Pakistan's troubled house

I did not know Salmaan Taseer personally. I did not even know much about the late Governor of Punjab's politics, except that he was a Pakistan People's Party stalwart who had been jailed and tortured during the dark period of General Zia-ul-Haq’s dictatorship in the 1980s. But when I heard the news of his assassination - the murder of a sitting provincial governor, no less - it hit home, hard. His own bodyguard had calmly filed 27 bullets into the governor and then, with an unsettling presence of mind, laid down his weapon and given himself up.

Why did he shoot the governor? Because he had had the gall to call the Blaspemy Law – ascribing punishment of death to those who insulted the Holy Prophet Muhammed – a ‘Black Law’. But Taseer's only crime was to sympathise with and try and get justice for Asia Bibi, a Christian woman and the first to be sentenced to death under the law. Taseer was calling for an amendment to the law, and to his killer, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, this itself was blasphemy and an insult to the Prophet.

Taseer's death has evoked varying reactions throughout the country. For the fundamentalists, Qadri is being hailed as a ‘hero’ who preserved the sanctity of the Holy Prophet. Right-wing lawyers – those 'objective', 'neutral' safekeepers of the law –showered rose petals on him as he was taken to court. The entire Bar Association of the capital city Islamabad has vowed to defend him.

Yet there are also those who are still reeling from the assassination. For Pakistan's liberals and progressives, his death represents a further constriction of the already small space they had to think, to debate and to question. For them, the ‘learned’ clerics who have hijacked their religion are slowly tightening the noose around them, suffocating them.

But they continue to fight, and with renewed determination, to reclaim that space to think, to breathe, to be stimulated. They are few in number, but if they were to be silenced as well they would lose their country to the hate-spewing bigots, and the only Islam left in Pakistan would be one of intolerance and narrow-mindedness.