- The final nail in the coffin of sanity
From an average Pakistani Muslim’s perspective, inviting non-Muslims to embrace Islam apparently exalts the status of a preacher to the highest possible level in our minds. Preaching is what is being practised since forever in all religions. Forced conversions is yet another phenomenon the victims of which often continue to adhere to their original beliefs and are known as crypto-followers (crypto-Christians, crypto-Muslims, etc). Killing people in the name of glorifying one’s religion is a recently surfaced ideology whereby decimating a population comprising the followers of one faith is considered an achievement.
Asma Yaqub’s death is an amalgam of two heinous crimes as nature of the factors leading to the incident is two-fold. First has been elaborated in the preceding lines. Second is the mundane custom of attacking women over marriage refusals, something held “dishonourable” in our society. Throwing acid to cause disfiguration of facial features, setting on fire, sexually assaulting and killing are a few tools that are typically employed by the “honourable” culprits.
Asma’s killing has surpassed all degrees of insanity that can possibly prevail in a society. In fact, sanity is what differentiates a civilised society from a rogue crowd; her death has proven that we are, indeed, a rogue crowd.
Rizwan Gujjar, a young, moustached man posing with a firearm, wanted to serve Islam in the best possible manner for which he chose Asma Yaqub, a 25-year-old maid, whom he would later propose for marriage. Rejecting the proposal on the basis of religious differences costs women their lives in this part of the world, but this fact was, perhaps, unknown to Asma owing to which she presented the same reason before him. This woke up the beast inside Rizwan who had fully intended to “serve” Islam by converting and marrying a Christian girl for fulfilling his own lust. Therefore, he decided to eliminate such a person who had disregarded the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of bagging success in this world and the Hereafter. He not only hurled acid on her face but also threw kerosene oil on her setting her on fire. After receiving a week-long treatment in Lahore, Asma died and with her died the last hope of becoming a civilised, truly honourable group of people the world would not be ashamed of categorising as a nation.
Apart from implementation of laws and conviction of perpetrators, Asma Yaqub’s death has brought into the spotlight the suffering of religious minorities
The root cause of this incident, like any other of similar nature that has occurred in the past, is non-implementation of laws. Publishing volumes of books containing penal codes, fundamental rights and all the laws is not sufficient. We need serious execution of them so that a potential perpetrator thinks at least twice before carrying out an offence. There exists a faction of intellectuals who bluntly reject this notion by proposing education as the only perceivable solution. My answer to them is Asaram Bapu’s conviction in India. A high-profile, self-styled godman who runs over 400 ashrams (religious hermitages) and has a huge following across the globe was formally convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl in his ashram in Jodhpur. Though the nature of this incident clearly differs from the one under discussion in that the latter is a case of exploitation at the hands of clerics, let them be Catholic priests, gurus or maulvis, the two coalesce in misusing religion for vested interests and the method of dealing with them.
Wearing a blindfold of faith is the first step. Deceit is where trust once was and this is the precise sense which is blocked in order to transform one into an ardent follower. That follower could become either a victim, as in the case of Asaram’s target, or a delinquent, as in the case of Rizwan Gujjar. It is nothing but using religion for the sake of serving your own interests that misleads one to the path of exploitation. Time and again, opinionated people have emphasised on keeping religion segregated from all other realms. When it agglutinates with politics, the manifestations are Faizabad Dharna in Pakistan and BJP supporting the rapists of Asifa Bano in India. When it blends with day-to-day dealings, the result is concealing wrongdoings with the masks of beards and saffron-coloured robes.
Apart from implementation of laws and conviction of perpetrators, Asma Yaqub’s death has brought into the spotlight the suffering of religious minorities in Pakistan. A country that was demarcated such that all Muslim-“majority” areas are brought under one umbrella has failed to provide shade to those in minority. The country’s denizens have side-lined, persecuted, mocked and suppressed the outnumbered in educational, professional and, in short, all domains that lead to living a normal routine life. This is common not only in Pakistan but all over the world. When it comes to, however, presenting yourself as nationals of a country whose emigrants are agonised in other countries because of being in minority, we must be careful and cautious in how we treat our minorities. As they say, what goes around comes around.
May be we are aggrandising the whole situation. May be it was only about taking revenge for marriage refusal. But that itself would be equivalent to understating the bigger picture from which the fact of Asma being a Christian cannot be eliminated. Remove the blindfold and think for a moment: Didn’t she have a right to live her life with someone who would not ask her to change her belief system with which she had grown up? Was it not a better idea to impress her by virtuous words and actions and let her known that Islam is a religion of peace? Will any Christian girl or boy of her acquaintance or outside ever think of accepting Islam, a religion whose follower set Asma ablaze? If reality has not dawned on us even after this, it never will.