Pious Desecration

"What it indicates is a genuine attempt at investigation rather than blaming the victim, which is what normally happens in blasphemy cases.  They are actually taking a look at incitement to violence and false allegations.  It is a welcome and positive development."  Ali Dayan Hasan, Human Rights Watch, Pakistan

Had not this incident involved an eleven or fourteen-year-old Christian girl reputed to have Down Syndrome whose death Muslims in her neighbourhood clamoured for because she has been accused of burning pages of a Koran, alerting the international community to yet another in a miserable series of punishment meted out both formally and informally within Pakistan, it can be certain that this issue would have been settled differently.

The young girl accused of having committed an unforgivable act of blasphemy against Islam would certainly languish much longer in prison.  On the other hand, if she were to be released to the care of her family which has fled for safety along with other Christian families from the neighbourhood they had called home, she might still be a living target for revenge, yet another murdered Christian. 

Pakistan is not a society that is forgiving and accepting of religious diversity.

On the other hand, Muslims in general are not given to generosity of spirit when it comes to other religions.  Their dire animosity toward Muslims whose sects deviate from the two broad streams of Sunni and Shia, which themselves hold one another in contempt as defilers of pure Islam is legendary.  The rage to which they are capable of whipping themselves into for the purpose of murderous rampages quite as legendary.

And this, presumably, was what a local mullah, Khalid Chishti was about when he was accused of having planted 'evidence' in the girl's bag for the purpose of instilling a collective outrage in the community.  Pakistani police have arrested Khalid Chishti on the basis of someone from his mosque having asserted that he was intent on stirring up anger and resentment against the Christian community, to effectively clear them out of the larger Muslim enclave.

While the young girl has been accused of desecrating a sublime symbol of Islam, the mosque's imam desecrated his obligation as a human being with the full knowledge that what he did might have imperilled a child's life, the outcome of which might also have been a full-scale massacre.  Two prominent politicians who sympathized with the plight of Pakistan's Christians and stated their support for the elimination of the country's blasphemy law, were themselves assassinated.  

The girl has been released from detention, the accused imam has taken her place in detention.  He is outraged and claims innocence of all charges lodged against him, and she has confessed to feeling vulnerable and unsafe.