Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws: From Islamic Empires to the Taliban

Preface: The Ethnography of a Military State

preface: the ethnography of a military state i am a woman scholar of sufism who was charged with blasphemy by state functionaries at a federal university in the capital of Islamabad in 1998 during the Nawaz Sharif government. This was six years after my return with a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin.1 My PhD dissertation was on “Speech Play and Verbal Art in the Indo-Pakistani Oral Sufi Tradition,” an area toward which the faculty of clerics in my university were extremely hostile. The Sufis and clerics have never been friends, as much of Sufi poetry ridicules the clerics, the sheikhs, and the mullas. As a full professor and chair of the Department of English Language and Applied Linguistics at the Allama Iqbal Open University, I was accused of using “frequent, ‘blasphemous’ and derogatory remarks against Islam, the Holy Quran and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH [peace be upon him]).” A female junior faculty member in the department initiated the charge. A male junior colleague , an adjunct political appointee who was on contract and who could not get an appointment through the regular selection board, further backed the accusation. He corroborated that “Dr. Shemeem Abbas said, ‘The Quran is an outdated book and should be put on the cupboard.’” For me, the female perpetrator recommended a fate like that of Salman Rushdie. The accusation was encouraged by the vice chancellor whom the faculty of clerics had brought to the Allama Iqbal Open University from the International Islamic University in Islamabad. The clerics around the vice chancellor colluded in the charge, especially among them the dean of my faculty of humanities, who had a PhD in Islamic studies from a madrassa (religious seminary) in Lahore, the Jamia Ashrafia.2 Many others like him had reached key positions within the university, such as deans of faculty and heads of departments , during General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s regime. These were individuals whose degrees were given “equivalence” through the rubberstamping processes at the University Grants Commission in Islamabad in the 1980s at the height of Pakistan’s “Islamization.”3 The late Dr. Muhammad Afzal, a close relative of General Zia-ul-Haq, in that period was the chairman of the University Grants Commission as well as the federal minister for education. Although a liberal intellectual with a graduate degree from the United States, he did uphold the rubber-stamping of the “mullaization ” of the Pakistani academy. Consequently, the madrassa diplomas of the clerics were upgraded to doctorates; they were made scholars of Islam, or ulema, to validate the Islamization of education in the region under General Zia-ul-Haq. xii pakistan’s blasphemy laws My instant action on being falsely charged with blasphemy was to seek an interview with the military secretary to the president of Pakistan, as the president is the chancellor of all the universities in the country. At that time it was Mr. Rafiq Tarar. Since I was a military war widow of the 1965 war with India, I got the interview immediately over the telephone with the military secretary, who asked me to also petition the president. I personally delivered my petition at the presidency, where the military personnel on the staff treated me with the utmost respect. A few days before I went to meet with the president, I met with the chief justice of the High Court of Panjab Province, who was a family friend. The chief justice cautioned me not to mention anything about my work in Sufism to the president, Rafiq Tarar, as he was an ahl-e hadith, in other words, of the sect whose members practice conservative, orthodox Islam based largely on a textual reading of the Quran and hadith (sayings of the Prophet and his Companions).4 The ahl-e hadith do not approve of the Su- fis. However, with my petition as an army war widow whose husband had gone missing in a commando mission called Operation Gibraltar in 1965 in Srinagar (Indian-held Kashmir), the state had to take action. The state had to uphold the jihad rhetoric. The Quran promises unlimited rewards in paradise to those who die in jihad. While I petitioned the president of Pakistan regarding the blasphemy accusation , I also responded to the charge through my immediate supervisor, a seminary cleric. In my response I said, “The procedure adopted in the instant case is unheard of under the E & D [Efficiency and Discipline] Rules. However, the counter...