Mick Hartley

Meanwhile, in Pakistan:

A Pakistani rights activist whose politician father was assassinated in 2011 for supposedly insulting Islam says he fears the same fate after a hardline religious group issued a fatwa demanding his execution and the police launched an investigation into allegations he had committed blasphemy.

Shaan Taseer said the Sunni Tehreek, a grouping of clerics drawn from the Barelvi movement, was “gunning for my blood and provoking people to take my life” over a Christmas video he posted on social media in which he criticised Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

His father, Salmaan Taseer, the former governor of Punjab province, was killed amid similar controversy by one of his own police guards six years ago.

The governor had infuriated hardliners with his demand for a government pardon for Asia Bibi, a poor Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy despite weak and contradictory evidence against her.

His killer, Mumtaz Qadri, became a hero, and an estimated 100,000 mourners attended his funeral following his execution last year.

The ire of the Barelvi sect, which on non-blasphemy issues is generally considered moderate, was rekindled last month after Taseer published a video expressing solidarity with people entangled in blasphemy allegations.

He called for the release of both Bibi, who remains on death row, and Nabeel Masih, a Christian teenager arrested last year for “liking” on Facebook a picture of the Kaaba in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site.

Taseer also demanded the repeal of what he called the “inhumane” blasphemy laws, a longstanding demand of international human rights groups who say the laws are widely abused by people who level false allegations to settle personal scores.

The video prompted Sunni Tehreek to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, saying Taseer was liable for death because he had supposedly committed both blasphemy and apostasy.

Police in the city of Lahore also lodged a first investigation report (FIR), a document that formally starts the process of investigating a crime, under the country’s blasphemy laws….

Whether or not the police pursue the matter, the mere accusation of blasphemy can be enough to incite vigilante attacks.

Taseer, who lives abroad but visits Pakistan regularly, said the Sunni Tehreek was deliberately trying to provoke its supporters in the hope that someone would mimic the killing of his father, which took place in an Islamabad market on 4 January 2011.

“On social media there are calls for another Mumtaz Qadri to deal with me and people are offering to be his successor,” he said. “What they plan to do is engineer another Qadri-like assassination.”

If the Barelvi are a moderate sect, one wonders what an immoderate sect would look like.

Or rather, no, we know only too well what an immoderate Islamic sect looks like. It's just that, as I said in my post six years ago on the occasion of Salmaan Taseer's killing, all this does cast considerable doubt on the distinction we commentators love to make between Islam and Islamism.