Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws: From Islamic Empires to the Taliban by Shemeem Burney Abbas (review)

The issue of blasphemy has risen to paramount importance throughout the Muslim world as contemporary Muslim-majority states seek to assert a politico-social identity through the assertion of new kinds of shar‘ia-based laws. While laws condemning blasphemy have existed for nearly a millennium in South Asia, they have taken on a new degree of controversy in contemporary Pakistan, as they are often used as a tool of ethnic and sectarian discrimination.

Shemeem Burney Abbas’s book takes a huge leap into this formidable arena of controversy. While Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws was initiated as a personal account — she was charged with blasphemy in Pakistan in the late 1990s — it has developed into a very solid work, both historical and contemporary, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of this critical concept and its legislative manifestations. The book provides a wealth of information on the historical development of Islamic law, and how and why blasphemy codes developed in conjunction with these. The only critique that can be leveled is the intermittent insertion of the example of Pakistan into the historical account; while Abbas is certainly justified to exhibit her anger at General Zia-ul-Haq’s imposition of religious laws to justify his regime, placing the entire discussion of Pakistan following the historical background would have made for smoother reading.

Following the initial foray into details about Pakistan’s “military state and civil society” (Chapter 1), Abbas takes a historical optic on blasphemy. She argues that the concept neither emerges from the Qur’an, nor from the life or practices of the Prophet Muhammad, but rather was created later. She expounds on how orality had been central to the way disputes had been settled during the Prophet’s life and how Sura alA‘raf, 7:158 (as translated by ‘Abdullah Yusuf ‘Ali) proclaims him as “the unlettered Prophet;” stating that today may indict someone of blasphemy. Abbas details how enemies of the Prophet arose, first the Quraysh and later because of changes in the social order given the Prophet’s “message of social justice, economic equality, and regard for the oppressed” (p. 35) that challenged the prevailing Arabian tribal hierarchy. She makes note of a number of early examples of the Prophet’s enemies disparaging him that proponents of blasphemy laws still cite as a call to support them (p. 37).

Abbas then carefully examines the historical opposition to the Prophet and his message, whether during his lifetime, on the battlefield or as succession disputes, and elaborates on the development of the use of Islamic laws. She argues blasphemy laws developed in conjunction with an effort to exert social and political control on the now-expanding umma. After elaborating on how shari‘a has evolved within various schools of jurisprudence, she then turns to the even more controversial texts of the hadith. She notes the work of Muhammad ‘Abid al-Jabiri, who provided,

Extensive historical evidence that very early on the rulers realized they could legitimize their authority by associating and justifying acts on the basis of religious citations. According to him … the era of putting the religious texts into writing was the beginning of the institutionalizing of censorship (p. 49).

Unfortunately, at this point, instead of continuing on the historical evolution of the different eras’ usage of censorship and blasphemy laws, Abbas jumps forward a millennium and begins to expound on Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization program and how the incorporation of blasphemy into it legitimated intolerance and accelerated the Pakistan state’s decline into a theocracy. While exploring the details of both Zia’s general Islamization laws and its emphasis on excluding women from public and political life, Abbas questions the motivation behind the Pakistan state’s forced “silence on events in Islamic history” (p. 54), especially the Blasphemy Law’s prohibition of any discussion of the Prophet’s wives. She argues that this must have been to deflect...