"295 makes it impossible to think out loud about Islam freely." Of course it should be repealed, but that is unlikely. From AINA, with thanks to DFS:
NEW YORK -- Gambling often produces sore losers. This past November, in the town of Sangla Hill in Pakistan's Punjab Province, it served as the trigger for something worse: religious riots and violence against members of Pakistan's minority Christian population.Yousuf Masih, a 40-year-old Christian, won several thousand rupees playing cards with a Muslim neighbor. The angry loser retaliated by filing an allegation with the local police that Masih had set fire to a copy of the Koran -- a punishable offense under Pakistani law. Within hours, rumors that a Christian had insulted the Islamic scripture were circulating throughout town. Local Muslim clerics used mosque loudspeakers to call on the faithful to avenge the insult.
The result: the next day, Nov. 12, 2005, a mob of more than 2,500 men (some from Sangla Hill, others from nearby Punjabi villages) attacked buildings belonging to the town's minority Christian community. They set fire to three churches and vandalized a Catholic convent and a Christian elementary school. Local Christian families were forced to flee or go into hiding. Police did nothing to restrain the violence -- but they did arrest the luckless Christian card-player Yousuf Masih....
Ordinance 295 -- commonly referred to as the blasphemy law -- dates back to the 1980s and the reign of the military dictator General Zia ul-Haq. Zia sought to legitimize his dictatorship by indulging the fundamentalist-minded mullahs of Pakistan's various religious parties. Ordinance 295 gave them what they wanted....
Zia's regime updated this legislation by adding provisions designed specifically to "safeguard" Islam. Section 295-B of Zia's law mandates life imprisonment for desecration of the Koran. Section 295-C goes further: it stipulates the death penalty for anyone who defames or insults the Prophet Muhammad....
The fact that Muslims have used Ordinance 295 to indict fellow Muslims points up the larger harm inflicted on Pakistan as a whole by this legislation. A Lahore-based Muslim intellectual told me, "295 makes it impossible to think out loud about Islam freely. We're at risk of paralysis, both as a nation and as a religious tradition."
Read it all.
"295 makes it impossible to think out loud about Islam freely. We're at risk of paralysis, both as a nation and as a religious tradition."
--- from a posting above
The comment by a Pakistani Muslim is both touching and telling. He has identified, but only in part, the problem of Islam, but appears to believe that this is a matter only of this particular Pakistani law against blasphemy. He says that "295 makes it impossible to think out loud about Islam freely." But it is not "295" that "makes...impossible" free and skeptical inquiry, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of conscience. It is, rather, Islam itself that militates against, that severely punihses, all three. The anti-blasphemy law merely puts into the criminal code what is there in any Muslim society, ready to be enforced, because it remains within the hearts and minds --in most cases already won, and permanently, for Islam -- of Muslims.
When he further says that Pakistan "as a nation" and Muslims in Pakistan "as a religious tradition" run the "risk of paralysis" he misstates, understandably. For there is no "risk" of paralysis; there already is mental and intellectual paralysis, and has been in Islam for at least a thousand years, and in most ways, since the very beginning. Even before the "gates of Ijtihad" were closed shut, even before the fructifying influence of non-Muslims (Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians) had died out as those non-Muslims diminished in numbers, and importance, as the initial Muslim conquest took firmer hold over the societies in the lands conquered by Islam, Islam was largely a cult that encouraged, and enforced, mental submission.
History shows that while tens of thousands of artists and thinkers and scientists of every kind emerged in the Western world, the world closest geographically and the historic rival of Islam (and of course there were many civilizational achievements in China and India appropriated by the Muslims and wrongly ascribed to them), a handful -- the same dozen or so names (Averroes, Avicenna, al-Khwarizmi, ar-Razi, etc.) keep coming up whenever the "greatness of Islamic civlization" is mentioned.
How could it be otherwise? How could it be otherwise when intelligent people will always question all kinds of things, and if, in a Muslim society, they are discouraged or suppressed or punished for doing so, this will naturally effect their ability to create in all kinds of ways that might contribute to the wellbeing of that society? Think in the first place of the narrow limits placed on artistic expression. No statuary, no painitings of living creatures, ideally no music (folk music has been hard to suppress, though the Taliban did what they could to execute singers, as does F.I.S. in Algeria with singers of Rai). How, when everything that needs to be known is already set down in the Qur'an, can Muslims easily enter the field of science and investigate the nature of the universe, of the structure of DNA or the structure of the atom?
Muslim leaders talk about the need for Muslims to forge ahead in what they call "science" -- see, for one example, Mahathir Mohamed's speech in Malaysia at a meeting of the Organization of Islamic Countries -- but what he meant, and what they have all meant, is not "science" in the Western sense but merely "science" as military technology, the weapons of war. That is what Arabs and Muslims have specialized in, that is what many have studied when they used to study abroad and were foolishly permitted by Western countries to do so. See A. Q. Khan. See Dr. Anthrax. See Dr. Germs.
No, the anti-blasphemy law, 295, does not put "at risk of paralysis" either Pakistan as "a nation" or Islam as a "religious tradition." Pakistan has been intellectually paralyzed since its inception. Islam as a "religious tradition" has been paralyzed for at least a thousand years, and one might suggest that, in every major way, the paralysis has been implicit in the Qur'an and Hadith, and the method of their mental reception, always. If the Qur'an is the immutable word of God, and every attempt at interpretation has only made it a more severe and rigid belief-system, and if it is always and everywhere the collective, the umma, that is given importance, and the individual none, how could anything but intellectual stasis be the result?
And here we are. And here they are. But now they are also here, and mere multiplication of numbers, and Western inhibitions, are creating within the West the possiblity of the loss of that superior -- for all of its many faults --civilization of the West (and then, inevitably, in other parts of the Infidel world), so that all of us, everywhere, can suffer the same stifling of art and science and freedom, as those who, through no fault of their own, are born into Islam and are not permitted even to think about getting out.
Zia was a lund of the highest order. Hope he is enjoying his time in hellfire
Oh, Naseem;
Always with the hatespeak.
General Zia just used Islam to get what he wanted and in the process, so did the mullahs.
For General Zod, a ligitimate dictatorship.
For the mullahs, an Islamic dictatorship.
All parties involved won,
Except the people.
Was Gen Zia the one who started the pogrons against Ahmadiyas? If yes, that would explain Naseem's loving attitude towards him.
Why was Yousuf Masih stupid enough to play cards with a Muslim?
Infidel Pride-
It is forbidden in Islam to gamble, but they wouldn't want to notice that little discrepancy in this story now would they?
Islam's arrogance and flatulent afflatus know no bounds.
profitsbeard
I dunno whether you follow cricket, but Pakistan and Sharjah have been the epicenter of not just gambling in cricket, but match fixing as well. Given their pious pretentions, when this was revealed some 4 years ago, it shook the entire cricket establishment the world over.
Still, if I was unfortunate enough to be the citizen of an Islamic shithole like Pakistan, betting against a Muslim would be the last thing I'd do.
Unless I had a death wish.
profitsbeard said
"Infidel "Pride-
It is forbidden in Islam to gamble, but they wouldn't want to notice that little discrepancy in this story now would they?
Islam's arrogance and flatulent afflatus know no bounds."
Yes , I'll say it s-l-o-w-l-y - by gambling these Muslims were doing an act Islam forbids - yet logically you blame Islam for it