by Kim Ghattas
In Jordan, in his hometown of Zarqa, condolences were held for the “martyr Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.” Several members of parliament visited to pay tribute. Zarqawi’s family and tribe had renounced him after the hotel bombings in Amman. But in death, in these fraught times of sectarian tensions and insecurity, he was theirs again. And they promised there would be a thousand more Zarqawis to fight the Americans—or anyone else who threatened them.
* * *
On December 30, 2006, at dawn, a man in a black suit and white shirt stood on an elevated metal platform, in a dark, dreary room. Tall, with a salt-and-pepper beard, his head almost touched the ceiling as he looked down at the small group of men watching from below. On either side of him stood a man clad in green khaki trousers and a black jacket. The two executioners, faces covered in black ski masks, lowered a thick rope with a noose and placed it around the elderly man’s neck. Saddam Hussein was living his last moments. After months in hiding, trying to evade capture by the Americans, he had finally been found in December 2003, cowering in a hole, haggard and disheveled. He was put on trial and received a death sentence. In mid-December 2006, he had lost his appeal. Prime Minister Maliki insisted there should be no delay in carrying out the sentence. After months of court proceedings, the final hours were hurried. Saddam was brought to the gallows, in a former intelligence base of the regime in Baghdad that now served as a US military base. He began to recite the Muslim profession of faith, the shahada: “I profess there is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
“Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!” The men below were taunting him, calling out the name of the hothead cleric leading the Mahdi army. “Long live Mohammad Baqer al-Sadr,” others chanted, referring to the cleric that Saddam had executed in 1980. “Moqtada? That’s [how you express] your manhood?” snarled Saddam. “Go to hell,” came the reply from one of the men.
At 6:10 the trapdoor opened beneath Saddam’s feet, just as he was repeating the shahada “There is no god but God and Muhammad is his proph—” The group, which included Shia members of the Iraqi cabinet, erupted in cheers: “The tyrant is dead!”
One man in the audience had filmed the dictator’s last moments on a cell phone. The video aired without sound on Iraqi television. But the grainy footage leaked beyond official hands and the taunts were heard by all. Everyone had a different interpretation. Many Sunnis saw an older Sunni statesman heckled by a Shia mob, deprived of dignity in his last moments. Many Shias were relieved, vindicated in their long wait for justice.
Jawad al-Khoei felt deeply conflicted. The young cleric whose own father had been killed by the regime felt some measure of relief. But why had it been carried out in such a disrespectful way? Were past grievances a justification for vengeful behavior? And why execute Saddam on this specific day? Maliki had made a fatal mistake—he’d ordered the execution of Saddam on the eve of an important Muslim holiday, Eid al-Adha, when rulers traditionally issue pardons. Perhaps he had done it on purpose, a spiteful man eager to show his mettle and determination to avenge all those who had been brutally killed or had disappeared in the darkness of Saddam’s republic of fear. Saddam issued pardons on holidays, but he also delivered body bags. Every holiday, families grew anxious, never knowing what a knock on the door would bring: reunion with a loved one, bruised and gaunt but alive, or the heartbreaking confirmation of their death. “We have become Saddam,” thought Jawad. “We have become him. We have adopted his ways.” Jawad thought back to the decades of history of Shias as a minority, always in the opposition, rarely in power, always seeking justice from oppression. Now, at this key moment in their history, they had failed the test of magnanimity, the very test that Imam Hussein would have passed. They had become the oppressors.
* * *
The death of these three Sunni men between 2005 and 2006 reverberated beyond Iraq and Lebanon, beyond the Arab world itself. They each represented a very different Sunni outlook on the world. Hariri had friends and fans all the way in Pakistan. Saddam’s hanging provoked protests in Sri Lanka and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Zarqawi was a hero in a minority circle. In Karachi, Sunni militants would soon complain that they were the persecuted ones, while they sat sipping tea in the sun, a gun in their lap, bodyguards roaming freely. Iran, they would say, was coming after them, and Saudi Arabia was their savior. In a Sunni majority country, where Shia mosques were being blown up on a regular basis, it was somehow the Sunni gunmen who felt like the underdog—yet another example of a majority group feeling threatened in its supremacy, unwilling to share long-held power. The backlash would be terrible, the revenge bloody and medieval, unlike anything the Muslim world had witnessed in recent times. The imperceptible fracture was now an open wound and the sectarianization of identities was setting in. In Pakistan, the rising tide of cultural intolerance and political score settling that had started under Zia was reaching new and savage heights.
15
SURRENDER
PAKISTAN
2011–18
When they came into my village
With a weird philosophy to kill
in the name of God
They looted everything …
They ruined my schools
Raped my dolls
Orphaned my children
Widowed my sisters
And we kept silent—like stones or tombs.
—Farid Gul Momand, “Surrender,” Paris Hilton Versus the Poor Poet (2014)
The apostate was dead. Shot at close range in broad daylight in Islamabad, on the morning of January 4, 2011. The body of the tall man, in a dark salwar kameez, was slumped on the floor, riddled with twenty-seven bullets. His blood seeped into the pavement, near a gray Honda Civic. The crowds came out the next day in the thousands. Not to mourn the dead, but to celebrate his killer.
In all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force. Not in 1989, when Khomeini called on believers to kill Salman Rushdie, not in 1992, when the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda was shot in Egypt, and still not in 2011. The Quran is immutable, and all it does is tell believers to respond to blasphemy with dignity.
But the doctrine of death for apostasy had taken on a life of its own in the previous two decades and had made its way back to Pakistan. The cultural war that Khomeini had started with his fatwa had seriously restrained the boundaries of expression. Worse: in the time that had elapsed since the assassination of Foda in Cairo in 1992, the reference points had moved. No one called it terrorism anymore; no one mourned the victims as martyrs of the nation, as Foda had been mourned. Few dared to protest against those who killed in the name of Islam, afraid they would meet the same fate. Everything had shifted to the right; the old extremes were the new center—or so it felt.
In a few years, the crowds would reemerge, tens of thousands of Pakistanis swarming the cities, shutting down traffic, to mourn the killer put to death by a justice system that felt it had no choice but to condemn him, though it likely would have preferred to spare him, if only to avoid creating a martyr. The apostate, the murdered man, was Salmaan Taseer, the nephew of Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the poet of love, the same Taseer who had continued to protest against Zia in the streets of Lahore during the 1980s, even after he had spent time in the dictator’s dungeons. The confidant of the Bhuttos had become a towering figure of Pakistani politics and had been governor of Punjab since 2008. He had just had coffee with a friend in an upscale neighborhood of Islamabad. The killer, police commando Mumtaz Qadri, was on Taseer’s security detail that morning, a last-minute addition for the governor’s visit to the capital. Taseer’s killing was too high profile to drown in the quagmire of Pakistani bureaucracy and willful incompetence. But also, for once, in the land of unresolved assassinations, the killer had willingly and proudly surrendered; the case was resolved on the spot; there would be a trial and a defendant.
“I am a slave of the Prophet, and the punishment for one who commits blasphemy is death,” Qadri said with a smile to the news reporte
rs and camera crews that had rushed to the scene after the killing. His hands and legs were bound by nylon rope. He smiled again as he was booked into a police van, delighted by his moment of fame. He seemed confident that he had secured his place in heaven by ridding Pakistan, the Land of the Pure, of a man who had committed a double sin: defending a Christian who had committed blasphemy and a woman at that.
Aamna Taseer was now a widow. She was tall and slender with a big smile, but on this fateful day, she felt alone, and afraid, not only because her husband was gone, but because Pakistan had finally surrendered to the forces of darkness, the forces he had fought against all his life. Zia had succeeded beyond his own expectations in transforming Pakistan. The result was not a model Islamic society, but a country full of zealots. Pakistan had so many problems: there were poverty, gangs, a demographic explosion, crime, and corruption—but the violent forces of radical fundamentalism compounded them all. Since Zia’s death, generous funding and constant tending by the Saudi kingdom had continued to nurture those dynamics, keeping the fundamentalist fire alive and the mob agitated.
Aamna felt guilty. It was she who had first told her husband the story of the blasphemous woman, Asia Bibi, just a few months before. The governor was a man of action, trying to fight the forces of extremism, and he immediately set out to help Bibi who, by then, had been in jail for over a year.
* * *
Bibi’s story began in June 2009, when she was harvesting falsa berries outside her village of Ittan Wali, not far from Lahore, in the Punjab, in a field belonging to rich landowners. She was hoping to make an extra 250 rupees ($2) on a Sunday to supplement the income of her brickmaker husband. Working under the sweltering sun of the Punjab summer, she went to fetch water from the nearby well, pulling up a bucket and dipping a metal cup into it to drink a few sips. In Bibi’s version, another woman set upon her, declaring that the well had been sullied by a Christian and rallying other women behind her. Bibi tried to defend herself. An argument ensued, comparisons were allegedly made between Christianity and Islam, and Bibi was asked to convert to Islam on the spot. The argument eventually died down and the crowd dispersed.
Five days later, working in another field, Bibi found herself face-to-face with the same agitator, who had brought a mob with her. They roughed up Bibi, screaming “Death to the Christian.” The police arrived. Bibi insisted she did not insult the prophet, but the women saw it differently. Bibi did tell them that Jesus had done more for humanity than the prophet Muhammad, which was perceived as an insult. She would maintain that story in court and in her autobiography. And for saying as much, she now stood accused of blasphemy. She made her case worse by rejecting what was presented to her as the only way to salvation: conversion to Islam. Thrown in jail, she was put in solitary confinement for her own protection: the mob on the inside was no more forgiving than the one on the outside.
The trial took place a year later. There were many discrepancies in the testimonies, as well as reports of old grudges and years of harassment against Bibi and her family, the only Christians in the village. In principle, the Roman Catholic wife and mother also had the law on her side: article 135(A)(a) in the Pakistani penal code promised to imprison anyone who incited ill-will, hatred, or disharmony between communities on grounds of religion, race, or caste. And Bibi had clearly been the victim of such an incitement. But it was Zia’s law that won: the 1986 law that handed out the death penalty to anyone who defiled the name of the prophet. And so, on November 8, 2010, Asia Bibi was sentenced to die by hanging.
The blasphemy law had initially been codified by the British a century earlier, in what was then pre-partition India. The intention had been to punish insults against any religious beliefs in an effort to preserve harmony between the different sects in the British colonial empire: Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and other. While in power, Zia added teeth to the laws, severely criminalizing any perceived insult to the prophet, his companions, the Quran, and basically anything having to do with Islam. In 1986, blasphemy against the prophet became punishable by death or imprisonment for life. Finally, in October 1990, the Federal Shariat Court of Pakistan called on the government to amend the penalty for blasphemy, making death the only punishment possible. The government acquiesced. The new death penalty punishment, with no possibility of bail, opened the floodgates of abuse and vigilante justice. The law became a favorite tool to settle scores for spurned lovers and rapacious businessmen, but by far the largest proportion of its victims were minorities, including Muslim minorities. Christians, Ahmadis, Hindus, and Shias accounted for 50 percent of the cases. And the numbers shot up dramatically. From 1927 to 1985, only ten blasphemy cases were heard in court. Between 1985 and 2011, an estimated four thousand cases of blasphemy of all sorts were tried, from desecrating the Quran to defiling the name of the prophet. More than thirteen hundred Pakistanis were formally accused of blasphemy under various clauses of the law. No other accusation seemed to get the police moving as swiftly as cries of blasphemy: not kidnappings, not threats of violence, not belonging to an outlawed radical group, not even overly zealous behavior on the part of a police officer, such as Qadri.
Governor Taseer was appalled when his wife told him about the verdict in Asia Bibi’s case. Together with their daughter Shehrbano, they went to visit the woman in prison and then held a press conference with her. Taseer wanted to reform the blasphemy law and stop it from being misused; he saw it as an existential threat to the identity of Pakistan—or what was left of it. Taseer didn’t bow to fear, he never had, not even after months shackled to the floor in solitary confinement in the dungeons of the Lahore fort. “I’m not made of wood that burns easily, don’t worry about me, I’ll come back to you,” he had once scribbled on a piece of paper delivered surreptitiously to his wife through a messenger during the Zia era.
After Zia died, the world moved on, seemingly still oblivious to the impact those years had had on the country. But Aamna and Salmaan Taseer had trauma inscribed in their every cell, like all Pakistanis—and they kept fighting back. And so, on November 23, 2010, with the confidence of one who had stared down death, Governor Taseer declared that the president was a “liberal, modern-minded president” who was not going to see a “poor woman like that targeted and executed.” “It’s just not going to happen,” Taseer added. The president was Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto, who had been assassinated in December 2007. The mob was quick to react to Taseer’s words. Religious parties agitated the angry crowds and thousands protested his comments, across the country and outside the governor’s mansion, even burning Taseer’s effigy. His fate was now tied to the blasphemer.
Taseer did not back down. This wasn’t just about one woman. This was about the soul of his country, a soul that still vibrated to the verses of Faiz and the music of Iqbal Bano. As matters intensified in December 2010, Taseer quoted Faiz’s most beloved and famous poem in a television interview, offering tenderly patriotic verses that carried both hope and a sense of self-sacrifice.
O burdened hearts, come walk with us again
Come, O friends, for we go to be slain.
The governor loved Twitter and used the platform to excoriate rivals, skewer critics, and bemoan the state of the world. On December 31, he sent out a poignant missive into the ether of social media:
“I was under huge pressure to cow down b4 rightist pressure. Refused. Even if I’m last man standing.”
And he was. When he was killed, there was no cohort of outspoken friends and colleagues loudly proclaiming that they would follow in Taseer’s footsteps and continue what he had started. Politicians from his own party effectively abandoned him in death—as they had done in life—on the issue of blasphemy. No one denounced his murder as terrorism, the way Egyptians had done two decades earlier. No one was foolish enough to proclaim: “Liberalism till victory or martyrdom,” the way a progressive judge had done after Foda’s assassination in Cairo. There had already been too many deaths. Egypt and Pakistan have much in c
ommon in their history and politics, though their social and cultural contexts belong to different continents. Foda and Taseer, both tall and imposing, both charismatic, vocal, and fearless, were similar targets for zealots.
To keep up appearances, flags were flown at half-mast and three days of mourning were declared. Taseer was, after all, a governor. But his family did not feel held by the nation in its mourning. A group of five hundred Islamic scholars had warned Pakistanis not to offer funeral prayers for the governor or they could meet the same fate. One militant religious group saluted “the bravery and valor of Mumtaz Qadri.” In the media, reactions were mixed. PUNJAB GOVERNOR MARTYRED headlined the Daily Times, a left-leaning newspaper owned by Taseer. Another opined that terrorism did not always come with the garb and beard of the Taliban, warning that the future was bleak. But mostly, Taseer was described as a “liberal extremist.” Every one of his faults was put back on the table: his secular ways, his divorce, his son with an Indian woman. Munawar Hasan, the head of Mawdudi’s Jamaat-e Islami, was unequivocal: “Salmaan Taseer is himself responsible for his own killing.”
Taseer’s position as governor afforded him an official funeral, but there were few official representatives and only a thin crowd at the funeral in the Cavalry Ground cemetery in Lahore. President Zardari, a friend of Taseer who had described him as a liberal just weeks earlier, did not attend. Punjab rangers with red and black fantail turbans delivered a military salute. The bugle echoed in the cold January air as “The Last Post” was played, the final farewell to soldiers, a British and Commonwealth regimental tradition. Colored wreaths were laid near the grave. At the end of the service, the governor’s sons, Shahbaz and Shehryar, their faces ashen, their eyes swollen, were presented with a big bowl of rose petals. They grabbed a handful, kissed the petals, and scattered them over the black coffin. There was so much of Pakistan being buried in that grave.
