New Delhi: Some Pakistanis are angry again. This time, they are finding a marriage between two characters in a TV serial to be blasphemous. Shia activists in Dadu and Sindh, last week, filed a blasphemy case against ARY Digital for airing the TV drama “Sher.” The complaint alleges that the show insults Syeds (believed to be descendants of the Prophet Muhammad) by portraying the marriage between a Syed girl and a non-Syed boy.
Sher is a 2025 Pakistani television series starring Danish Taimoor and Sarah Khan in the lead roles.
The drama follows the story of Sher Zaman and Fajar, two individuals from rival families who fall in love, facing intense family conflicts, longstanding feuds, and the challenges of forbidden romance.
Pakistanis are divided between defending religious sensitivities and mocking what they see as misplaced outrage.
“Pakistan seems to have more Syed than the entire Arabian Peninsula. In Karachi, every third person one meets or comes across is a Syed. Literally, one can buy half a dozen Syeds for Rs. 500. Buy a full dozen & you get two for free,” Pakistani X user Faisal Naseer wrote.
Another asked: “How is this blasphemy?” to which one replied: “By Pak logistics”.
Others find it funny. “Looks like someone woke up from a sleep and thought about minting money from a super hit drama lol,” one Reddit user wrote.
Soon, a playful jab also emerged in reference to actor Danish Taimoor, who stars in Sher. When one Redditor commented, “Of all the things that people can object about, this is what they came up with? Filhaal sab ka dimagh kharab hai”, another asked, “Are you King Danish by any chance? You use ‘filhaal’ a lot”.
Taimoor had previously made headlines earlier this year after remarking that although Islam permits four marriages, “filhaal (for now)” he is content with his wife, actress Ayeza Khan — turning the word into an online meme.
The controversy, however, exposes deeper issues, not just around religion and entertainment, but also caste, class, and sectarian hierarchy in Pakistan.
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Casteism in Pakistan
In a 2020 article for Al Jazeera, Shaista Abdul Aziz Patel, Assistant Professor of Critical Muslim Studies at the University of California, San Diego, noted that Pakistan has about 40 castes, 32 of which were listed as scheduled castes under the November 1957 Presidential Ordinance.
A 2007 report by journalist Zulfiqar Shah highlighted how a 6 per cent government job quota for scheduled castes, announced in 1948, was never ethically implemented and was eventually scrapped in the 1990s. As a result, no political or economic security measures were extended to scheduled caste communities, who remain vulnerable and are often dismissed as mere “religious minorities.”
Shah emphasised that this systemic neglect has left lower-caste groups “marked for violence with impunity”.
According to Patel, the 2016 murder of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch, though largely framed in moral and gendered terms, also carried caste undertones. Anti-caste activist Auwn Gurmani was one of the few public figures who drew attention to that dimension, though most journalists and scholars ignored it.
She also argued that caste denial in Pakistan stems from the widespread belief that because Islam rejects caste, it cannot exist among Muslims. “The Quran does not institutionalise caste as Hindu scriptures do, and Pakistan, unlike India, lacks the framework of Brahminical cis-heteropatriarchy and Islamophobia that governs its neighbour’s nation-state,” alleged Patel.
However, caste in Pakistan, she claimed in her article, manifests through religious, social, economic, and gendered hierarchies — “not saffron-tinted as in Hindu nationalism, but rather green, taking on an Islamic traditional hue”.
Sindhi anti-caste scholar Ghulam Hussain has also argued that Syedism or Syed supremacy — the notion that Syeds, as supposed descendants of the Prophet, have a purer lineage and deeper religious authority — functions as a form of upper-caste hegemony.
Anti-caste researcher Haris Gazdar further notes that “the public silencing on caste contrasts with an obsession with it in private dealings.” He documents numerous forms of caste-based violence, from pejorative labels and social segregation (such as taboos on eating together) to land theft, beatings, and sexual violence — all used to maintain caste hierarchies.
Upper-caste Muslims often invoke Islamic purity laws to rationalise such discrimination, claiming that lower-caste Hindus and Christians consume haram (forbidden) food. Yet, paradoxically, dining with upper-caste Hindus or Christians is not frowned upon.
These notions of purity have become intertwined with the Islamic ideas of “paak” (pure) and “naapak” (impure) in Pakistan’s casteist interpretations of Islam. Even when lower-caste Hindus or Christians convert to Islam, they frequently continue to face exclusion and violence — their conversion does not erase caste identity.
In Pakistan, there is also a persistent misconception that caste is a rural phenomenon, confined to provinces like Sindh and Punjab. In reality, as researchers argue, caste “dangerously circulates as common sense” in major cities as well.
Syedism, as both a social and political structure of dominance, remains deeply embedded in Pakistani society and its diaspora — a fact starkly illustrated by the outrage over this TV show. X users chose to employ their quintessential humour to counter Pakistani social and cultural realities.
“Delusional Superiority Complex”, a Pakistani X user wrote, while another user, Shuja, said, “Glad to see Shias in a Sunni-dominated field”.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)