal beheading of Samuel Paty shook the conscience of France as a nation. France reacted to this shocking threat promptly, but perhaps in the opinion of many, inadequately. Though in the opinion of many others, the Muslim citizens in France, who have been unnecessarily hounded by the French law enforcement.

Source: Reuters/ekathimerini

Considering the oppressive colonial history of France, especially targeting the Algerian and other Western African Muslims, this is a concern. However, Muslims from these communities are perhaps the most assimilated with the French Republican values. As evident by the recent stabbing and beheading attacks, most of the violence came from Muslim immigrants from other parts of the world such as Chechnya, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Perhaps the most shocking of them all was a Pakistani Barelvi immigrant who was supposedly the follower of Khadim Hussain Rizvi of the extremist Tehreek Labaik Pakistan. This should have alarmed the Pakistani state establishment and the civil society, but instead of condemning the violence, Pakistan chose to double down on its rejection of French outrage on this onslaught of mindless violence.

The charge against France was led by the increasingly regressing European counterpart Turkey, which has been spiraling away from its secular democratic character of late. Turkey’s Islamist authoritarian President Erdogan insulted Macron to be in need of a mental checkup for his “anti-Muslim” policies, while Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan mimicked the “Caliph” by rejecting French reaction as Islamophobia.

There are two important pieces that have appeared in the Foreign Policy magazine. One by Benjamin Haddad that defended Macron’s policy from a liberal viewpoint, especially when the liberal and progressive criticism on his crackdown on Islamism has been the harshest, apart from the ones from the anti-Islamophobia bloc. The other by Mustafa Aykol, a Turkish scholar on Islam associated with the CATO Institute who primarily conceded Macron’s criticism that Islam , yet criticized French laïcité as “illiberal,” while endorsing the “Anglo-Saxon” secularism values as practiced in Britain and the United States. He argued that Macron’s France was not helping Muslims resolve that crisis.

Of course, I tend to agree more with Haddad’s assessment of the situation and the unjustified attacks that Macron is enduring for his rather brave reaction to the recent Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks. However, Aykol’s argument is not without its merits. It is important to recognize though that both frankly deal with the French political reality very differently. Aykol’s review, like that of many liberals and progressives, is more superficial, no matter how much such analyses may claim to account for France’s historical injustices with its largest minority, particularly in the context of the brutal colonial rule in Algeria and Western Africa. Haddad’s article did not ignore the French shortcomings in that area, neither did it omit the mention of Macron’s admission of France’s failure to address it.

However, acknowledging that an overwhelming, if not all French Muslims being peaceful and well-integrated with the Republican values is why Macron made the distinction between French Muslims and “Islamists.” His controversial proposals of policing school-going children, restricting homeschooling, have attracted new criticism, widely misreported by the anti-Islamophobia industry as discriminatory to Muslim children only. Frankly, such measures, which should include banning the Madrassah network, are more needed in Muslim majority countries such as Pakistan to curb radicalism.

We can dismiss France’s crackdown on Islamists or Muslims, depending on what you want to hear, as a political stunt for electoral survival of the third way liberals. But when will the intelligentsia of the Muslim community have a debate about the unacceptable and outrageous behavior of their fellow members of the faith in terms of not only endorsing but openly demanding beheading blasphemers and killing apostates? What is their view of defending curbing freedom of speech through intimidation when it is not discriminatory in the French culture at all.

What is more important here is the absence of liberal and progressive voices among Muslims to call for necessary reform. While they would disapprove of beliefs such as demands of beheading the blasphemers and killing the apostates in their private echo chambers, they are either too scared to or are simply disinterested in initiating a change or a reform. And when an external entity reacts to fill the void, they try their best to block those efforts in order to preserve the status quo of violent tantrums. They would indulge the victim complex of Western identity politics pursued by their representatives, but would not acknowledge preserving the secular, liberal, democratic values that allowed them the freedom to observe their faith without the fear of persecution and threat from the theological violence of their own faith.

Here, I must acknowledge that the onus of this reform does not lie as much on liberal and progressive Muslims in countries such as Pakistan, where they are themselves under constant threat from the very fundamentalism under discussion. As a matter of fact, many of the progressives and liberals, whose opinion in this regard is hard to separate from that of the position of Muslim Brotherhood, have little choice but to toe the line in order to dodge blasphemy allegations and attempts on their lives. The example of Mashaal Khan who was brutally murdered in his own university must be remembered to understand the gravity of the threat.

The biggest burden of responsibility lies on diaspora Muslim intellectuals who have not rejected their religious identity or even religiosity. Unfortunately, many former Muslims who denounce their religious identity in a Western democracy tend to react toward Islam in a hostile manner, perhaps as a reaction to the treatment they have received by the Muslim majority societies over the years. Like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, they become increasingly conservative and passionate advocates for individual freedom, at times ignoring the sensitivities of the realities of what Muslim minorities have to endure in the West. The diaspora liberal and enlightened Muslims, who are enjoying the religious freedom in Western democracies and might not have the same freedom to practice their faith differently in Muslim majority societies can dare to initiate reform movements in Islam without the fear of their lives, unlike those in countries like Pakistan. Even if these reform movements start as survival mechanisms to better assimilate in the West, it would offer Islam a path to reform similar to Reform Judaism that flourished among the Jewish diaspora in Europe. Perhaps 2,000 years of life in a state like Israel may not have made it possible.

It is crucial to mention Aykol here because he is perhaps the most prominent of the intellectuals from the Muslim community that recognizes that Islam is indeed in crisis with a special mention of the blasphemy law in Pakistan. Apart from a history of writings advocating moderation in Islam, he recognizes the fact that it is important for Muslims to accept liberal values in a democracy and how an enlightened reform has been missing in Islam. He does not touch the Islamist terrorist threat issue in terms of French domestic security policy as much as and rightly so, because let’s face it, reactions to blasphemy against the Prophet brings a regressive reaction from most devoted Muslims, not just Islamist terrorists. He probably just does not see Muslims changing that reaction as a realistic path of reform. Though it must be recognized that the demands from the Western democracies to alter are also absurd and unacceptable.

Without this unaddressed crisis, the cycle of blasphemy and violent reaction will never stop.

If anything, Muslims globally should express their solidarity with France over #JeSuisSamuel and perhaps respect a gesture of tribute for once.