c. 1998 Religion News Service
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan _ According to the law, no one should have been able to take Seema and Khushi Masih’s daughters away from them.
According to the law, all parents in Pakistan _ including Christian parents such as the Masihs _ have the right to raise their children in their own faith.
But the law isn’t always followed in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Particularly when it comes to Christians.
The three girls were taken Jan. 25 by the family’s landlady and her husband, who had police escorts. The couple contended the children had converted to Islam and should no longer remain in a Christian home. The Masihs maintain that their daughters are still Christians, and even if they did convert to Islam, they should stay with their parents.
But 14-year-old Nadia, 11-year-old Nyla and 9-year-old Nabila are gone, and it’s unclear whether they’ll ever be allowed to return home. Two sons and another daughter still live with the Masihs.
The city magistrate overseeing the case admits he decided against the Christians not on the basis of law but on public sentiment and a concern he could have a religious riot on his hands.
“Legally speaking, they should have been given to their parents,” said Kamran Abdullah Siddiqi.
But Siddiqi said if he did that, “Some crazy person would come and say these are the children of Islam. They’d say we’re going to chop you. We’re going to shoot you. We’re going to _ what did the KKK used to say in America? _ lynch you.”
Article 36 of Pakistan’s Constitution promises to safeguard the rights and interests of religious minorities. But human rights organizations say that’s not happening. The U.S. State Department agrees, citing a government-fostered “atmosphere of religious intolerance” that has led to violence against religious minorities. In Pakistan, 97 percent of the population is Muslim; the rest is made up mostly of Christians but also of Hindus, Buddhists and other groups.
In the 1980s, the United States gave Pakistan billions of dollars for economic development. But in recent years, concern that Pakistan was developing a nuclear bomb has prompted sanctions, slashing aid to millions of dollars, most of it for humanitarian, food and counter-narcotics efforts. Pakistan’s decision to test nuclear weapons in May further cooled U.S.-Pakistan relations.
Pakistan’s pattern of religious persecution, documented for years in State Department reports, could lead to further sanctions.
David Forte, a professor at Cleveland State University and an expert on Islamic law who testified before Congress, said Pakistani Christians encounter the same institutionalized injustice African-Americans experienced before civil rights.
“In both instances,” he says, “the minority is disenfranchised. It has no effective vote. It is subject to a legal system arrayed against it. Arbitrary violence against it goes unpunished.”
Glynn L. Wood, a professor at the Monterey (Calif.) Institute of International Studies who has studied Pakistan for 30 years, said general social turmoil contributes to the problem. “The Pakistani Christians are right in saying that when their people are murdered, justice is not being pursued vigorously,” he says. “But it’s not being pursued vigorously for the rest of the population as well. It’s very, very lawless.”
Even some representatives of the government agree.
Ahmed Balal, deputy director of the new human rights department of Pakistan’s ministry of law and justice in Lahore, holds up a newspaper and summarizes the articles: “Federal minister and provincial adviser beaten with shoes by disgruntled crowd”; “24 women injured during political rally”; “Five people murdered in Lahore”; “Ten party members killed in Karachi”; “Crowd charged by baton-wielding police in Islamabad”; “Deputy superintendent of police fired upon.”
His point: that everyone _ not just Christians _ has something to fear in Pakistan.
“Compare a Christian with a Muslim citizen of this country,” Balal says. “Is he any less protected? The majority of the people are unprotected. Everyone is unprotected.”
Yet Christians in Pakistan say they are protected even less.
“We are unequals among equals,” says M.L. Shahani, who, until he left the bench earlier this year, was Pakistan’s only Christian judge.
“We are being treated as second-class citizens,” says Bishop-elect Inayat Ejaz of the Church of Pakistan, a Protestant denomination made up of Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists and members of the Church of Scotland.
British missionaries brought Christianity to Pakistan in the 1800s and 1900s. Today, no one knows for sure how many Christians are in Pakistan, but they are the nation’s largest religious minority group.
Pakistani Christians are dirt poor in a poor country, where the average income is less than $500 a year.
Fewer than half of Pakistan’s citizens can read and write; fewer than 7 percent of Christians can. Christians often do the low-level sanitary work, cleaning toilets and collecting garbage, that others refuse to do. Because of this association with filth, Muslims in some parts of Pakistan will not touch a utensil used by a Christian unless it is washed first.
Asma Jehangir, chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said things are getting worse, not better, for Christians.
“Incidents are increasing. Insecurities are increasing,” she said. “You have legislation that is discriminatory. You have court judgments that are biased. It’s not just that people are socially discriminated against now. It’s persecution.”
A practicing Muslim and an attorney, Jehangir said she defends Christians because “justice must be given to all.”
Under the country’s blasphemy law, a mere complaint by a private citizen can result in an arrest without a warrant, even if there is no evidence. Bail is often hard to obtain or not granted at all.
Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto tried to amend the law but backed away when radical Islamic groups called for the death of anyone supporting change.
According to Compass Direct, an American-based Christian news service that monitors worldwide religious persecution, more than a dozen people have been jailed on blasphemy charges in the past seven years. No one has been executed, though four have been sentenced to death and five have been killed while in custody, the organization says.
In April, a young Pakistani Christian, Ayub Masih, was condemned to death for allegedly making a positive reference to Salman Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses,” which Iranian religious leaders have declared blasphemous.
Roman Catholic Bishop John Joseph came to Masih’s defense.
In a development that sent both Muslims and Christians to the streets in protest, the bishop killed himself on April 27. Supporters say he did it to draw worldwide attention to the blasphemy law, even though his church considers suicide a sin.
(OPTIONAL TRIM _ STORY MAY END HERE)
Although only a handful of people have been convicted of blasphemy, others, such as schoolteacher Katherine Shaheen, have had their lives shaken through a mere accusation.
Forced into hiding, she agreed to tell her story on condition her location not be identified. In 1995, she was accused, then cleared, of committing blasphemy.
She was the only Christian on the staff of the Government Girls High School in Rangpur, teaching biology and chemistry. But problems emerged, she said, when one school administrator told her she must convert to Islam and another ordered her to allow his relatives to cheat on an exam.
Shaheen said she refused and was accused of blasphemy by several students and teachers. A judicial inquiry was held, and the charges were dropped.
Members of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan attended the public proceedings and wrote that “the false and baseless” charges were motivated by “professional jealousy, personal grudges and religious intolerance.”
It added that “the case against Ms. Shaheen was a clear example of abuse of the blasphemy law.”
Shaheen thought the matter was over. But it was just beginning.
She had been labeled an enemy of Islam in a daily newspaper. A mob burned her in effigy, shouting “blasphemer” and “kill her.”
She fled. Since then, she said police have harassed her family. A photograph from her school file has been copied and distributed throughout the country.
“They’re looking for me so they can kill me,” she said, even though, under the law, she is innocent.
In Shekhupura, a rural area 19 miles from Lahore, Pakistan’s third biggest city, the story of the Rev. Noor Alam’s murder and the burning of his church has been told again and again.
According to Alam’s widow, Sakina Alam, and his daughter, Shazia Alam, Alam bought a plot of land in 1997 and started construction of a church. Three months later, according to Sakina Alam, a mob destroyed the church.
Noor Alam held the Christmas service in his home that year. Sakina Alam said he told the 25 families making up his Presbyterian congregation: “`Even if I have to lay my life down for the rebuilding of this church, I will.”’
On Jan. 28, his family says he did just that.
Just after midnight Alam heard a noise in the house. Walking upstairs, he encountered three men wearing bedsheets over their heads, according to Alam’s wife and daughter. He was stabbed in the chest, stomach and above the right eye.
“My husband was martyred,” Sakina Alam says. “As Jesus was crucified, and as blood dripped from his head, he was silent. And so was my husband.”
No one has been arrested or charged in the crime, but the police say they are investigating.
“This wasn’t a religiously motivated murder,” says Ghulam Rasul, the police officer overseeing the investigation.
He speculates that the three attackers were robbers from outside the region, caught by Alam in an act of thievery.
Joseph Francis, head of the Centre for Legal Aid, Assistance & Settlement, a Pakistan-based human rights organization, says Alam’s church was one of four destroyed in a four-month period. He says a pattern of “anti-Christian sentiment” has been established, a pattern authorities deny but of which Christians are acutely aware.
“In present circumstances, we are absolutely hopeless,” says Akhter Bhatti, Noor Alam’s brother-in-law. “Whatever happens in Pakistan, neither the courts, nor the executive nor the legislature care for our Christian community.”
DEA END O’KEEFE
