Asia Bibi’s plight illuminates Pakistan’s ongoing struggle between democratic modernity and extremist Islam. Bibi is a Roman Catholic who has spent years in detention after being sentenced to death for insulting Pakistan’s Islamic faith – a ridiculous charge, considering the facts of her case.
The nation’s supreme court overturned Bibi’s conviction last week, ruling it unjustified. That ruling would have both figuratively and literally closed the case, but for Prime Minister Imran Khan. Facing protests by fanatical Islamists longing to see Bibi lynched, the arch-populist Khan is preventing Bibi leaving Pakistan for sanctuary in the west. The implication is that Khan will find a way to see Bibi retried or at least held under permanent house arrest. In this battle over Bibi’s fate; between the supreme court, the government, and Islamist mobs, we see Pakistan’s modern struggle for a better democracy.
In Khan’s government, the issue is weakness matched to narrow-minded political opportunism. After first defending the judiciary’s independent authority, Khan then blinked when hard-line Islamists took to the streets in mouth frothing hordes. And just as he flirted with hard-line Islamists to win election earlier this year, Khan decided to put his narrow populist base before the rights of an innocent citizen. Here we see another chapter in the long-running Pakistani myth that democracy can coexist with misogynistic fanatics bearing terroristic threats. Khan the cricket-master is far more interested in joining the Chinese imperial project than he is in justice.
Still, this is about far more than one person’s plight. What’s ultimately at stake here is whether religious minorities should live free of mob intimidation, and thus whether Pakistan is a true democracy. The long path to answering that question has already borne blood. Former minorities minister and fellow Catholic, Shahbaz Bhatti, and former Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, have both been assassinated for speaking in Bibi’s defense.
Fortunately, the supreme court offers a better testament to modern Pakistan.
Overturning Bibi’s conviction, Chief Justice Saqib Nasir was unequivocal. The established facts, he said, prove “inescapable and irresistible that the prosecution had failed to prove its case against [Bibi] beyond reasonable doubt.” In the most basic instance, Nisar notes that Bibi was accosted for no other reason than drinking water out of a cup. This, her accusers said, was a Christian act of pollution against the Islamic purity and cleanliness of her co-workers.
Yet the best rationale for overturning Bibi’s conviction came from another Justice, Asif Khosa. Because Justice Khosa threw the prosecution’s argument right back at them. He noted that those accusing Bibi appeared to have broken the law themselves by attacking Bibi’s Christian faith. “Blasphemy is a serious offence,” Khosa noted, “but the insult of [Bibi’s] religion and religious sensibilities by the complainant party and then mixing truth with falsehood in the name of the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) was also not short of being blasphemous. It is ironical that in the Arabic language the appellant’s name Asia means ‘sinful’ but in the circumstances of the present case she appears to be a person, in the words of Shakespeare’s King Lear, “more sinned against than sinning.”
That’s a legal mic drop, Pakistan-style.
But Bibi’s fate remains far from certain. Khan has proven himself weak and incapable of standing down the fanatics (the moment they took to the streets with threats of violence, Khan should have arrested their ringleaders). And while the Pakistani army will maintain order, it wants to avoid injecting itself into a fight between liberal reformers and Islamic fanatics. A fight, it believes, is ultimately peripheral to its own interests. So it will be incumbent on the U.S., and the European Union to pressure the Pakistani government here. The U.S. should also nudge Pakistan’s grand patron, Saudi Arabia, to pressure Khan in Bibi’s favor. Doing so would offer some much-needed positive press for the desert kingdom as it continues to grapple with the fallout over Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.
Whatever happens with Bibi, Pakistan’s challenge will remain great. Facing weak central governments, the demented zealots see continuing fortune for their xenophobic totalitarianism.
