My friend Timmy wrote the other day to ask what Pakistanis were saying about the gigantic bomb that the US just dropped on a few dozen Daesh fighters in eastern Afghanistan. Not an unreasonable question: Pakistan's fate is tied up with Afghanistan's and the target was pretty close to the border. But the answer is, Not much. An article about the hit was on the (online) front page of the big English-language papers, but nobody mentioned it at work except me, to a colleague who hadn't heard about it. By the afternoon, the story had moved down the front page in favor of stories about the lynching, late last week, of a student at a university about two hours from Islamabad.
That, people are talking about.
The attack was shocking: the young man, who had been accused of blasphemy, was attacked by a crowd of fellow-students, beaten, shot, and then beaten some more in death until the police were able to recover his body. The mob demanded the return of his body so they could burn it, but were not successful in getting it back. And there is video. Like the proliferation of videos of police assaults on black people in the US, the video seems to have snapped some otherwise complacent people to attention.
Pakistan has a fraught relationship with Islamic extremism. The government has long used extremist militias as a foreign-policy tool in its efforts to maintain power in the region, in particular with respect to Kashmir and to Afghanistan. Blasphemy is not just illegal here, it's punishable by death. But most Pakistanis I interact with -- devout Muslims no more or less than indifferent ones or proud atheists -- are horrified by mob violence and have no patience for extremism. People are cynical about the government's use of religion: an op/ed writer in one of the major papers, Dawn, observed that the initial government reaction to this recent lynching was to promise to root out blasphemers, in addition to arresting some suspects. To the op/ed writer, the message that sends is clear: Yeah, yeah, don't go around murdering each other in broad daylight, we'll make a big show of justice, but [wink, nudge] we all know who the real criminals are.
Now, a few days later, the head of the party that runs KPK, the province where the lynching happened, said, "Whoever planned his murder and whoever participated in it will be punished and made an example of for future generations. Even if the culprits are found to be from PTI [his party], they will be punished. We will not discriminate along party lines in pursuing this case. The entire country saw. Even animals don't behave this way. We will take this as a lesson and make sure no one ever misuses the blasphemy law again to murder people again."
That is a pretty revealing statement, sentence by sentence. It reveals a conceptualization of justice that's "medieval" in the European sense -- punishment as an example to others, rather than the modern concept of rehabilitation and imprisonment away from the public eye (basically the only theorist I've read on that subject is Foucault, so take that observation with a grain of salt). It clearly acknowledges that people believe political parties treat their own members differently when they are in power. It dehumanizes the attackers, drawing a line around them that separates/insulates the speaker from their actions. And it doesn't question the legitimacy of the blasphemy law at all, it accepts that such a thing should exist.
Lynching has become a hot topic in India, as well, with mobs killing mostly Muslim butchers who have been accused of slaughtering and selling cows.
No conclusion here, just observations.
That, people are talking about.
The attack was shocking: the young man, who had been accused of blasphemy, was attacked by a crowd of fellow-students, beaten, shot, and then beaten some more in death until the police were able to recover his body. The mob demanded the return of his body so they could burn it, but were not successful in getting it back. And there is video. Like the proliferation of videos of police assaults on black people in the US, the video seems to have snapped some otherwise complacent people to attention.
Pakistan has a fraught relationship with Islamic extremism. The government has long used extremist militias as a foreign-policy tool in its efforts to maintain power in the region, in particular with respect to Kashmir and to Afghanistan. Blasphemy is not just illegal here, it's punishable by death. But most Pakistanis I interact with -- devout Muslims no more or less than indifferent ones or proud atheists -- are horrified by mob violence and have no patience for extremism. People are cynical about the government's use of religion: an op/ed writer in one of the major papers, Dawn, observed that the initial government reaction to this recent lynching was to promise to root out blasphemers, in addition to arresting some suspects. To the op/ed writer, the message that sends is clear: Yeah, yeah, don't go around murdering each other in broad daylight, we'll make a big show of justice, but [wink, nudge] we all know who the real criminals are.
Now, a few days later, the head of the party that runs KPK, the province where the lynching happened, said, "Whoever planned his murder and whoever participated in it will be punished and made an example of for future generations. Even if the culprits are found to be from PTI [his party], they will be punished. We will not discriminate along party lines in pursuing this case. The entire country saw. Even animals don't behave this way. We will take this as a lesson and make sure no one ever misuses the blasphemy law again to murder people again."
That is a pretty revealing statement, sentence by sentence. It reveals a conceptualization of justice that's "medieval" in the European sense -- punishment as an example to others, rather than the modern concept of rehabilitation and imprisonment away from the public eye (basically the only theorist I've read on that subject is Foucault, so take that observation with a grain of salt). It clearly acknowledges that people believe political parties treat their own members differently when they are in power. It dehumanizes the attackers, drawing a line around them that separates/insulates the speaker from their actions. And it doesn't question the legitimacy of the blasphemy law at all, it accepts that such a thing should exist.
Lynching has become a hot topic in India, as well, with mobs killing mostly Muslim butchers who have been accused of slaughtering and selling cows.
No conclusion here, just observations.
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