Dawood I. Ahmed on Pakistan's Blasphemy Law

Solving Pakistan's Blasphemy Problem

Almost a quarter of the countries in the world have blasphemy laws. Yet no blasphemy law has as notorious a reputation as that of Pakistan's, which is under the spotlight again as a scholar/dean of a university who was accused of blasphemy was shot dead. Only a few weeks ago, a woman and two children were murdered by a mob enraged over an "an allegedly blasphemous Facebook post." Unfortunately, these incidents are not rare.

Pakistan's blasphemy law has survived almost unamended for the past three decades. Yet blasphemy cases and even the frequency of incidents of violence have spiked only in the last 10 years or so. A graph from the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad records major blasphemy cases in the 60 years between 1953 and 2012. Although there were very few blasphemy cases between 1953 and 1979 and only a handful of cases almost every year in the 80s and 90s (that is, after Zia changed the law), the number of blasphemy cases only began to increase at an alarming rate after 2004 -- almost two decades after the amendment to the law by Zia.

There could be many reasons as to why there was a jump in cases only in the last decade, but it demonstrates quite clearly that neither the blasphemy law's existence, nor its amendment by Zia can explain the sharp rise in blasphemy-related cases or the descent into blasphemy related violence on their own. To be sure, the argument is not that the law does not have problems. It is very defective -- in design and in application. Yet, while Pakistan's blasphemy law has serious defects such as the lack of intent required for the offence and the vague language used to denote offences and its particular targeting of Ahmadis, as highlighted by Osama Siddique, we do suggest that, based on the data, it is short-sighted to adopt a narrow focus on the law as being the sole instigator of blasphemy related violence in the country. Such a presumption is common where even informed commentators sometimes assume that the law caused the violence -- when in reality, the sudden rise in the number of cases indicates something else: that other deeply-ingrained social factors, and not the law on its own, may be at play in increasing blasphemy related violence. A myopic focus on the law thus detracts from getting to the root of the problem.

Read more at Foreign Policy