[The case illustrates the growing reach and aggressiveness of Pakistan’s once-obscure anti-blasphemy movement, which has gained wide popular support since staging a three-week protest outside the capital, Islamabad, in November. The group filed the original complaint against Massih and was treated deferentially by the police. Now leaders of the area’s minority Christians are beginning to fear they are no longer safe.]
By
Pamela Constable
 |
|
People from a Pakistani
Christian community near Lahore pray for the recovery of
Sajid Massih, who
suffered serious injuries after jumping off a
federal building. (K.M.
Chaudary/AP)
|
DHAIR,
Pakistan — It was a quiet
February morning when the mob of men in green turbans came surging through the
alleys of a run-down Christian neighborhood in this town outside Lahore. Some
carried cans of fuel. They were hunting for a young man named Patras Massih,
and they were in a state of frenzy.
“They were shouting and breaking things. They
said to hand him over, or we will burn the whole community down,” recounted
Sana, 28, a neighbor whose front door was kicked in and whose TV and washing
machine were smashed.
By then, most other residents had fled,
warned by police to evacuate the area that day. They were coming to arrest the
illiterate janitor, 20, on charges of blasphemy, accompanied by a group of
Islamist activists. He was away at work, so the police detained several of his
relatives as insurance and departed, along with the vigilantes.
Today, Massih is awaiting trial in prison for
having allegedly shared an image on Facebook Messenger of an unidentified man
standing triumphantly atop the prophet Muhammad’s tomb. His family is in
hiding, along with his cousin Sajid, 26, who jumped from a fourth-story window
while being questioned at a police building and nearly died from his injuries.
The case illustrates the growing reach and
aggressiveness of Pakistan’s once-obscure anti-blasphemy movement, which has
gained wide popular support since staging a three-week protest outside the
capital, Islamabad, in November. The group filed the original complaint against
Massih and was treated deferentially by the police. Now leaders of the area’s
minority Christians are beginning to fear they are no longer safe.
“Our life is over,” said Massih’s father
Inderias, sitting despondently in a legal rights office in Lahore on Sunday.
Even if he is found innocent and released, his father said, “we will always be
afraid someone will attack us. No one accused of blasphemy is ever safe.”
‘This
was never our war’
The Movement in Service to the Sanctity of
the Prophet, formed several years ago, has caught fire across Pakistan, its
emerald banners rippling from rooftops and taxis. Rather than advocating
extreme ideology or terrorist tactics, it calls on ordinary Muslims to “defend”
deeply held principles, especially reverence for the prophet Muhammad.
Government officials, almost all Muslim, have
struggled to curb religious rabble-rousing without being seen as insufficiently
devout. Many privately sympathize with the anti-blasphemy cause; some who try
to mend fences have been humiliated. On Sunday, former prime minister Nawaz
Sharif spoke at a Sunni seminary in Lahore, but two people from the audience
threw shoes at him. One shouted exultantly, “We are here, oh prophet!”
Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s most
populous and wealthy province, is also the home of Sharif’s ruling party and
half a dozen Islamist groups. In October, the anti-blasphemy group and a second
religious party ran test candidates in a legislative race there, and observers
say it could become a key battleground in their bid to influence the national
elections later this year.
The region is also home to the country’s
largest concentration of Christians, who constitute about 10 percent of the
populace. Until now the anti-blasphemy forces have focused on condemning
Ahmedis, another minority religious group, but Christians have come under
attack before, and activists said the number of blasphemy accusations against
them is growing.
“This was never our war. We have much in
common with Muslims, and when problems arose we have always tried to settle
things informally,” said Mary Gill, a Christian member of the Punjab provincial
legislature. “We are not against the blasphemy law. We just want to prevent its
misuse.”
Leaders of the anti-blasphemy group in Lahore
did not respond to requests for comment, but several members said they bore no
ill will toward Christians. “All should be free to pray, to live,” said one.
“Our goal is to see sharia fully implemented, but respect for Christians is
obligatory.”
But activists cited several cases of false
blasphemy accusations and mob violence against Christians, provoked by rumors
or disputes. An elderly villager was accused and attacked after he refused to
sell his house in a Muslim area. A couple was burned alive in a brick factory
oven after word spread that they had burned pages of the Koran.
In the Massih case, the anti-blasphemy group
filed formal charges that he had shared the image mocking the prophet’s tomb
with friends in a Facebook Messenger group. Police told Pakistani media that
Massih had confessed under questioning and apologized.
But the family and their lawyer told a
different story. They described a complex conspiracy that involved Muslim
youths who fought with Massih at a cricket match, a mobile-phone shop owner who
belonged to the anti-blasphemy group and a local landowner who wanted to drive
out low-income Christian squatters.
“There are conspiracies through the whole
story,” said the lawyer, Aneeqa Anthony. “This is a very emotional issue, and
people in mobs don’t pay attention to facts; they just know they have been told
that blasphemy has occurred, and they want someone to be hanged for it.”
Anthony said officers of the Federal
Investigative Agency falsely accused Massih of sharing the offensive image on
Jan. 16, a date when his cellphone was at the repair shop. She also said he
could not read or write but put his thumbprint on a written confession after
being beaten in custody.
The abusive treatment of Sajid Massih, she
said, was far worse. Her office has filed charges accusing investigators of
beating him, then ordering him to perform oral sex on Patras Massih before he
leaped out the window. The agency insists that Sajid jumped out of panic that
they would find deleted blasphemous photos on his cellphone, but it is also
conducting an internal investigation.
Sajid’s account, on a video recorded at his
hospital bedside, is barely audible. His face is swollen and bruised, but his
words are clear enough. “They told me to curse Patras,” he says in the
recording. “They told me to take off his pants and do sex with him. I asked
forgiveness and said he is my brother. They told me to take off my pants. I saw
the window was open, and I jumped.”
An
uneasy coexistence
In Shahdara, a crowded working-class district
where Dhair is located, pockets of Christians have coexisted with Muslims for
decades. At the end of one alley, a tall steel gate with a guard tower stands
outside St. Luke’s Catholic Church.
On Sunday, the pews were crammed for
communion and hymns in Urdu, accompanied on a handheld harmonium. Older
congregants said they had worshiped there for years without incident, but
Rafael Mehnga, the priest, said tensions had been growing since the protests in
November.
“The issue of blasphemy has become
highlighted and more sensitive now,” he said. “If it is misused, if neighbors
start to doubt, it can be a danger to every citizen. There is no threat to
their religion. But in the name of it, they are creating a threat.”
In the twisting alleys of Dhair, Christian
residents said they had no animosity toward Muslims and respected Islam. No one
rose to Massih’s defense. A Muslim horsecart driver, chatting with a Christian
teacher, said somewhat heatedly that Massih should be punished if found guilty,
and his family, too.
The teacher nodded, then spoke quietly: “Yes,
but not all Christians.”
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