“Help Me, Please, Get Me out of Here!”
By Anila Ali
Irvine , CA
My trip to Karachi in November was primarily to spend time with my aged father, Mr. Qutubuddin Aziz. He belongs to a generation of people that is becoming obsolete. Though a young student leader at the time of partition, he saw the birth of Pakistan, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Pakistan’s founder, Jinnah, and still hasn’t lost hope in Pakistan. Whenever I visit him, he asks me if I’ll write negatively or positively about Pakistan’s progress.
This question stems from the time when I had gone to Pakistan for the first time after getting my green card and seen the filth, the carcasses of sacrifice animals pile up on street corners after Eid-Adha, and felt disgusted to see children playing with the filth! I know it offended him greatly that I wrote about the lack of planning and civic sense among Karachiites and to this day, that I dared to criticize his city.
“If we don’t point out our errors, we will not improve,” was my feeble and disconcerting answer to him. Ten years on, he is still the same, unwilling to shed his optimism, disinclined to see any flaws in the country that he helped found; and the country he dedicated his entire life to.
This time around when I visited him, though, I could detect a definite silence and pent up anger in my father’s demeanor. He was contemplative about the poor socio-economic situation stymieing the middle class. Often times, we sat and discussed how hard it was for an average Pakistani to make ends meet with the surge in commodity prices, our hearts bled for them and then we went on to discuss why Pakistanis had become so intolerant of others. I reminded him of our childhood, when my grandmother used to take us to all the Shiite Muharram majlises, to commemorate the martyrdom of the Prophet’s (PBUH) grandsons. My grandmother used to proudly flaunt her Shiite relatives and claim: “ Lucknow, main tu hum bahut mil jul kay rahtay thay.” (In Lucknow, India, we, the Sunnis and Shiites, used to live amicably together.)
I showed my father, a picture of my mother with her three girls, standing in front of her house. My mother, in the mid-sixties, looking glamorous, much like a Bollywood movie star, and not even remotely fearful of Taliban telling her to cover her hair - that was the Pakistan I was born in. I recalled my father taking us to Christmas parties and giving speeches about Jesus and emphasizing how he is also a prophet of Islam and greatly revered by Muslims. After the partition of Pakistan and India, my father became a defender of equal rights for all. My paternal grandparents were both torchbearers of the real Islam and the upholders of equal rights for all. They’d felt religious discrimination in India; and knew what it was like to be a minority and not have equal rights; and so how could they take away the rights of others based on their religion or ethnicity.
Over the next few days, as our discussions ensued, my father showed serious concern about the lack of intolerance in the people of his country. Though, what made us both perturbed was a friend asking me for help. I came back after meeting a Christian-educator friend. She implored me to help her get out of Pakistan. She explained how she was being harassed for being a Christian, in Karachi, being followed, called names, and threatened in her apartment building.
For the first time in years, my father had a look of despair, and I could see he was enraged by the intolerance that he had seen grow into a monster of hate and persecution. He asked me if I’ll write about it and I said, “Of course, I am your daughter.”
What is most disturbing to me though is that if this is happening in the most educated city of Pakistan, no wonder the villagers fling charges of false blasphemy on Christians and use the law as a tool to avenge personal vendettas. Recently, a woman was accused and then found guilty of blasphemy. Her case had been in the public eye but not much was being done about it.
The Blasphemy Law in Pakistan is antiquated; and definitely needs to be fine-tuned. Crimes against Christians are being committed under its umbrella. The one politician who has come forward to ask for its repeal is the Punjab Governor, Salman Taseer. President Zardari has touched upon the need to review the law but it needs to be followed by concrete action. Unfortunately, no member of Parliament will ask for its repeal for fear of losing support of religious parties. Moderate Muslim leaders must review it. Crimes and false allegations against innocent Christians and Hindus will stop only if we push Pakistani government to walk the walk. Pardoning a Christian will not solve the problem.
Laws governing such hate crimes must be revisited and rewritten. It is time that Muslims scholars in Pakistan come together and follow “ijtihad”, legal reasoning that doesn’t merely rely on traditional schools of jurisprudence. The Holy Qur’an indicates the use of it in the centuries following the Prophet’s (PBUH) demise. We mustn’t close the door of reasoning, after all, God has bestowed the ability to reason on us and so ijtihad must be brought back in as a legal Islamic practice. Renowned Sunni scholars like Al-Ghazali have advocated it and the fact that it came to a halt after the fall of Andulus, could have contributed to the stagnation and regression of Muslim thought. All we need is one brave, Muslim cleric to revive it and put an end to persecution of religious minorities and women in many Muslim countries of the world.
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