Karachi: Members of the Action Committee for Human Rights chant slogans in the support of Rimsha Masih (AFP)

A very strong and forceful article by Mehdi Hasan relating to the persecution of Rimsha Masih. (h/t: Jai):

Not In My Name: Islam, Pakistan and the Blasphemy Laws

by Mehdi Hasan (Huffington Post)

You could not make it up. An 11-year old Christian girl in Pakistan with Down’s Syndrome is in police custody, and could face the death penalty, for allegedly burning pages from the Quran.

The girl, who has been identified as Rifta Masih, was arrested on blasphemy charges and is being held in Islamabad pending a court appearance later this month. She was detained by police after an angry mob turned up at her family’s single-roomed home in a poor district on the outskirts of the Pakistani capital.

“About 500-600 people had gathered outside her house in Islamabad, and they were very emotional, angry, and they might have harmed her if we had not quickly reacted,” Pakistani police officer Zabi Ullah told reporters.

“Harmed her”? Really? I mean, really? What on Allah’s earth is wrong with so many self-professed Muslims in the self-styled Islamic Republic of Pakistan? Have they taken leave of their morals as well as their senses? It beggars belief that they should want to hurt or attack a child in the name of a religion based on mercy, compassion and justice.

Some defenders of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws – under which anyone found guilty of insulting the Quran or Prophet Muhammad can be sentenced to death – have been keen to highlight the growing number of press reports that suggest Masih may be 16, rather than 11, and may not have Down’s Syndrome.

To which the only appropriate response is: so what?

Whether she is 11 or 16, mentally able or mentally retarded is, frankly, irrelevant. For a start, a child is a child and should be treated as such. Pakistani authorities have legal as well as moral obligations. Second, even if this girl did set fire to pages from the Quran – and there is, incidentally, not a single eyewitness to this alleged ‘crime’ – to sentence her to death for doing so would be, to put it mildly, a grossly disproportionate ‘penalty’.

Personally, I’ve never quite understood why so many of my co-religionists are so keen to kill or maim those who ‘insult’ Islam, Prophet Muhammad or the Quran. What is behind such rage and, dare I add, insecurity? Is their God so weak, so sensitive, so precious, that He cannot withstand any rejection?

Mine, for the record, isn’t. As the Pakistani writer and singer Fifi Haroon noted on Twitter: “You think God needs little old you to protect him from an 11-year-old girl with Down’s Syndrome? Think again.”

It is worth pointing out that there is a misguided assumption among some Muslims that Pakistani-style blasphemy laws are divinely-mandated. They aren’t. They were instituted by Pakistani dictator General Zia ul Haq in the 1980s, says leading Pakistani human-rights lawyer Asma Jahangir, “as a pretext for waging war in Afghanistan and adopting an aggressive stance towards India. By advancing a more orthodox version of Islam, he was able to hold on to a repressive regime and quell any opposition”.

Here is the reality: the books of Islamic tradition are replete with stories of how Prophet Muhammad was verbally and physically abused by his idol-worshipping enemies in Mecca. They threw animal intestines and excrement on him; on one famous occasion, a group of homeless children threw stones and rocks at him. Yet he did not have them killed, tortured or detained. The founder of the Islamic faith, it seems, had a much thicker skin than many of its 21st Century adherents.

So far, in Pakistan, no one has yet been executed for blasphemy but, as the Guardian‘s Jon Boone observes, “long prison terms are common – one Christian couple was sentenced to 25 years in 2010 after being accused of touching the Qur’an with unwashed hands”.

Christians have long been a target of Pakistan’s ultra-conservative Islamic religious parties and movements. The blasphemy laws, in particular, are used again to criminalise Pakistani Christians on the flimsiest of pretexts; Rifta Masih, perhaps, is just the latest victim.

Of course, some of my co-religionists will soon claim that this latest story is all a Western media conspiracy – against Islam, against Muslims, against poor Pakistan. If only. Listen to Jahangir, who says those accused of blasphemy are “almost always helpless in the face of intimidation and a frightened or biased judiciary… Pakistan’s future remains uncertain and its will to fight against rising religious intolerance is waning.”

Listen to Zora Yusuf, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who says the law “has been exploited by individuals to settle personal scores, to grab land, to violate the rights of non-Muslims, to basically harass them.”

Masih’s arrest even provoked Imran Khan, the country’s most high-profile politician, to tweet:

“Shameful! Sending an 11yr old girl to prison is against the very spirit of Islam which is all about being Just and Compassionate.”

He added:

“Poor child is already suffering from Down’s Syndrome. State should care for its children not torment them. We demand her immed release.”

Khan is to be commended for his public condemnation of Masih’s arrest. It is a bold (dangerous?) move in a land where politicians – such as the Punjab governor Salman Taseer - have been shot dead for speaking out against the barbaric blasphemy laws.

I, for one, am fed up with politicians, mullahs and mobs using my religion to further their own vicious and sectarian agendas. So here’s my own very simple message to the bigots, fanatics and reactionaries of the Islamic world: whatever intellectual or theological disagreements we may have with them, the fact is that Christians (and, for that matter, Jews) are our brethren; the Quran respectfully refers to them as the “People of the Book“. Nor should we extend our tolerance, compassion and solidarity only to members of Abrahamic faiths while demonising and discriminating against everyone else. Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists – all of them are also our brethren. Don’t believe me? Listen to the verdict of Imam Ali ibn Abu Talib, the great Muslim caliph and son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad: “Remember that people are of two kinds; they are either your brothers in religion or your brothers in mankind.”

The imprisonment of this Christian child isn’t only about Pakistan or Pakistanis. Those of us who claim to be members of a global Muslim ummah cannot be silent when such flagrant human-rights abuses are committed in the name of Islam and in the world’s second-biggest Muslim-majority nation. Denial is not an option, nor is turning a blind eye. We have to speak out against hate, intolerance and the bullying of non-Muslim minorities – otherwise we risk becoming complicit in such crimes. “Not in my name” has to be more than just an anti-war slogan.

A nuanced and in-depth article on all the problems with James Bloodworth’s article comparing the term “Islamophobia” to “Orwellian doublespeak.” It covers all the points that I may have missed in today’s feature:

Islamophobia: Orwellian ‘Doublespeak’ ?‎

by M. Francois-Cerrah (HuffingtonPost)

Earlier this month, James Bloodworth wrote a blog for the Independent ‎comparing Islamophobia to a type of Orwellian doublespeak, designed to ‎shut down public debate. He joins a chorus of voices on the Left who reject ‎the term on grounds of the ‘freedom to criticise’ Islam.‎

Some on the Left have gone further still, joining voices on the Right in ‎denouncing Islam on the grounds of its alleged anti-liberal tenets. British ‎novelist and former New Statesman editor Martin Amis has previously ‎stated Muslims should be deprived of their civil liberties and Guardian ‎columnist Polly Toynbee frequently regurgitates the most odious and ‎decontextualized translations of the Quran as if they were, well – Gospel. ‎Paul Hockenos argues that “the left and liberals have largely capitulated, ‎unable to address the issue of Islam and the Muslims among us in a ‎constructive way.”‎

Despite the frequently erected straw-man of stifling free speech, ‎countering islamophobia is not about limiting discussion of the faith itself. ‎It is about ensuring a largely socially, economically and politically‎disenfranchised minority is not stigmatised, stereotyped, further ‎marginalised and consequently left open to hate crimes.‎

A personal bugbear is the suggestion that Islam or the Quran ‘says’ – Islam ‎doesn’t speak – people speak in the name of Islam, filtering the texts ‎through their experiences and drawing on interpretive traditions. ‎Islamophobia is when influential figures like Toynbee define Islam in a ‎public sphere where Muslims struggle to make themselves heard, over ‎and above how Muslims themselves understand their faith. In other ‎words, it is to ascribe meaning to Islam which most Muslims do not. This ‎reification of faith assumes that, unlike other religious traditions, Islam is ‎monolithic and can be gleaned from a brief perusal of sacred texts. It can’t. ‎To do so is to misrepresent Islam, the faith of over 1.3 billion people in the ‎world, and to leave its practitioners open to the accusation of complicity in ‎a depraved hate cult.‎

What’s more, despite a clear ontological distinction between race and ‎religion, it cannot be ignored that Islam is associated with racialized ‎minorities – South Asians in the UK, Arabs in France, Turks in Germany. ‎When critique of religion overlaps so significantly with a particular racial ‎group within society, and is often used as short-hand for that racial group, ‎the line between religion and race becomes obscured. The Daily Mail’s ‎choice to use the term “muslim gang” to refer to rapists, is one such ‎example. The recent case in Rochdale further illustrated this confusion. ‎While Chief Crown Prosecutor in the case Nazir Afzal blamed “imported ‎cultural baggage”, commentators such as David Aaronovitch promptly ‎interpreted that to mean Islam.

Although Pakistan is a Muslim majority ‎country, to assume Islam is the central motivating factor in the behaviour ‎of all Pakistanis, is a form of cultural racism. ‎

Islamophobia, as a term, is required to refer to precisely these cases where ‎the focus of abuse is a projected understanding of what someone stands ‎for based on their being identified as Muslim. New forms of discrimination ‎avoid the crude biological markers of racial stereotyping and have been ‎replaced with a focus on cultural differences, real or imagined, to ‎rationalize the unequal status and treatment of different racial groups. ‎

The assumptions is that honour killings and forced marriages are ‎reflections of a backward ‘islamic’ culture, which through the presence of ‎Muslims in Europe, poses a threat to our identity and values. Despite ‎Muslim objections to these practise, such assumptions are then reflected in ‎people’s attitudes and behaviour towards Muslims. ‎

The topic of Islam has had a uniquely harmonising effect on Left and Right, ‎uniting unlikely pundits in a shared concern that Islam – assumed to be a ‎hegemonic influence on people’s behaviour- is responsible for virtually all ‎social ills, from sex trafficking to benefit fraud. Perceived ethnic uniformity ‎is taken to mirror a uniformity of belief and outlooks, despite the fact, all ‎religions have plural expressions.‎

The concern is that the racist essentializing of “Muslimhood” is ignored on ‎the grounds that the term ‘islamophobia’ isn’t clear enough. I would wager ‎the term is crystal clear for those on the receiving end – such as when ‎Muslim columnist Mehdi Hasan was described by one blogger as a ‎‎”moderate cockroach“. Or when the American writer Laila Lalami ‘s ‎husband was asked by an immigration officer “So, how many camels did ‎you have to trade for her?” ‎

Islamophobia is only unclear to those who seek to obfuscate its meaning. It ‎is the tendency to reify Islam – that is to assume the behaviour of given ‎individuals (typically extremists) reflects an accurate concretisation of the ‎principles of the faith itself, and it is the tendency to view its practitioners, ‎Muslims, as a monolithic block, whose every behaviour is a consequence of ‎that essentialised identity.‎

Rather than investigating and investing in countering rape culture, we ‎claim the ‘muslimhood’ of particular rapists is to blame, absolving popular ‎culture when the men themselves refer to the victims using the popular ‎playground put down “slags“. We regularly see ‘Islam’ used as a catch-all ‎phrase to explain complex phenomena, distracting us from the real issues.‎

Islamophobia is rejecting the ease with which dejecting stereotypes are ‎accepted as normal, such as the recent claim, popularised by the Daily ‎Mirror, that Zain Malik of boyband One Direction, was “pimping Islam” on ‎young girls through “boyband jihad”. Or the use of imagery to fan the ‎flames of fear, as the Sun on Sunday did by superimposing the image of a ‎woman in a burka against a caustic anti-immigration article. ‎

Raising awareness of islamophobia is also about recognising that far from ‎being a lone sociopath, Breivik’s actions were grounded in an all too ‎common view of Islam and Muslims as a fifth column and a threat to ‎Western values. A consequence of this ‘theoretical’ islamophobia, the ‎intellectual jousting over the place of Islam in Europe, is that Muslims in ‎Europe are facing increasingly tough conditions. ‎

According to a report from Amnesty International, “European Muslims are ‎regularly denied employment and educational opportunities because of ‎widespread cultural and religious stereotypes that lead to discrimination ‎against them.” ‎

Just as minarets or or face veils have become imbued with a significance ‎beyond that attributed to them by Muslims themselves, discrimination ‎against those bearing religious symbols becomes justified through the ‎fallacious reasoning that people have chosen to subscribe to those ideas, in ‎a way people don’t choose their ethnicity. We don’t choose the significance ‎people attribute to our symbols – especially when we have so little access ‎to defining them ourselves. We have no choice in the stereotypes and ‎assumptions people make on the basis of our skin colour, nor do we have a ‎choice in those stereotypes concerning the symbols which people interpret ‎according to the dominant narrative of extremism and cultural ‎incompatibility. ‎

John Mullen of France’s radical left-wing Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste has ‎argued that “opposition to religious practices on the basis of progressive ‎values can easily turn into a thinly disguised form of racism.” It is time the ‎Left take a stronger and clearer stance against islamophobia and stop ‎giving the Right free rein to dictate the terms of European interaction with ‎Muslims based on misplaced and ill-informed assumptions about Islam ‎and Muslims.‎

The struggle against islamophobia is the struggle for a nuanced and ‎contextualised appraisal of events involving Muslims, a refusal to accept ‎that everything can be explained away through a facile reference to ‘Islam’ ‎and a defence of a European minority group. There is nothing Orwellian ‎about that.‎

Follow Myriam Francois-Cerrah on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MFrancoisCerrah

An important article from the Independent’s Owen Jones on the need for all communities to join forces to fight Islamophobia:

Owen Jones: Islamophobia – for Muslims, read Jews. And be shocked

by Owen Jones (The Independent)

To be a prominent Muslim means suffering a daily diet of bigotry and even outright hatred. This week, Mehdi Hasan – who, other than my colleague Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, is Britain’s only prominent Muslim journalist – wrote of how, every day, he is attacked as a “jihadist” and a “terrorist”. He has been described as a “dangerous Muslim shithead”, a “moderate cockroach”, and worse. The message from his critics is clear: Muslims have no legitimate place in public life.

Mehdi Hasan hits out against the campaign of silencing Muslims in public life through acts of intimidation and smearing:

We mustn’t allow Muslims in public life to be silenced

by Mehdi Hasan (Guardian: Comment is Free)

Have you ever been called an Islamist? How about a jihadist or a terrorist? Extremist, maybe? Welcome to my world. It’s pretty depressing. Every morning, I take a deep breath and then go online to discover what new insult or smear has been thrown in my direction. Whether it’s tweets, blogposts or comment threads, the abuse is as relentless as it is vicious.

You might think I’d have become used to it by now. Well, I haven’t. When I started writing for a living, I never imagined I’d be the victim of such personal, such Islamophobic, attacks, on a near-daily basis. On joining the New Statesman in 2009, I was promptly subjected to an online smear campaign, involving a series of selectively edited videos of speeches I’d delivered in front of groups of Muslim university students several years ago. I was accused of being a “secret” member of the extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and a “dangerous Muslim shithead” in the “same genre” as the Nazis. The post that sticks in my mind is from the blogger who referred to me as a “moderate cockroach” whose Islamic faith was “no different from the Islam of Abu Hamza, Abu Qatada, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Anjem Choudary or any of the ‘tiny minority’ of Islamic terrorists who believe that Islam must dominate, no matter what the cost”.

Three years later, as I leave the New Statesman to join the Huffington Post UK, little seems to have changed. “Huffington Post’s new UK political director brings pro-Iran baggage,” screamed the headline on the Fox News website back in late May. My “baggage”? I once publicly praised a fatwa from Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, forbidding the production of nuclear weapons. Shame on me! Another ultra-conservative US news website, the Washington Free Beacon, referred to me as the “HuffPo’s house jihadi”.

The mere mention of the words “Islam” or “Muslim” generates astonishing levels of hysteria and hate on the web. As one of only two Muslim columnists in the mainstream media – the other being the Independent’s Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – I have the dubious distinction of being on the receiving end of much of it. In August 2011, for instance, I wrote a light-hearted column in the Guardian on Ramadan, examining how Muslim athletes cope with fasting while competing. The article provoked an astonishing 957 comments, the vast majority of which were malicious, belligerent or both. As one perplexed commenter observed: “There is much we might criticise Islam for … but to see the amount of hatred being spewed on this thread on an article about something as innocuous as fasting really makes one wonder.” Indeed.

And it isn’t just pieces about Muslims. A recent interview of mine with the shadow chancellor, Ed Balls, elicited the following response: “Get out of my country, goatfucker.” How many other political columnists have to deal with such “feedback”? And how many of my fellow pundits in the British media get death threats in the post, warning them that “there will not be 1 live Muslim left in Europe when we have finished”?

From my perspective, the British commentariat can be divided into three groups. The first consists of a handful of journalists who regularly speak out against the rising tide of anti-Muslim bigotry – from the Telegraph’s Peter Oborne to a bevy of Guardian columnists, including Jonathan Freedland, Seumas Milne and Gary Younge.

The second consists of those writers, such as the Mail’s Melanie Phillips, the Telegraph’s Charles Moore and the Spectator’s Douglas Murray, who see Islam and Muslims as alien, hostile and threatening. Phillips has referred darkly to a “fifth column in our midst”; Murray has said “conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”.

But it is the third, and perhaps biggest, group that concerns me most: those commentators who boast otherwise impeccable anti-racist credentials yet tend to be silent on the subject of Islamophobia; journalists who cannot bring themselves to recognise, let alone condemn, the growing prevalence of anti-Muslim feeling across Europe – or acknowledge the simple fact that the targeting of a powerless, brown-skinned minority is indeed a form of racism.

Read the rest…

On the politics of “halal hysteria” in the UK and beyond:

by Mehdi Hasan (New Statesman)

I am sitting in one of London’s finest Indian restaurants, Benares, in the heart of Mayfair. I’ve just placed an order for the “Tandoori Ratan” mixed-grill appetiser – a trio of fennel lamb chop, chicken cutlet and king prawn.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty excited. Most of the upmarket restaurants in London do not cater for the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. Benares is one of the few exceptions: all of the lamb and chicken dishes on its menu are halal.

The restaurant opened in 2003 and its owner, Atul Kochhar, is a Michelin-starred chef. “Right from day one, we’ve kept our lamb and chicken halal,” Kochhar says. “It was a very conscious decision because I grew up in India, a secular country, where I was taught to have respect for all religions.” Kochhar, who is a Hindu, says Muslims make up “easily between 10 and 20 per cent” of his regular diners. It isn’t just a taste for religious pluralism that has dictated the contents of his menu; serving halal meat makes commercial, as well as cultural, sense.

To other, perhaps less tolerant types, however, the rise of halal meat in the west and here in the UK, in particular, is a source of tension, controversy, fear and loathing. British Muslims are living through a period of halal hysteria, a moral panic over our meat. First there came 9/11, 7/7 and the “Islamic” terror threat; then there was the row over the niqab (face veil) and hijab (headscarf); now, astonishingly, it’s the frenzy over halal meat.

Last month, MPs in the Commons rejected a ten-minute-rule bill that would have made it mandatory for retailers to label all of the halal and kosher meat on sale and make it clear on the packaging that the animals were “killed without stunning”. The bill’s proponent, the Tory backbencher Philip Davies, claimed that the meat was being “forced upon” shoppers “without their knowledge”. It was defeated by the narrowest of margins – 73 votes to 70.

As is so often the case, the right-wing press is behind much of the fear-mongering and misinformation. “Britain goes halal . . . but no one tells the public,” screamed the front-page headline in the Mail on Sunday on 19 September 2010. The paper claimed that supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, pubs and big sporting venues such as Wembley Stadium were “controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public”.

The following week, readers were treated to two more stories suggesting a sinister plot to inflict halal meat on innocent, animal-loving, non-Muslim Britons. “How 70 per cent of New Zealand lamb imports to Britain are halal . . . but this is NOT put on the label”, said the Daily Mail on 25 September 2010. “Top supermarkets secretly sell halal: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and M&S don’t tell us meat is ritually slaughtered,” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday the next day.

With the threat from terrorism receding, Britain’s Islam-baiters have jumped on the anti-halal bandwagon, and not just the neo-fascists of the British National Party and the English Defence League, which has a page on its website devoted to its (anti-) “halal campaign”, but mainstream commentators, too. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle – who once wrote a column entitled “Islamophobia? Count me in” – has demanded that halal meat be banned and called for a boycott of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury and the rest until they agree to stop stocking halal products. “I will buy no meat from supermarkets,” he wrote, rather melodramatically, back in 2010.

Read the rest here….