Jessie Magee & Aroosa Masroor Khan report on developments in defamation legislation in Ireland and Pakistan, which have resulted in some strange allegiances
Last week an interesting story in the Pakistani media went by almost unnoticed. It concerned an eminent Islamic jurist, Dr Muhammad Aslam Khaki, who threatened to register a blasphemy case against the federal government for comparing the controversial National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) to the Charter of Medina, a document of great importance to Muslims.
The Charter of Medina, Khaki said, was an accord between Muslims and non-Muslims to promote mutual patience and tolerance under the leadership of the Prophet Muhammad. It was not, as he described the NRO, an agreement between a dictator and a political party to hide each other’s crimes.
Khaki is of the opinion that comparing the actions of the Prophet to a dictator amounts to blasphemy. According to him, the government is liable to be prosecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws – ironically introduced by former dictator in 1986.
This accusation couldn’t have come at a worse time for a government in the process of amending its blasphemy law to prevent its misuse by extremists.
Although minority groups and human rights activists have time and again called for the repeal of this law, the government only has some “procedural changes” to offer for now in the face of protest threats by religious groups if more revisions are made.
Moreover, for a country that heads the 57-nation strong Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which is lobbying for international legislation against blasphemy at the UN, a full repeal of its national blasphemy law is out of the question – despite there being no evidence to back religious groups’ claims that insults against Islam are on the rise in Pakistan.
Over the past two decades, hundreds of cases have been registered under the country’s blasphemy law, which is known to be one of most stringent in the world. The penalty includes a mandatory death sentence for defaming the Prophet Muhammad, but no one has been convicted so far.
However, in a recent case in Lahore, a Christian was sentenced to life imprisonment for desecrating the Holy Qur’an. In several other cases, alleged blasphemers have died at the hands of mobs before the police could intervene.
Secular groups in Pakistan have long demanded a repeal of the law, arguing that Islam should not be the only religion protected. As one activist with the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan rightly points out: “There is no need for an anti-blasphemy law. Laws are for humans, not beliefs and ideas. You can’t limit one’s thoughts.”
At an international level, western democracies also reject the basic premise that religions should have rights. The focus, they argue, should be on equally protecting the rights of the adherents of all religions, as well as those who choose not to practice religion at all.
One interesting exception to the generally laissez-faire attitude towards blasphemy in the west is the case of Ireland, which surprised everyone last summer by introducing a new law against blasphemy.
The legislation imposes criminal penalties and fines of up to €100,000 on anyone found guilty of “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion.”
Minister for Justice Dermot Ahern insisted that he was obliged to reform the existing 1961 Irish law on defamation, which ruled that a person can be both fined and imprisoned for up to seven years for the crime of blasphemous libel.
“My intention is to remove the possibility of prison sentences and private prosecutions for blasphemy,” said Ahern, who argued that the only alternative to bringing in a new law was to change the constitution by a national referendum – “a costly and unwarranted diversion” from the country’s financial crisis, he said.
But it seems the minister did not realise the worldwide ripple effect that his actions prompted. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) warned that the Irish blasphemy law could flout international regulations and have a “chilling effect” on the freedom of expression.
Elsewhere, a group named Atheists Ireland launched a controversial online campaign opposing the law that garnered worldwide attention. It posted 25 written or uttered quotations attributed to figures including Jesus Christ, the Prophet Muhammad, Pope Benedict XVI, authors Mark Twain and Salman Rushdie and Icelandic musician Björk which have been categorised as blasphemous under various laws.
Yet, while the new law was largely criticised and condemned in the west, it was praised as a model by others. Religious groups in Pakistan are using the Irish law to spearhead their own campaign for an international law against blasphemy, even borrowing word-for-word the text of the Irish legislation in their submission to the United Nations.
But amid all of this controversy, there’s a question that still needs to be answered: does a law against blasphemy protect against the incitement of religious hatred, or does it promote intolerance and extremism?
Hard-line religious groups in Pakistan and the Irish Government both favour the former argument, while the government of Pakistan, which is struggling to balance the interests of religious groups against the control of extremists, finds itself on the same side of the fence as Atheists Ireland.
A case of strange bedfellows, indeed.
Aroosa Masroor Khan is a reporter with Express Tribune newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan. Jessie Magee is a freelance print and broadcast journalist living in Dublin
