Pakistan Faces a Divide of Age on Muslim Law

Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack — carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad — as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.

Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.

Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.

It may seem a stark turnabout for a group that just a few years ago looked like the vanguard of a democracy movement. They waged months of protests in 2007 and 2008 to challenge Pakistan’s military dictator after he unlawfully removed the chief justice.

But the lawyers’ stance is perhaps just the most glaring expression of what has become a deep generational divide tearing at the fabric of Pakistani society, and of the broad influence of religious conservatism — and even militancy — that now exists among the educated middle class.

They are often described as the Zia generation: Pakistanis who have come of age since the 1980s, when the military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, began to promote Islam in public education and to use it as a political tool to unify this young and insecure nation.

Today, the forces he set loose have gained such strength that they threaten to overwhelm voices for tolerance in Pakistan’s feeble civilian government. They certainly present a nagging challenge for the United States.

Washington has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani military to combat terrorism, but has long neglected a civilian effort to counter the inexorable pull of conservative Islam. By now the conservatives have entered nearly every part of Pakistani society, even the rank-and-file security forces, as the assassination showed. The military, in fact, has been conspicuously silent about the killing.

“Over time, Pakistani society has drifted toward religious extremism,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst from Lahore. “This religious sentiment has seeped deep into government circles and into the army and police at lower levels.”

“The lower level are listening to the religious people,” he said.

Indeed, the Pakistan of today, and the brand of Islam much of the nation has embraced, is barely recognizable even to many educated Pakistanis older than the Zia generation. Among them is Athar Minallah, 49, a former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the lawyers’ protest campaign against Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007 and 2008.

Mr. Minallah studied law at Islamic University in Islamabad from 1983 to 1986, and the first lesson any student learned in his day was that the preservation of life was a pillar of Islamic law, he said.

But under General Zia in the 1980s, the government began supporting Islamic warriors to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Indian control of Kashmir, and the syllabus was changed to encourage jihad. The mind-set of students and graduates changed along with it, Mr. Minallah said.

That change is now no more apparent than among the 1,000 lawyers from the capital, Islamabad, and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi, who have given their signed support for the defense of Mr. Qadri, who has been charged with murder and terrorism.

Their leader is Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, who formed a “lawyers’ forum,” called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet, in December. The aim of the group, he said, was to counter Mr. Taseer’s campaign to amend the nation’s strict blasphemy laws, which promise death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.

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Assassin or hero? Pakistan's great divide over killer of governor

Imagine this: One of the top politicians of your country is gunned down by his own bodyguard. Shocking, but not unheard of.

Now imagine this: The very next day, the assassin shows up at court and is given a hero's welcome. Supporters shower him with rose petals and put a garland around his neck.

Sound bizarre? Well, that's exactly what has happened this week in Pakistan.

The killing and its aftermath highlight as never before the fast-growing divide between the country's secular and religious forces. It's a divide that's symbolized by the life and death of Salman Taseer, the slain governor of Punjab province.

To understand this divide it's important to know a bit more about Taseer's background. He was the son of an urban intellectual, born the year before the creation of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in 1947. His political thoughts were forged at his English-style high school in posh Lahore, and then furthered in his time studying accounting in England. Taseer lived and died a Muslim.

But he was also modern, with western views on law and democracy. And it was those views that clashed with a country that has increasingly identified itself as Islamic, shedding the anglicized traditions of its colonized past.


Taseer most recently made news in November last year. He was campaigning against Pakistan's blasphemy law, which makes insulting Islam a crime punishable by death.

When CNN's "Connect the World" last spoke with him on November 23, he said he didn't want to abolish the law. He said he wanted it "changed in such a way that if you insult any prophet, no matter who he is, then that is a criminal offense. But certainly not punishable by death."

And that change, prosecutors say, was reason enough for his bodyguard, a "slave of the Prophet," to pump 26 bullets into the man he was paid to protect.

Taseer's argument came to the fore because of the case of Asia Bibi, a Christian woman who was sentenced to death for insulting Islam. According to Taseer, she also epitomized the type of person the blasphemy law has hurt.

"It's a law which gives an excuse to extremists and reactionaries to target weak people and minorities," he explained. "I mean, no big, rich, powerful man has gone in under the blasphemy law. It's only poor people."

It's an argument that Pakistan's elites agree with. But they're in the minority. Renowned journalist Ahmed Rashid attended Taseer's funeral in Lahore on Wednesday, and told CNN that he knew many people who wanted to pay their respects but were scared to come.

"Apart from the killer, nobody's been arrested. There doesn't seem to be any kind of crackdown, and it seems the government is backing off from doing anything. And that, of course, is proving to be very disturbing for liberals and moderates all across Pakistan."

Taseer's family couldn't find a well-known maulvi, or Islamic cleric, to read the funeral prayers. "The government... maulvi refused to do it, even though he was a government servant," Rashid said.

"And then, people went around to the leading mosques, to the leading maulvis, trying to find someone who would read the funeral prayers. They all refused to do so."

The message seems to be: shut up, or get shot.

And it's a message disseminated across the country's media. According to the Urdu-language newspaper Jang, leaders of one religious party forbade all their followers to attend funeral prayers for Taseer.

Another Urdu-language daily, Ummat, had this in its editorial: "Salman Taseer made a controversial statement on a religious issue... [he] not only committed contempt of court but also harmed the religious sentiments of the people... There is no doubt that taking law into one's hand is not right. However, similar incidents are possible in reaction."

Compare that to editorials from the leading English dailies. Dawn said "religious indoctrination is feeding the fires of hatred and intolerance" and the Daily Times (of which Taseer was the publisher) said: "If the religious extremists who consider themselves the guardians of the Prophet's honour can go so far as to take the life of someone who opposed man-made laws, then society is heading for anarchy and barbarism."

Why the dichotomy between the two types of media?

Ed Husain is the author of "The Islamist," in which he describes how he was seduced by radical Islam as a student. He now works to help other young Muslims avoid the same fate.

"You have a situation where the masses in Pakistan -- very religious, very devoted -- tend to see those who speak out against (people) from the liberal tradition to be, essentially, anti-God, anti-Islamic.

"The vast majority of Pakistanis read the Urdu literature, and they are, then, suspicious of the English-speaking, English-educated, western-connected liberal elite that they see to be representatives -- stooges -- of the west," says Husain. "And this is the fundamental crisis within Pakistan."


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