In Ireland we’re familiar with shameless political posturing taking place around so-called religious morality
SPARE A thought for Rimsha Masih, who is about 14 years old and facing into at least another fortnight in jail, if not much worse. On Saturday a court in Islamabad deferred her bail application on a technicality until today. Her lawyers say Rimsha has learning difficulties. Yesterday brought news that the local imam who has accused Rimsha Masih of blasphemy, Hafiz Mohammed Khalid Chishti, had himself been arrested and accused of planting evidence on her.
Rimsha Masih was said to have been found with pages of the Koran in a shopping bag of charred ashes she was carrying on her bicycle. Her accuser, a man called Malik Hammad, and Chishti had been vocal in their dislike of having to share a slum on the outskirts of Islamabad with a Christian community. Chishti had complained that the religious services of the Christians were too noisy.
When she was arrested, Rimsha Masih’s family went into hiding – although her father has been speaking to journalists on her behalf and working for her release. The Christian community in her neighbourhood went into hiding also, although the Guardian reported yesterday that there were signs of them returning to their homes.
In a new development, senior Muslim clerics and scholars in Pakistan have come out to support Rimsha Masih, saying that they did not want any excesses to take place.
Otherwise we are back with the blasphemy laws of Pakistan, which are used mostly against Muslims in that Muslim country, according to human rights organisations. Recently there have been attacks against Shia Muslims. Attacks against members of a Muslim sect, the Ahmadis, are ongoing.
Clauses have been added to the anti-blasphemy laws – originally framed in general terms by the British colonial administration – to redefine the Ahmadis as non-Muslims. Apart from the anti-blasphemy laws, which have already led to the assassination of two senior Pakistani politicians, religious intolerance is on the rise. Pakistani Hindus are even complaining that their daughters are being abducted and forced to marry Muslim men.
But Rimsha Masih is a Christian girl. The details of her case are as heartbreakingly mundane as the case of the Christian woman Asia Bibi, who was drummed out of her village and into jail on a blasphemy charge in 2010.
Asia Bibi, who has five children, is a poor woman. But her arrest led directly to the assassination of one of Pakistan’s political elite, the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer. He spoke out against Asia Bibi’s incarceration and the application of the anti-blasphemy laws, and was gunned down by a fanatic, one of his own bodyguards, in January 2011. Pakistan’s minorities minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, was assassinated two months later.
You would imagine, then, that Pakistan would be all agog about the case of Rimsha Masih. Not so, according to the journalist Shahid Saidullah, who lives in Pakistan. “I haven’t seen a single television programme devoted to this. I haven’t seen a single opinion piece in a newspaper devoted to this,” he told Edward Stourton on BBC radio yesterday.
National interest has been sparked only by the international interest in Rimsha Masih’s case, he said. Saidullah has no truck with the blasphemy laws, which are used, he said, to settle personal and local disputes. If they were being used for those ends in this instance, he said, “I wouldn’t be too surprised by it.”
However, his analysis of Pakistan itself had the chill of truth about it. After the Asia Bibi case and the killing of governor Taseer, people said the majority of Pakistani people were liberal and completely against the anti-blasphemy laws and the murders arising from them, he said. He himself had never seen any evidence of that, he added, although he did cite the support of the senior imams for Rimsha Masih as a positive development.
Meanwhile, the lawyer prosecuting the case against Rimsha Masih, Rao Abdur Raheem, had this to say in the international context: “A single drone attack and hundreds of people die. What is the difference between Rimsha and these innocent people?”
This is the type of question the West does not want to answer, of course, because we can’t explain what the difference is. Perhaps it is that we know the details of Rimsha’s case a little and we don’t know anything about the civilians who die in drone attacks.
We do know a little bit here about the impact of international publicity on an insecure and intensely self-conscious country – and that its results can be exactly the opposite of what a well-meaning international community intends.
In Ireland we’re familiar with the spectacle of shameless political posturing taking place around so-called religious morality. And we must also be aware that Christians are under threat now in some Muslim countries in a new and disturbing way.
The organisation Church in Chains ( churchinchains.ie) was formed by evangelical Christians in the 1970s to help Christians imprisoned under the old Soviet regime. It now campaigns on cases such as Rimsha Masih's and the recent church burnings in Nigeria. It is holding its annual conference in Athlone next Saturday, at which the Pakistani Christian activist Wilson Saraj will be guest speaker. All are welcome.