Mick Hartley

In the wake of the arrest of an 8-year-old Hindu boy, Kunwar Khuldune Shahid. in the Spectator, looks at the "antediluvian monstrosity" of Pakistan's blasphemy law:

Sending texts, sharing poetry, giving homework, producing films, making footballs, removing stickers and drinking water are some of the acts that have been deemed blasphemous in Pakistan. Even reading the Quran, performing Islamic rituals or calling yourself Muslim is sacrilegious if you belong to the Ahmadiyya sect, making Pakistan the only country where one can be imprisoned — or even sentenced to death — for practising Islam. Where the officially excommunicated Ahmadiyya Muslims are legally barred from practising Islam, even Shia Muslims are victims of state persecution, with efforts made in the Sunni-majority country to outlaw their beliefs as blasphemous. Before the eight-year-old Hindu was charged with blasphemy, a three-year-old Shia Muslim had been investigated for organising an Islamic gathering. 

Notwithstanding the antediluvian monstrosity of sanctioning death for drawing images or burning pages, these blasphemy cases illustrate the trigger-happiness of Islamist mobs. Many of the Quran burning allegations are either fabricated or carried out by someone mentally unsound. A 12-year-old Christian girl had to flee the country after being falsely accused of tearing pages from the Quran, which were later reported to have been done by a local Islamic cleric in a bid to frame her….

Imran Khan’s response to the unrelenting surge in blasphemy cases has been to rally against the ‘Islamophobia’ in the West, where he wants to export Pakistan’s blasphemy law. In April, after weeks of violent unrest in the country over Charlie Hebdo’s Mohammed caricatures, Khan said he shared the ‘same goals’ as those demanding that France be nuked and vowed to make the West ‘scared of blaspheming’ against Islam’s prophet. The level of Khan’s hyperbole can be seen in his promise to impose trade sanctions on a country from which Pakistan takes billions of dollars worth of aid.

Pakistan shares a long border with China, where, in Xinjiang, the Muslim Uighurs are suffering a cultural genocide of extraordinary clinical brutality. Imran Khan has nothing to say on the subject, and the preachers and demagogues likewise remain unmoved. It's all about finding easy targets., like 8-year-old boys.

So far there have been at least 77 extra-judicial killings in Pakistan, hundreds sentenced to death and thousands rendered homeless. Instead of urging these countries — which constitute the vast majority of the Muslim world — to shun their vicious sharia clauses, Islamic blasphemy violence has been allowed to flourish elsewhere. 

Pakistan’s blasphemy law, and indeed its varying renditions across Muslim-majority countries, can only be eliminated by challenging the ideology that elevates offended Islamic sensibilities. As long as Islamic exceptionalism continues to be endorsed in the garb of protecting Muslim minorities in the West, minorities in countries like Pakistan will continue to be targeted by the gory excesses of Islamism.