A Pakistani cleric has found himself a victim of the very laws that he promotes.
A Pakistani cleric has found himself a victim of the very laws that he promotes
Pakistani pop singer turned religious cleric Junaid Jamshed has been accused of blasphemy recently. Jamshed has now taken refuge in London, rightly fearing for his life in Pakistan.
The allegation occurred after Jamshed re-enacted a hadith which suggests that the Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife Ayesha occasionally faked illness to seek her husband’s attention. The re-enactment was entitled ‘even the prophet’s company cannot tame a woman’.
Jamshed is notorious – or renowned, depending on who you talk to – for his misogynistic views. He is on record as saying:
“If you want a happy life, do not teach your wives how to drive a car. Do not let her go outside. She might leave you.”
He has also said that “A husband only involves himself in an extra marital affair because his wife isn’t doing enough. She is to be blamed.”
He has also advocated a ban on women driving, drawn connections between respect and how much a woman covers herself, and generally espoused the view that women are men’s possessions.
Ironically, it was his supposedly Islamic endeavour of sanctioning women as the ‘inferior species’ that led him into the quagmire of blasphemy.
Jamshed has since apologised for his ‘naivety’. The same scholars who dubbed blasphemy an ‘unpardonable sin’ when minorities were burnt alive or sentenced to death are now seeking forgiveness for their man.
The entire episode, however, is not just about an individual’s misogynistic endeavours or the collective hypocrisy of the Pakistani clergy. If anything, the hypocrisy can be cashed in on by the state to finally modify the stringent blasphemy law in the country, which has been blatantly used to suppress religious minorities.
Pakistan’s blasphemy law is a virtual death sentence for minorities, with an allegation enough to sanction murder, or at the very least make it impossible for the accused to remain in the country.
Jamshed’s case holds pertinent lessons for those who endorse religious law in the 21st century.
Jamshed, who is on record as saying that ‘secularism is a curse’, is now taking refuge in a society that has secular laws, vying to dodge the ramifications of the jurisprudence that he has endorsed for 17 years.
Despite Britain’s increasing number of Sharia courts – 85 at time of writing – which are limited to financial and familial matters, Jamshed knows he is perfectly safe in Britain, a country that epitomises everything that’s ‘wrong’ with the ‘evil West’.
He was wise enough to not go into exile in Saudi Arabia, the country that is the epitome of Jamshed’s version of Islam, which is intolerant, fundamentalist and extremist.
The Saudi legal system is based on Sharia law and does not have a penal code. Therefore, in Saudi Arabia, where Jamshed’s endorsed law prevails, the punishment for his comments about Ayesha would be left at the mercy of a judge’s interpretation of the Sharia law, which more often than not leads to decapitated heads.
This is not to suggest that Jamshed’s understanding of Islam, or the Saudi interpretation of Islamic law is the sole authority. This is just to highlight how religious law can be, and is, interpreted to result in barefaced human rights abuses, as cases in Saudi Arabia and Iran have shown.
It is deeply ironic that it is an Islamist who has unearthed the obvious downside to the outmoded Sharia. It’s ironic that it’s an Islamist who has vindicated the importance of secularism as a societal and legal necessity.
Regardless of what the ‘true’ interpretation of any ideology is, no state can exist in the modern world, or remain functional in the future, if it isn’t founded upon universal equality and freedom of thought.
Sharia law doesn’t guarantee equal rights for all – this is also the case in British Sharia courts where women and adopted children are denied equal inheritance. Not to mention the 13 Muslim states that sanction death for apostasy, scepticism or for the lack of belief in a deity, owing to their implementation of the Sharia law at varying scale.
United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives a pretty good idea of the rights that a modern state needs to ensure. Only a secular state can guarantee that all citizens are equal before the law, regardless of their beliefs, or lack thereof.
And when a human’s life is at stake over the vague interpretation of religious law and the even more ambiguous interpretation of ‘respect’ – as is the case with Junaid Jamshed right now – you need jurisprudence that values human life more than the respect of any ideology or religious figure of the past.
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid is a Friday Times journalist. Follow him on Twitter
43 Responses to “How an Islamist made the case for secularism”
guest
The religion of piss. May pig shit and diapers be upon him.
Guest
Ah yes, I’m a “headcase” for saying you should follow your own standards. Nope, you only apply your “standards” to the Other.
You’re clearly a hypocrite.
Karin Karejanrakoi
Well written, Mr Shahid.
Send the slimy piece of faecal matter back to face the ‘law’ that he espoused.
Karin Karejanrakoi
Ah, so you’re one of those ‘leftists’ who, ever since the “end of the Cold War” in 1992, have been suffering from a sort of PTSD prompted by the apparent consigning of any form of liberal thought to the trash-can of history. Some of you, of course, have simply turned your coats inside out and joined the world’s Conservatives, while others have grasped like drowning swimmers onto the ‘shiny’ of post-modernist cultural relativism (the view that, as journalist Johann Hari once wrote, “the world is carved up among ‘cultures,’ and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be ‘respectful.’ You can criticize Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different from you”).
Add to this a notion of anti-imperialism that is so badly defined that it is meaningless – including the misguided belief that islamism is *always* bred in poverty –and a fair serving of “European guilt” and we have a situation where we must hold our tongues or sit on our hands and excuse barbarities because “we’re not allowed to preach to ‘the Natives’ and tell them how to live their lives.” No wonder the ‘Left’ is something of a joke in most of the world.
It is not racist to defend equality or tolerance or social, economic or juridical rights for all. What *is* racist is to deny people the same rights and freedoms because they were raised in a “different culture.” And to say that people *choose* to live in a society where they must wear a mobile black tent to go out in public or where they can be stoned to death for love or have their throats opened for talking to a man to whom they are not related is an *insult* of the highest order – people live in such circumstances because those in power in those ‘societies’ (usually men) *benefit* from these shenanigans and convince their ‘societies’ that their imaginary friends have sanctioned it.
Nor is it “arrogant Western cultural imperialism,” or “neo-colonialism” – much less “Western decadence” – to wish to share those rights and freedoms with every human being on the planet. Yes, they arose in the context of the *European* Enlightenment and the capitalism that spawned it, but – just as capitalism was a huge step forward over slaveholding and feudalism – they can become the common currency of the human race and be used to create world-historic advances in human well-being.
To reject these ideas just because they first emerged in Europe is a particularly short-sighted form of nativism – any revolutionary worth the name doesn’t care that Marx was German, Trotsky a Russian Jew, Stalin Georgian or Mao Chinese, but only whether their ideas will be useful.
Moreover, before you folks on the ‘Left’ enthuse on how ‘progressive’ it is to support islamism against imperialism, you should take thought for the fact that islamism is a *creation* of imperialism. The British were happy to encourage islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia to stalemate Imperial Russian expansion in the nineteenth century, then in the Middle East in WWI to frustrate the Turks, and again in Central Asia in the wake of the Russian Revolution. After the First World War, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded under British auspices to counter Egyptian nationalism, and this rationale was inherited by the US after WWII, when ‘nationalism’ was equated with ‘communism’ (1) and islamist movements – from the anti-Soviet mujahidin in Afghanistan, to ‘al-Qaida’ and IS – have become the weapons of-choice for Washington to further its agenda of global conquest … and are, moreover, invaluable in scaring the population of the ‘Homeland’ into giving up their freedoms in exchange for a bogus “national security.”
Those who would be called ‘progressive’ should be willing to oppose reaction *wherever* it raises its head, and as happily speak and act against the islamic right as against the christian one.
____
(1) John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, wrote, “The religions of the East are deeply rooted and have many precious values. Their spiritual beliefs cannot be reconciled with Communist atheism and materialism. That creates a common bond between us.”
Karin Karejanrakoi
Don’t you have the backbone to tell us your name, Imam?