The Divine Right of Islamist Clerics

"Any Muslim, if given the chance, would kill such a person. You would be rewarded in heaven for it." Pakistani Muslim cleric Muhammad Salim

What a wise and knowledgeable soul is he. Committed to the divinely inspired task of creating an understanding among those who depend on his religious knowledge, of the principles of Islamic devotion. There is no tolerance for disrespect of Islam, of the Prophet Mohammad, of Allah, of the Koran. Blasphemy has one deserving cure, and that is death, to expunge the intolerable insult to the holy, in the restoration of honour.

No self-respecting Muslim may countenance through witness or hearsay an insult to Islam. It is their duty to report any suspected insult so that divine justice may be meted out. Justice, that is, undertaken by religious authority in lieu of a bolt of lightning from heaven. This is meet and just. A blasphemous sinner must be held to account for the gravity of their sin against Islam. And the sentence of death carried out to ensure that the sin will not be repeated.

There is another cleric in Peshawar prepared to surrender 500,000 rupees to anyone who volunteers to kill Asia Bibi, if perchance her scheduled execution does not after all eventuate. There is an international outcry over this woman's death sentence. She is not Muslim, but Christian. And the other women, all Muslim, with whom she was working in the fields objected to her contaminating the common drinking vessel, as a non-Muslim.

Her reaction was to be affronted, and to sneer at their fundamentalist ignorance, jeering at their profound dedication to the Prophet Mohammad, and to the Koran. Which she characterized as not the profound words of god as recounted to Mohammad, but a set of junctions put together as a human construct to control peoples' minds and attitudes and their very existence.

Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari, mindful of the international outcry objecting to the death penalty exacted for this woman's Islamic-critical words may yet act on his enlightened instinct to pardon Asia Bibi. With her conviction, President Zardari, on the cusp of using his constitutional authority to grant a pardon, was stopped short by the Lahore High Court, hearing her appeal.

His trusted colleague in the Pakistan Peoples Party, the governor of Punjab state, has recently himself paid the ultimate price for visiting Asia Bibi in jail, and expressing his support for her. Governor Salman Taseer courageously rejected the barbarism of capital punishment for blasphemy, and sought to expunge the law from Pakistan's judicial system.

One of his own security police guards, a man known for his extremist views and whom his own superior attempted in vain to have disqualified and removed from his guard position over the governor, assassinated him while his fellow guards, pre-warned of his intention, did nothing to prevent the atrocity.

That guard is now regarded as a hero of Islam. Thousands upon thousands of fundamentalist Pakistanis have marched in his support. The vehicles used to transport him to and from court hearings have been festooned with roses. Clerics in support of his courage in firing 30 bullets in the governor's back warn that those who mourn the death of Salman Taseer can themselves expect death as blasphemers.

The blasphemy law has been well worn and disgracefully used to settle disputes by false accusations and incarcerations and punishments. A Pakistani man, Imran Latif, charged with blasphemy in Lahore by burning Koranic pages was found to have been falsely charged, and discharged from prison. Despite which he was later shot to death in an anonymous attack, the attackers never brought to justice.

The profound ignorance and primitive values combined in such fundamentalist Islamic societies do nothing to promote Islam as a world-wide religion dedicated to peace. What does emerge is a backward society controlled by fanatic clerics whose commitment to a fearsome kind of religion that inflicts terror and death, effectively abandons any pretence at kindly religious devotion.