As he tried to restart his stalled car, the young military doctor would have heard the speech being delivered to the Muslim Railway Employees Association near Quetta railway station. Followers of the Ahmadi faith, a frenzied cleric was proclaiming, were blasphemers and heretics, who ought to be punished by death. Then, someone in the crowd noticed that Major Mahmood Ahmad had a short beard. The doctor’s body was found later, his one lung cut through and his guts carved out of his body.
Like so many thousands after it, the murder on 11 August 1948—Pakistan’s very first blasphemy killing—remained unidentified and the case was filed untraced.
There was, judges Muhammad Munir and MR Kayani acidly recorded in an official inquiry, no one “willing to take credit for this act of Islamic heroism and out of a large number of persons who were eyewitnesses, none was able or willing to identify the ghazis who were authors of this brave deed.”
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As the 75th anniversary of Major Mahmood’s murder passes, unmentioned, unnoticed, the Pakistani state and Islamist groups continue to pursue his killers’ project.
Last month, a 22-year-old Christian Noman Masih was sentenced to death for failing to delete purportedly blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—sent to him on WhatsApp by a Muslim friend, who has not been prosecuted. An eight-year-old Hindu boy faces death penalty for urinating on the carpet of a madrasa library. Aneeqa Atia, a 26-year-old Muslim woman, is on death row.
The scholar Muhammad Nafees has shown how blasphemy cases have surged over the years, together with extrajudicial killings of purported heretics.
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The politics of blasphemy
Five years after Major Mahmood’s death, in 1953, massive anti-Ahmadi riots tore through Pakistan. Led by the right-wing Majlis-e-Ahrar, the protests marked a determined attempt by Pakistan’s clerics to take control of the political system. The collapse of the police in the face of anti-Ahmadi communal violence compelled the government to proclaim martial law for the first time. Even though the clerics lost the battle, they emerged as significant political actors.
The genesis of the conflict, though, lay in the intense competition between Hindu nationalist and Islamist political movements that broke out across Punjab a century ago. The contestation—marked by bitter communal invective, as well as the first blasphemy murder in 1929—often erupted into riots.
Even though the colonial penal code provided for the punishment of anyone who “destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons”, fears mounted over the power of religious groups to incite violence. In 1927, the law was—despite some unease over the consequences—expanded to proscribe “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.”
General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ruled Pakistan from 1977 until his death in 1988, expanded the power to punish religious offences. The most important of his reforms was Section 298(C) of the penal code, which codified the death sentence for blasphemy. The law mandates that whoever “by words, either spoken or written or by visible representation, or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation, directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad shall be punished with death, or imprisonment for life”.
The General’s notorious Ordnance XX institutionalised severe restrictions on the practice of the Ahmadi faith, conceding the demands made by clerics in 1953. Attacks on Ahmadi mosques and graveyards have continued unabated. In 2014, the word “Muslim” was gouged out from an epitaph on the gravestone of the Nobel-prize winning physicist Abdus Salam, so it bizarrely read “the First Nobel Laureate”.
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God’s own army
Ever since the murder of Punjab governor Salman Taseer in 2011—assassinated for opposing the blasphemy laws—it’s been clear that God commands a not-insubstantial vigilante army in Pakistan. Lawyers in Lahore showered rose petals on Taseer’s assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, and clerics have repeatedly hailed him as a martyr. The mausoleum for Qadri in Lahore’s Miani Sahib graveyard draws large numbers of supporters, and hagiographic accounts of his life are taught in school.
And, most important, no political party in Pakistan is willing to call for the repeal of the blasphemy laws.
Taseer’s killing followed his calls to reform the blasphemy laws, in the wake of a death sentence handed down to Asiya Noreen. Noreen, a member of the only Christian family in the Punjab village of Ittan Wala, had been asked to fetch water for a group of women working in the fields. Some of the women refused to accept the water, because of her low caste, and an argument broke out.
Local clerics said Noreen had blasphemed against the prophet. Taseer, who met her in prison, concluded that the charge had been brought to hide the fact that she had been beaten and gang-raped for having argued with people of a higher caste.
The assassination of Taseer illustrated deep ambiguities in the Pakistani elite’s relationship with religion. Taseer’s own father, the Left-wing poet Muhammad Din Taseer, had marched in the funeral procession of the 1929 blasphemy murderer, Ilm Din. Even though historical documents show the 19-year-old killer carpenter may have been driven by a dysfunctional homoerotic fixation, rather than religious passion, the complexities of the case are rarely discussed.
Following Taseer’s killing, minorities affairs minister Shahbaz Bhatti was also murdered for helping provide a legal defence to Noreen Bhatti’s assassin, Tehreek-e-Taliban jihadist Hammad Adil, who came from an affluent family and was the brother of a senior police officer.
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The prosecutions have continued—often with a surreal tinge. A 17-year-old schoolboy was prosecuted for doodling supposedly blasphemous remarks on a corner of an examination paper. A doctor who threw into the dustbin the business card of a pharmaceutical salesman, whose first name was the same as that of the Prophet, also faced a blasphemy trial. In another case, a Muslim cleric and his son were sentenced to prison for tearing down religious pamphlets.
Even though convictions have generally been set aside on appeal, jihadists and mobs have sometimes overruled judicial verdicts by force. In one 2021 case, a police officer murdered Lahore resident Muhammad Waqas, after a judge acquitted him of blasphemy charges. In other cases, mobs have punished those they believe to be guilty even before the trials began—just as Major Mahmood was slaughtered in 1948.
Even an American citizen has been killed on blasphemy charges, with Tahir Naseem being shot inside the court hearing his case. The only people with some degree of immunity against blasphemy allegations are Chinese nationals, whom the government has been more than willing to protect.
Like so much to do with theology, Pakistan’s anti-blasphemy laws are contested. London-based author Ziauddin Sardar, among others, has noted that the Quran “has no notion of blasphemy.” The concept, he argues, was introduced by rulers in 8CE, who used it as a tool to punish political opponents.
There’s no will in Pakistan, though, to engage in that fraught debate. The blasphemy laws demonstrate that real power lies with the clerics—not the political system or the state.
The author is National Security Editor, ThePrint. He tweets @praveenswami. Views are personal.