Blasphemy Law: An Academic Investigation
May 12, 2001, Saturday FOREIGN DESK
Death to Blasphemers: Islam`s Grip on Pakistan
By BARRY BEARAK (NYT) 1842 wordsISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Blasphemy is a capital crime in this volatile Islamic nation, so Dr. Younus Shaikh, while teaching at a medical college, might have wisely avoided any discussion of the personal hygiene of the holy Prophet Muhammad. But the topic came up during a morning physiology class. And the doctor talked briefly about seventh-century Arabia and its practices regarding circumcision and the removal of underarm hair. Some students found his remarks deeply offensive. ``Only out of respect, because he was our teacher, did we not beat him to death on the spot,`` said Syed Bilal, 17. Instead, they informed a group of powerful mullahs, who in turn filed a criminal complaint. Lest the matter be treated with insufficient urgency, these clerics dispatched a mob to the medical school and the police station, threatening to burn them down. Precisely what Dr. Shaikh said in class last October is now a matter of mortal dispute, but he has been jailed ever since, awaiting trial and pondering the noose. Defending himself presents a conundrum. What can he safely say? Pakistan, a nearly bankrupt nation with 150 million people, a military government and an expanding nuclear arsenal, is drifting toward religious extremism. Blasphemy cases are its version of the Salem witch trials, with clerics sniffing out infidels, and enemies using the law to settle personal scores. Accurate crime statistics are a low priority here, but the number of those imprisoned on blasphemy charges is estimated in the hundreds. Only the most sensational cases get much notice: when vigilantes murder the accused, or the bold judge who set him free. When a man is condemned to die if a few pages in the Koran are torn. When a newspaper is shut down after publishing a sacrilegious letter. Dr. Shaikh is charged under Provision 295-C of the law: the use of derogatory remarks about the holy Prophet Muhammad. Whether such an offense is intentional or not, the mandatory punishment is death. ``Please understand, I am a deeply religious man,`` Dr. Shaikh said recently, professing his Islamic faith through the tight wire mesh of a jail cell. A short, rumpled man, he had the weary look of someone trying to rub a disturbing dream from bleary eyes. ``I cannot even imagine blaspheming our holy Prophet, peace be upon him.`` Few Pakistanis have heard of Dr. Shaikh, but news of his woes has leapt the borders, flitting across the Internet. He is associated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which describes itself as an ``umbrella organization for humanist, rationalist, agnostic, skeptic, atheist and ethical culture groups around the world.`` In 1999, he gave a presentation at the World Humanist Congress. In an attempt to save the doctor, a global letter-writing campaign was quickly begun, with pleas aimed at Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler. Publicity, on the other hand, has been discouraged. The hope was that persistent statesmanship would outlast righteous anger, with the charges then quietly disappearing. This hushed approach has proved a frustration, however, and after declining earlier requests for an interview, Dr. Shaikh agreed to speak of his case. ``My statements about the holy Prophet, peace be upon him, were made in his praise only, and these have now been twisted out of context,`` he said in measured phrases. Moments later, pressed for specifics, he said: ``My students asked me about the shaving of pubic and armpit hair, and I, in describing the glory of Allah`s revelations, said that before the arrival of Islam, the Arabs did not have these practices. And they did not.`` Before his troubles, Dr. Shaikh lived alone in a small room in Islamabad. He had studied medicine in both Pakistan and Ireland but his practice had long periods of interruption. He preferred academic research and his passion has been ``the history of nations.`` After the Koran, he said, the important books in his life have been the Encyclopedia Britannica and ``The Story of Civilization,`` by Will and Ariel Durant. Pakistan may have an ample supply of free thinkers, but free speakers have long been on the wane. Governments -- civilian or military -- tend to imprison opponents. Federal laws enforce a mix of mosque and state, and questions of religion are often presumed to have a single right answer, like arithmetic. ``Before saying anything in this country, you must always be aware of the forum, the place and the time,`` said Afrasiab Khattak, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. ``If accused of blasphemy, you are in great difficulty. The mullahs are not known for their generosity. Even if exonerated, you will always be in danger.`` Dr. Shaikh was a member of peace and environmental groups. But while he might have asked an occasional dissenting question at a public seminar, he was not a well-known activist. His few writings have appeared mostly in cyberspace, and at least some of them accuse organized religion of mass murder, bigotry and the degradation of women. (Supporters have now removed most of this material from the Internet.) Last fall, as Dr. Shaikh worked part time at a small clinic, he accepted a teaching job at the Capital Homeopathic Medical College, on the second floor of a shopping plaza. He had no expertise in homeopathic cures, but his subject was physiology and he knew that well enough. He was paid $89 a month. However badly it ended, Dr. Shaikh`s brief tenure was not a contentious one. Students liked him. If he had a fault, they said, it was for lectures that meandered into irrelevancies like poetry or free sex in Western countries. Occasionally, Dr. Shaikh`s digressions embarrassed his students; occasionally, they seemed impious. One irksome topic was how Muslims had come to practice circumcision and, for purposes of cleanliness, the removal of pubic and underarm hair. A question arose: Had Muhammad been circumcised before receiving God`s revelations at age 40? The ensuing discussion brought on no great ado, and Dr. Shaikh said he only remembers saying, ``The Prophet`s tribe did not practice circumcision.`` But the offended students repeat a different version. ``He told us the Prophet hadn`t been circumcised before,`` insisted Majid Lodhi, 22. ``We asked, `In what book is this knowledge?` And he said, `I`m telling you the way it was, and if you have evidence to the contrary, bring in your proof.` `` Outside of school, the students had begun talking about Dr. Shaikh. Was he uttering blasphemies? they asked each other. And if so, what should a good Muslim do? ``I had heard from the sermons in the mosques that those who blaspheme deserve to be killed immediately,`` said Asghar Ali Afridi, who at 28 was older than most students and whose views were persuasive. ``It was a weakness of faith that we did not do it.`` But 11 students, the entire class, did sign a letter that listed Dr. Shaikh`s possible crimes. They claimed he had said that the Prophet was not a Muslim until age 40; that before then, he did not remove his underarm hair or undergo circumcision; that he first wed, at 25, without an Islamic marriage contract; that his parents were not Muslims. Mr. Afridi was picked to deliver the letter to the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, a group well known for pursuing blasphemers. ``For Dr. Shaikh`s own protection, we sought his arrest,`` said Abdul Wahid Qasmi, secretary general of the organization`s Islamabad chapter. ``Otherwise, he might have been killed in the streets.`` The Movement`s vigilance is most often directed at Ahmadis, who regard themselves as Muslims but believe another prophet appeared after Muhammad. By law, they are barred from linking themselves in any way to Islam. Each year, many are arrested for simply reciting a Koranic verse or using the greeting ``Salaam aleikum.`` Non-Muslims make up about 3 percent of Pakistan`s population, and while they have obvious reasons to fear the blasphemy statutes, there is no shortage of opposition among Muslims as well. Even a strong advocate, the minister for religious affairs, Mahmood Ahmad Ghazi, says the law requires revision. He has reviewed numerous cases and said the majority originate from ``ill will and personal prejudice.`` Last year, General Musharraf himself called for a procedural change, suggesting that the merits of blasphemy cases be reviewed by local officials before an arrest. But when fundamentalists took to the streets in protest, he backed down. At the Movement`s headquarters, the law also comes under criticism, though the complaint is of sluggish justice. Blasphemers may get locked up, but not one has been executed. ``Even if someone is only half-conscious when speaking against the Prophet, he must die,`` said Mr. Qasmi, who managed to sound amiable. ``In Dr. Shaikh`s case, his relatives have come to see us, saying the man is sorry and that he repents. But to be sorry now is not enough. Even if a man is sorry, he must die.`` These days, Dr. Shaikh calls himself an ``Islamic humanist,`` stressing the adjective. This surge in devotion is a return to his roots; he comes from a religious family in Bahawalnagar, and his father, a merchant, is a hafiz, a man who has memorized the Koran. In hiring a lawyer, the family has steered away from human rights types. Its attorney takes a rather omnibus approach. First, there is a technicality to exploit. The students should have filed the charges instead of the mullahs, he asserts. Second, his client never said the things alleged, and even if he did, the words are not blasphemous. A judge will decide. And customarily, the accusing party packs the courtroom with zealots in a show of righteous concern. The Shaikh family, however, has no intention of being steamrolled by hostile fundamentalists. At a recent hearing, they brought their own mullahs -- equally bearded, equally turbaned, equally able to quote from holy books. ``No blasphemy has been committed in this case,`` proclaimed Maulana Abdul Hafiz. An elderly, stern-faced man, he, too, heads a chapter of the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, his being in Bahawalnagar. ``Blasphemy can be committed only if issues are raised about the period after the holy Prophet declared his prophethood. These issues are pre-prophethood.`` The mullahs from Bahawalnagar say they have tried to reason with the mullahs from Islamabad, but these efforts have failed. ``They know we are right but they do not want to backtrack and lose face,`` said Maulana Hafiz, enraged by his adversaries. How dare they? he declared: ``They tell us that we ourselves should be cautious, that protecting a blasphemer is as bad as blaspheming itself.``
August 30, 2001, Thursday EDITORIAL DESK
Pakistan`s Cruel Blasphemy Law
( Editorial ) 262 words A Pakistani criminal court has sentenced Dr. Younus Shaikh to be hanged for stating obvious facts about the life of Muhammad before he became the founder of Islam. That verdict and the blasphemy law that underlies it are an embarrassment to Pakistan and a threat to the basic liberties of its citizens. Other countries can and do honor the beliefs of Islam without offending basic precepts of justice and intellectual honesty. Dr. Shaikh is a medical school lecturer whose crime was to say that before receiving God`s words at the age of 40, Muhammad and his family were not Muslims and did not follow Muslim practices. These remarks were reported to the local offices of a fundamentalist group that then filed a criminal complaint under the blasphemy law. Earlier this month a local court upheld the charges and imposed the mandatory death penalty the law requires. Dr. Shaikh, who considers himself a devout Muslim, has filed an appeal. Hundreds of other Pakistanis have been condemned under the blasphemy law since its introduction 15 years ago, most of them Christians or members of other religious minorities. In the past, higher courts have generally struck down their death sentences. But there is no guarantee that they will do so in the future. Last year the country`s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, proposed that all blasphemy charges be reviewed by local officials before being brought before a court. But General Musharraf later dropped that proposal to avoid offending fundamentalist groups. A better solution would be to eliminate the law altogether.
Posted by
OMAR1974
Aug 15, 2002 01:16 am
NEW YORK TIMESMay 12, 2001, Saturday FOREIGN DESK
Death to Blasphemers: Islam`s Grip on Pakistan
By BARRY BEARAK (NYT) 1842 wordsISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Blasphemy is a capital crime in this volatile Islamic nation, so Dr. Younus Shaikh, while teaching at a medical college, might have wisely avoided any discussion of the personal hygiene of the holy Prophet Muhammad. But the topic came up during a morning physiology class. And the doctor talked briefly about seventh-century Arabia and its practices regarding circumcision and the removal of underarm hair. Some students found his remarks deeply offensive. ``Only out of respect, because he was our teacher, did we not beat him to death on the spot,`` said Syed Bilal, 17. Instead, they informed a group of powerful mullahs, who in turn filed a criminal complaint. Lest the matter be treated with insufficient urgency, these clerics dispatched a mob to the medical school and the police station, threatening to burn them down. Precisely what Dr. Shaikh said in class last October is now a matter of mortal dispute, but he has been jailed ever since, awaiting trial and pondering the noose. Defending himself presents a conundrum. What can he safely say? Pakistan, a nearly bankrupt nation with 150 million people, a military government and an expanding nuclear arsenal, is drifting toward religious extremism. Blasphemy cases are its version of the Salem witch trials, with clerics sniffing out infidels, and enemies using the law to settle personal scores. Accurate crime statistics are a low priority here, but the number of those imprisoned on blasphemy charges is estimated in the hundreds. Only the most sensational cases get much notice: when vigilantes murder the accused, or the bold judge who set him free. When a man is condemned to die if a few pages in the Koran are torn. When a newspaper is shut down after publishing a sacrilegious letter. Dr. Shaikh is charged under Provision 295-C of the law: the use of derogatory remarks about the holy Prophet Muhammad. Whether such an offense is intentional or not, the mandatory punishment is death. ``Please understand, I am a deeply religious man,`` Dr. Shaikh said recently, professing his Islamic faith through the tight wire mesh of a jail cell. A short, rumpled man, he had the weary look of someone trying to rub a disturbing dream from bleary eyes. ``I cannot even imagine blaspheming our holy Prophet, peace be upon him.`` Few Pakistanis have heard of Dr. Shaikh, but news of his woes has leapt the borders, flitting across the Internet. He is associated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which describes itself as an ``umbrella organization for humanist, rationalist, agnostic, skeptic, atheist and ethical culture groups around the world.`` In 1999, he gave a presentation at the World Humanist Congress. In an attempt to save the doctor, a global letter-writing campaign was quickly begun, with pleas aimed at Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler. Publicity, on the other hand, has been discouraged. The hope was that persistent statesmanship would outlast righteous anger, with the charges then quietly disappearing. This hushed approach has proved a frustration, however, and after declining earlier requests for an interview, Dr. Shaikh agreed to speak of his case. ``My statements about the holy Prophet, peace be upon him, were made in his praise only, and these have now been twisted out of context,`` he said in measured phrases. Moments later, pressed for specifics, he said: ``My students asked me about the shaving of pubic and armpit hair, and I, in describing the glory of Allah`s revelations, said that before the arrival of Islam, the Arabs did not have these practices. And they did not.`` Before his troubles, Dr. Shaikh lived alone in a small room in Islamabad. He had studied medicine in both Pakistan and Ireland but his practice had long periods of interruption. He preferred academic research and his passion has been ``the history of nations.`` After the Koran, he said, the important books in his life have been the Encyclopedia Britannica and ``The Story of Civilization,`` by Will and Ariel Durant. Pakistan may have an ample supply of free thinkers, but free speakers have long been on the wane. Governments -- civilian or military -- tend to imprison opponents. Federal laws enforce a mix of mosque and state, and questions of religion are often presumed to have a single right answer, like arithmetic. ``Before saying anything in this country, you must always be aware of the forum, the place and the time,`` said Afrasiab Khattak, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. ``If accused of blasphemy, you are in great difficulty. The mullahs are not known for their generosity. Even if exonerated, you will always be in danger.`` Dr. Shaikh was a member of peace and environmental groups. But while he might have asked an occasional dissenting question at a public seminar, he was not a well-known activist. His few writings have appeared mostly in cyberspace, and at least some of them accuse organized religion of mass murder, bigotry and the degradation of women. (Supporters have now removed most of this material from the Internet.) Last fall, as Dr. Shaikh worked part time at a small clinic, he accepted a teaching job at the Capital Homeopathic Medical College, on the second floor of a shopping plaza. He had no expertise in homeopathic cures, but his subject was physiology and he knew that well enough. He was paid $89 a month. However badly it ended, Dr. Shaikh`s brief tenure was not a contentious one. Students liked him. If he had a fault, they said, it was for lectures that meandered into irrelevancies like poetry or free sex in Western countries. Occasionally, Dr. Shaikh`s digressions embarrassed his students; occasionally, they seemed impious. One irksome topic was how Muslims had come to practice circumcision and, for purposes of cleanliness, the removal of pubic and underarm hair. A question arose: Had Muhammad been circumcised before receiving God`s revelations at age 40? The ensuing discussion brought on no great ado, and Dr. Shaikh said he only remembers saying, ``The Prophet`s tribe did not practice circumcision.`` But the offended students repeat a different version. ``He told us the Prophet hadn`t been circumcised before,`` insisted Majid Lodhi, 22. ``We asked, `In what book is this knowledge?` And he said, `I`m telling you the way it was, and if you have evidence to the contrary, bring in your proof.` `` Outside of school, the students had begun talking about Dr. Shaikh. Was he uttering blasphemies? they asked each other. And if so, what should a good Muslim do? ``I had heard from the sermons in the mosques that those who blaspheme deserve to be killed immediately,`` said Asghar Ali Afridi, who at 28 was older than most students and whose views were persuasive. ``It was a weakness of faith that we did not do it.`` But 11 students, the entire class, did sign a letter that listed Dr. Shaikh`s possible crimes. They claimed he had said that the Prophet was not a Muslim until age 40; that before then, he did not remove his underarm hair or undergo circumcision; that he first wed, at 25, without an Islamic marriage contract; that his parents were not Muslims. Mr. Afridi was picked to deliver the letter to the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, a group well known for pursuing blasphemers. ``For Dr. Shaikh`s own protection, we sought his arrest,`` said Abdul Wahid Qasmi, secretary general of the organization`s Islamabad chapter. ``Otherwise, he might have been killed in the streets.`` The Movement`s vigilance is most often directed at Ahmadis, who regard themselves as Muslims but believe another prophet appeared after Muhammad. By law, they are barred from linking themselves in any way to Islam. Each year, many are arrested for simply reciting a Koranic verse or using the greeting ``Salaam aleikum.`` Non-Muslims make up about 3 percent of Pakistan`s population, and while they have obvious reasons to fear the blasphemy statutes, there is no shortage of opposition among Muslims as well. Even a strong advocate, the minister for religious affairs, Mahmood Ahmad Ghazi, says the law requires revision. He has reviewed numerous cases and said the majority originate from ``ill will and personal prejudice.`` Last year, General Musharraf himself called for a procedural change, suggesting that the merits of blasphemy cases be reviewed by local officials before an arrest. But when fundamentalists took to the streets in protest, he backed down. At the Movement`s headquarters, the law also comes under criticism, though the complaint is of sluggish justice. Blasphemers may get locked up, but not one has been executed. ``Even if someone is only half-conscious when speaking against the Prophet, he must die,`` said Mr. Qasmi, who managed to sound amiable. ``In Dr. Shaikh`s case, his relatives have come to see us, saying the man is sorry and that he repents. But to be sorry now is not enough. Even if a man is sorry, he must die.`` These days, Dr. Shaikh calls himself an ``Islamic humanist,`` stressing the adjective. This surge in devotion is a return to his roots; he comes from a religious family in Bahawalnagar, and his father, a merchant, is a hafiz, a man who has memorized the Koran. In hiring a lawyer, the family has steered away from human rights types. Its attorney takes a rather omnibus approach. First, there is a technicality to exploit. The students should have filed the charges instead of the mullahs, he asserts. Second, his client never said the things alleged, and even if he did, the words are not blasphemous. A judge will decide. And customarily, the accusing party packs the courtroom with zealots in a show of righteous concern. The Shaikh family, however, has no intention of being steamrolled by hostile fundamentalists. At a recent hearing, they brought their own mullahs -- equally bearded, equally turbaned, equally able to quote from holy books. ``No blasphemy has been committed in this case,`` proclaimed Maulana Abdul Hafiz. An elderly, stern-faced man, he, too, heads a chapter of the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, his being in Bahawalnagar. ``Blasphemy can be committed only if issues are raised about the period after the holy Prophet declared his prophethood. These issues are pre-prophethood.`` The mullahs from Bahawalnagar say they have tried to reason with the mullahs from Islamabad, but these efforts have failed. ``They know we are right but they do not want to backtrack and lose face,`` said Maulana Hafiz, enraged by his adversaries. How dare they? he declared: ``They tell us that we ourselves should be cautious, that protecting a blasphemer is as bad as blaspheming itself.``
August 30, 2001, Thursday EDITORIAL DESK
Pakistan`s Cruel Blasphemy Law
( Editorial ) 262 words A Pakistani criminal court has sentenced Dr. Younus Shaikh to be hanged for stating obvious facts about the life of Muhammad before he became the founder of Islam. That verdict and the blasphemy law that underlies it are an embarrassment to Pakistan and a threat to the basic liberties of its citizens. Other countries can and do honor the beliefs of Islam without offending basic precepts of justice and intellectual honesty. Dr. Shaikh is a medical school lecturer whose crime was to say that before receiving God`s words at the age of 40, Muhammad and his family were not Muslims and did not follow Muslim practices. These remarks were reported to the local offices of a fundamentalist group that then filed a criminal complaint under the blasphemy law. Earlier this month a local court upheld the charges and imposed the mandatory death penalty the law requires. Dr. Shaikh, who considers himself a devout Muslim, has filed an appeal. Hundreds of other Pakistanis have been condemned under the blasphemy law since its introduction 15 years ago, most of them Christians or members of other religious minorities. In the past, higher courts have generally struck down their death sentences. But there is no guarantee that they will do so in the future. Last year the country`s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, proposed that all blasphemy charges be reviewed by local officials before being brought before a court. But General Musharraf later dropped that proposal to avoid offending fundamentalist groups. A better solution would be to eliminate the law altogether.
Blasphemy Law: An Academic Investigation
May 12, 2001, Saturday FOREIGN DESK
Death to Blasphemers: Islam`s Grip on Pakistan
By BARRY BEARAK (NYT) 1842 wordsISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Blasphemy is a capital crime in this volatile Islamic nation, so Dr. Younus Shaikh, while teaching at a medical college, might have wisely avoided any discussion of the personal hygiene of the holy Prophet Muhammad. But the topic came up during a morning physiology class. And the doctor talked briefly about seventh-century Arabia and its practices regarding circumcision and the removal of underarm hair. Some students found his remarks deeply offensive. ``Only out of respect, because he was our teacher, did we not beat him to death on the spot,`` said Syed Bilal, 17. Instead, they informed a group of powerful mullahs, who in turn filed a criminal complaint. Lest the matter be treated with insufficient urgency, these clerics dispatched a mob to the medical school and the police station, threatening to burn them down. Precisely what Dr. Shaikh said in class last October is now a matter of mortal dispute, but he has been jailed ever since, awaiting trial and pondering the noose. Defending himself presents a conundrum. What can he safely say? Pakistan, a nearly bankrupt nation with 150 million people, a military government and an expanding nuclear arsenal, is drifting toward religious extremism. Blasphemy cases are its version of the Salem witch trials, with clerics sniffing out infidels, and enemies using the law to settle personal scores. Accurate crime statistics are a low priority here, but the number of those imprisoned on blasphemy charges is estimated in the hundreds. Only the most sensational cases get much notice: when vigilantes murder the accused, or the bold judge who set him free. When a man is condemned to die if a few pages in the Koran are torn. When a newspaper is shut down after publishing a sacrilegious letter. Dr. Shaikh is charged under Provision 295-C of the law: the use of derogatory remarks about the holy Prophet Muhammad. Whether such an offense is intentional or not, the mandatory punishment is death. ``Please understand, I am a deeply religious man,`` Dr. Shaikh said recently, professing his Islamic faith through the tight wire mesh of a jail cell. A short, rumpled man, he had the weary look of someone trying to rub a disturbing dream from bleary eyes. ``I cannot even imagine blaspheming our holy Prophet, peace be upon him.`` Few Pakistanis have heard of Dr. Shaikh, but news of his woes has leapt the borders, flitting across the Internet. He is associated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which describes itself as an ``umbrella organization for humanist, rationalist, agnostic, skeptic, atheist and ethical culture groups around the world.`` In 1999, he gave a presentation at the World Humanist Congress. In an attempt to save the doctor, a global letter-writing campaign was quickly begun, with pleas aimed at Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler. Publicity, on the other hand, has been discouraged. The hope was that persistent statesmanship would outlast righteous anger, with the charges then quietly disappearing. This hushed approach has proved a frustration, however, and after declining earlier requests for an interview, Dr. Shaikh agreed to speak of his case. ``My statements about the holy Prophet, peace be upon him, were made in his praise only, and these have now been twisted out of context,`` he said in measured phrases. Moments later, pressed for specifics, he said: ``My students asked me about the shaving of pubic and armpit hair, and I, in describing the glory of Allah`s revelations, said that before the arrival of Islam, the Arabs did not have these practices. And they did not.`` Before his troubles, Dr. Shaikh lived alone in a small room in Islamabad. He had studied medicine in both Pakistan and Ireland but his practice had long periods of interruption. He preferred academic research and his passion has been ``the history of nations.`` After the Koran, he said, the important books in his life have been the Encyclopedia Britannica and ``The Story of Civilization,`` by Will and Ariel Durant. Pakistan may have an ample supply of free thinkers, but free speakers have long been on the wane. Governments -- civilian or military -- tend to imprison opponents. Federal laws enforce a mix of mosque and state, and questions of religion are often presumed to have a single right answer, like arithmetic. ``Before saying anything in this country, you must always be aware of the forum, the place and the time,`` said Afrasiab Khattak, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. ``If accused of blasphemy, you are in great difficulty. The mullahs are not known for their generosity. Even if exonerated, you will always be in danger.`` Dr. Shaikh was a member of peace and environmental groups. But while he might have asked an occasional dissenting question at a public seminar, he was not a well-known activist. His few writings have appeared mostly in cyberspace, and at least some of them accuse organized religion of mass murder, bigotry and the degradation of women. (Supporters have now removed most of this material from the Internet.) Last fall, as Dr. Shaikh worked part time at a small clinic, he accepted a teaching job at the Capital Homeopathic Medical College, on the second floor of a shopping plaza. He had no expertise in homeopathic cures, but his subject was physiology and he knew that well enough. He was paid $89 a month. However badly it ended, Dr. Shaikh`s brief tenure was not a contentious one. Students liked him. If he had a fault, they said, it was for lectures that meandered into irrelevancies like poetry or free sex in Western countries. Occasionally, Dr. Shaikh`s digressions embarrassed his students; occasionally, they seemed impious. One irksome topic was how Muslims had come to practice circumcision and, for purposes of cleanliness, the removal of pubic and underarm hair. A question arose: Had Muhammad been circumcised before receiving God`s revelations at age 40? The ensuing discussion brought on no great ado, and Dr. Shaikh said he only remembers saying, ``The Prophet`s tribe did not practice circumcision.`` But the offended students repeat a different version. ``He told us the Prophet hadn`t been circumcised before,`` insisted Majid Lodhi, 22. ``We asked, `In what book is this knowledge?` And he said, `I`m telling you the way it was, and if you have evidence to the contrary, bring in your proof.` `` Outside of school, the students had begun talking about Dr. Shaikh. Was he uttering blasphemies? they asked each other. And if so, what should a good Muslim do? ``I had heard from the sermons in the mosques that those who blaspheme deserve to be killed immediately,`` said Asghar Ali Afridi, who at 28 was older than most students and whose views were persuasive. ``It was a weakness of faith that we did not do it.`` But 11 students, the entire class, did sign a letter that listed Dr. Shaikh`s possible crimes. They claimed he had said that the Prophet was not a Muslim until age 40; that before then, he did not remove his underarm hair or undergo circumcision; that he first wed, at 25, without an Islamic marriage contract; that his parents were not Muslims. Mr. Afridi was picked to deliver the letter to the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, a group well known for pursuing blasphemers. ``For Dr. Shaikh`s own protection, we sought his arrest,`` said Abdul Wahid Qasmi, secretary general of the organization`s Islamabad chapter. ``Otherwise, he might have been killed in the streets.`` The Movement`s vigilance is most often directed at Ahmadis, who regard themselves as Muslims but believe another prophet appeared after Muhammad. By law, they are barred from linking themselves in any way to Islam. Each year, many are arrested for simply reciting a Koranic verse or using the greeting ``Salaam aleikum.`` Non-Muslims make up about 3 percent of Pakistan`s population, and while they have obvious reasons to fear the blasphemy statutes, there is no shortage of opposition among Muslims as well. Even a strong advocate, the minister for religious affairs, Mahmood Ahmad Ghazi, says the law requires revision. He has reviewed numerous cases and said the majority originate from ``ill will and personal prejudice.`` Last year, General Musharraf himself called for a procedural change, suggesting that the merits of blasphemy cases be reviewed by local officials before an arrest. But when fundamentalists took to the streets in protest, he backed down. At the Movement`s headquarters, the law also comes under criticism, though the complaint is of sluggish justice. Blasphemers may get locked up, but not one has been executed. ``Even if someone is only half-conscious when speaking against the Prophet, he must die,`` said Mr. Qasmi, who managed to sound amiable. ``In Dr. Shaikh`s case, his relatives have come to see us, saying the man is sorry and that he repents. But to be sorry now is not enough. Even if a man is sorry, he must die.`` These days, Dr. Shaikh calls himself an ``Islamic humanist,`` stressing the adjective. This surge in devotion is a return to his roots; he comes from a religious family in Bahawalnagar, and his father, a merchant, is a hafiz, a man who has memorized the Koran. In hiring a lawyer, the family has steered away from human rights types. Its attorney takes a rather omnibus approach. First, there is a technicality to exploit. The students should have filed the charges instead of the mullahs, he asserts. Second, his client never said the things alleged, and even if he did, the words are not blasphemous. A judge will decide. And customarily, the accusing party packs the courtroom with zealots in a show of righteous concern. The Shaikh family, however, has no intention of being steamrolled by hostile fundamentalists. At a recent hearing, they brought their own mullahs -- equally bearded, equally turbaned, equally able to quote from holy books. ``No blasphemy has been committed in this case,`` proclaimed Maulana Abdul Hafiz. An elderly, stern-faced man, he, too, heads a chapter of the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, his being in Bahawalnagar. ``Blasphemy can be committed only if issues are raised about the period after the holy Prophet declared his prophethood. These issues are pre-prophethood.`` The mullahs from Bahawalnagar say they have tried to reason with the mullahs from Islamabad, but these efforts have failed. ``They know we are right but they do not want to backtrack and lose face,`` said Maulana Hafiz, enraged by his adversaries. How dare they? he declared: ``They tell us that we ourselves should be cautious, that protecting a blasphemer is as bad as blaspheming itself.``
August 30, 2001, Thursday EDITORIAL DESK
Pakistan`s Cruel Blasphemy Law
( Editorial ) 262 words A Pakistani criminal court has sentenced Dr. Younus Shaikh to be hanged for stating obvious facts about the life of Muhammad before he became the founder of Islam. That verdict and the blasphemy law that underlies it are an embarrassment to Pakistan and a threat to the basic liberties of its citizens. Other countries can and do honor the beliefs of Islam without offending basic precepts of justice and intellectual honesty. Dr. Shaikh is a medical school lecturer whose crime was to say that before receiving God`s words at the age of 40, Muhammad and his family were not Muslims and did not follow Muslim practices. These remarks were reported to the local offices of a fundamentalist group that then filed a criminal complaint under the blasphemy law. Earlier this month a local court upheld the charges and imposed the mandatory death penalty the law requires. Dr. Shaikh, who considers himself a devout Muslim, has filed an appeal. Hundreds of other Pakistanis have been condemned under the blasphemy law since its introduction 15 years ago, most of them Christians or members of other religious minorities. In the past, higher courts have generally struck down their death sentences. But there is no guarantee that they will do so in the future. Last year the country`s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, proposed that all blasphemy charges be reviewed by local officials before being brought before a court. But General Musharraf later dropped that proposal to avoid offending fundamentalist groups. A better solution would be to eliminate the law altogether.
Posted by
OMAR1974
Aug 15, 2002 01:16 am
NEW YORK TIMESMay 12, 2001, Saturday FOREIGN DESK
Death to Blasphemers: Islam`s Grip on Pakistan
By BARRY BEARAK (NYT) 1842 wordsISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Blasphemy is a capital crime in this volatile Islamic nation, so Dr. Younus Shaikh, while teaching at a medical college, might have wisely avoided any discussion of the personal hygiene of the holy Prophet Muhammad. But the topic came up during a morning physiology class. And the doctor talked briefly about seventh-century Arabia and its practices regarding circumcision and the removal of underarm hair. Some students found his remarks deeply offensive. ``Only out of respect, because he was our teacher, did we not beat him to death on the spot,`` said Syed Bilal, 17. Instead, they informed a group of powerful mullahs, who in turn filed a criminal complaint. Lest the matter be treated with insufficient urgency, these clerics dispatched a mob to the medical school and the police station, threatening to burn them down. Precisely what Dr. Shaikh said in class last October is now a matter of mortal dispute, but he has been jailed ever since, awaiting trial and pondering the noose. Defending himself presents a conundrum. What can he safely say? Pakistan, a nearly bankrupt nation with 150 million people, a military government and an expanding nuclear arsenal, is drifting toward religious extremism. Blasphemy cases are its version of the Salem witch trials, with clerics sniffing out infidels, and enemies using the law to settle personal scores. Accurate crime statistics are a low priority here, but the number of those imprisoned on blasphemy charges is estimated in the hundreds. Only the most sensational cases get much notice: when vigilantes murder the accused, or the bold judge who set him free. When a man is condemned to die if a few pages in the Koran are torn. When a newspaper is shut down after publishing a sacrilegious letter. Dr. Shaikh is charged under Provision 295-C of the law: the use of derogatory remarks about the holy Prophet Muhammad. Whether such an offense is intentional or not, the mandatory punishment is death. ``Please understand, I am a deeply religious man,`` Dr. Shaikh said recently, professing his Islamic faith through the tight wire mesh of a jail cell. A short, rumpled man, he had the weary look of someone trying to rub a disturbing dream from bleary eyes. ``I cannot even imagine blaspheming our holy Prophet, peace be upon him.`` Few Pakistanis have heard of Dr. Shaikh, but news of his woes has leapt the borders, flitting across the Internet. He is associated with the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which describes itself as an ``umbrella organization for humanist, rationalist, agnostic, skeptic, atheist and ethical culture groups around the world.`` In 1999, he gave a presentation at the World Humanist Congress. In an attempt to save the doctor, a global letter-writing campaign was quickly begun, with pleas aimed at Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler. Publicity, on the other hand, has been discouraged. The hope was that persistent statesmanship would outlast righteous anger, with the charges then quietly disappearing. This hushed approach has proved a frustration, however, and after declining earlier requests for an interview, Dr. Shaikh agreed to speak of his case. ``My statements about the holy Prophet, peace be upon him, were made in his praise only, and these have now been twisted out of context,`` he said in measured phrases. Moments later, pressed for specifics, he said: ``My students asked me about the shaving of pubic and armpit hair, and I, in describing the glory of Allah`s revelations, said that before the arrival of Islam, the Arabs did not have these practices. And they did not.`` Before his troubles, Dr. Shaikh lived alone in a small room in Islamabad. He had studied medicine in both Pakistan and Ireland but his practice had long periods of interruption. He preferred academic research and his passion has been ``the history of nations.`` After the Koran, he said, the important books in his life have been the Encyclopedia Britannica and ``The Story of Civilization,`` by Will and Ariel Durant. Pakistan may have an ample supply of free thinkers, but free speakers have long been on the wane. Governments -- civilian or military -- tend to imprison opponents. Federal laws enforce a mix of mosque and state, and questions of religion are often presumed to have a single right answer, like arithmetic. ``Before saying anything in this country, you must always be aware of the forum, the place and the time,`` said Afrasiab Khattak, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. ``If accused of blasphemy, you are in great difficulty. The mullahs are not known for their generosity. Even if exonerated, you will always be in danger.`` Dr. Shaikh was a member of peace and environmental groups. But while he might have asked an occasional dissenting question at a public seminar, he was not a well-known activist. His few writings have appeared mostly in cyberspace, and at least some of them accuse organized religion of mass murder, bigotry and the degradation of women. (Supporters have now removed most of this material from the Internet.) Last fall, as Dr. Shaikh worked part time at a small clinic, he accepted a teaching job at the Capital Homeopathic Medical College, on the second floor of a shopping plaza. He had no expertise in homeopathic cures, but his subject was physiology and he knew that well enough. He was paid $89 a month. However badly it ended, Dr. Shaikh`s brief tenure was not a contentious one. Students liked him. If he had a fault, they said, it was for lectures that meandered into irrelevancies like poetry or free sex in Western countries. Occasionally, Dr. Shaikh`s digressions embarrassed his students; occasionally, they seemed impious. One irksome topic was how Muslims had come to practice circumcision and, for purposes of cleanliness, the removal of pubic and underarm hair. A question arose: Had Muhammad been circumcised before receiving God`s revelations at age 40? The ensuing discussion brought on no great ado, and Dr. Shaikh said he only remembers saying, ``The Prophet`s tribe did not practice circumcision.`` But the offended students repeat a different version. ``He told us the Prophet hadn`t been circumcised before,`` insisted Majid Lodhi, 22. ``We asked, `In what book is this knowledge?` And he said, `I`m telling you the way it was, and if you have evidence to the contrary, bring in your proof.` `` Outside of school, the students had begun talking about Dr. Shaikh. Was he uttering blasphemies? they asked each other. And if so, what should a good Muslim do? ``I had heard from the sermons in the mosques that those who blaspheme deserve to be killed immediately,`` said Asghar Ali Afridi, who at 28 was older than most students and whose views were persuasive. ``It was a weakness of faith that we did not do it.`` But 11 students, the entire class, did sign a letter that listed Dr. Shaikh`s possible crimes. They claimed he had said that the Prophet was not a Muslim until age 40; that before then, he did not remove his underarm hair or undergo circumcision; that he first wed, at 25, without an Islamic marriage contract; that his parents were not Muslims. Mr. Afridi was picked to deliver the letter to the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, a group well known for pursuing blasphemers. ``For Dr. Shaikh`s own protection, we sought his arrest,`` said Abdul Wahid Qasmi, secretary general of the organization`s Islamabad chapter. ``Otherwise, he might have been killed in the streets.`` The Movement`s vigilance is most often directed at Ahmadis, who regard themselves as Muslims but believe another prophet appeared after Muhammad. By law, they are barred from linking themselves in any way to Islam. Each year, many are arrested for simply reciting a Koranic verse or using the greeting ``Salaam aleikum.`` Non-Muslims make up about 3 percent of Pakistan`s population, and while they have obvious reasons to fear the blasphemy statutes, there is no shortage of opposition among Muslims as well. Even a strong advocate, the minister for religious affairs, Mahmood Ahmad Ghazi, says the law requires revision. He has reviewed numerous cases and said the majority originate from ``ill will and personal prejudice.`` Last year, General Musharraf himself called for a procedural change, suggesting that the merits of blasphemy cases be reviewed by local officials before an arrest. But when fundamentalists took to the streets in protest, he backed down. At the Movement`s headquarters, the law also comes under criticism, though the complaint is of sluggish justice. Blasphemers may get locked up, but not one has been executed. ``Even if someone is only half-conscious when speaking against the Prophet, he must die,`` said Mr. Qasmi, who managed to sound amiable. ``In Dr. Shaikh`s case, his relatives have come to see us, saying the man is sorry and that he repents. But to be sorry now is not enough. Even if a man is sorry, he must die.`` These days, Dr. Shaikh calls himself an ``Islamic humanist,`` stressing the adjective. This surge in devotion is a return to his roots; he comes from a religious family in Bahawalnagar, and his father, a merchant, is a hafiz, a man who has memorized the Koran. In hiring a lawyer, the family has steered away from human rights types. Its attorney takes a rather omnibus approach. First, there is a technicality to exploit. The students should have filed the charges instead of the mullahs, he asserts. Second, his client never said the things alleged, and even if he did, the words are not blasphemous. A judge will decide. And customarily, the accusing party packs the courtroom with zealots in a show of righteous concern. The Shaikh family, however, has no intention of being steamrolled by hostile fundamentalists. At a recent hearing, they brought their own mullahs -- equally bearded, equally turbaned, equally able to quote from holy books. ``No blasphemy has been committed in this case,`` proclaimed Maulana Abdul Hafiz. An elderly, stern-faced man, he, too, heads a chapter of the Movement for the Finality of the Prophet, his being in Bahawalnagar. ``Blasphemy can be committed only if issues are raised about the period after the holy Prophet declared his prophethood. These issues are pre-prophethood.`` The mullahs from Bahawalnagar say they have tried to reason with the mullahs from Islamabad, but these efforts have failed. ``They know we are right but they do not want to backtrack and lose face,`` said Maulana Hafiz, enraged by his adversaries. How dare they? he declared: ``They tell us that we ourselves should be cautious, that protecting a blasphemer is as bad as blaspheming itself.``
August 30, 2001, Thursday EDITORIAL DESK
Pakistan`s Cruel Blasphemy Law
( Editorial ) 262 words A Pakistani criminal court has sentenced Dr. Younus Shaikh to be hanged for stating obvious facts about the life of Muhammad before he became the founder of Islam. That verdict and the blasphemy law that underlies it are an embarrassment to Pakistan and a threat to the basic liberties of its citizens. Other countries can and do honor the beliefs of Islam without offending basic precepts of justice and intellectual honesty. Dr. Shaikh is a medical school lecturer whose crime was to say that before receiving God`s words at the age of 40, Muhammad and his family were not Muslims and did not follow Muslim practices. These remarks were reported to the local offices of a fundamentalist group that then filed a criminal complaint under the blasphemy law. Earlier this month a local court upheld the charges and imposed the mandatory death penalty the law requires. Dr. Shaikh, who considers himself a devout Muslim, has filed an appeal. Hundreds of other Pakistanis have been condemned under the blasphemy law since its introduction 15 years ago, most of them Christians or members of other religious minorities. In the past, higher courts have generally struck down their death sentences. But there is no guarantee that they will do so in the future. Last year the country`s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, proposed that all blasphemy charges be reviewed by local officials before being brought before a court. But General Musharraf later dropped that proposal to avoid offending fundamentalist groups. A better solution would be to eliminate the law altogether.
Blasphemy Law: An Academic Investigation
Frankly this is beyond pathetic. I am not in the least bit offended by either of his two claims. If he believes he`s the Son of God, so what? So what if he calls Islam a fake religion? Does he deserve to die or rot in jail for expressing his beliefs? No.
This is all about FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, The FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION.
The blasphemy law violates Human Rights. It must be repealed.
Posted by
OMAR1974
Aug 14, 2002 04:58 pm
A Christian in Pakistan was recently sentenced to death, with a mob outside the court baying for the death sentence simply because he claimed he was Jeasus Christ, and said Islam was a fake religion.Frankly this is beyond pathetic. I am not in the least bit offended by either of his two claims. If he believes he`s the Son of God, so what? So what if he calls Islam a fake religion? Does he deserve to die or rot in jail for expressing his beliefs? No.
This is all about FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, The FREE EXERCISE OF RELIGION.
The blasphemy law violates Human Rights. It must be repealed.
Blasphemy Law: An Academic Investigation
Posted by
OMAR1974
Aug 14, 2002 04:58 pm
In the Old Testament, the crime of blasphemy is very strictly defined as cursing the name of God with the name of God. There is no punishment for blasphemy against the prophets.
A Convert’s Complaint: Analyzing Naipaul’s Views on Islam
The writer states:
`Not even the prophet was a born Muslim.`
According to the Pakistani court that sentenced Dr.Younis Sheikh to death on Aug 18 last year, the above statement is blasphemous under
PPC 295-C.
Therefore we are to suspend both reason and logic, i.e that the Prophet (pbuh) received his revelations starting at the age of 40, solely to accomodate the religious obscurantists of Pakistan that have intimidated its courts. For more details see the the NYT editorial on
Aug 28, 01.
Posted by
OMAR1974
Mar 1, 2002 11:12 am
BLASPHEMY!The writer states:
`Not even the prophet was a born Muslim.`
According to the Pakistani court that sentenced Dr.Younis Sheikh to death on Aug 18 last year, the above statement is blasphemous under
PPC 295-C.
Therefore we are to suspend both reason and logic, i.e that the Prophet (pbuh) received his revelations starting at the age of 40, solely to accomodate the religious obscurantists of Pakistan that have intimidated its courts. For more details see the the NYT editorial on
Aug 28, 01.
A Decision to Regret
Agony Over Kashmir Echoes in Indian Courtroom
By JOHN F. BURNS
For one of its most controversial courts-martial in 50 years, the Indian Army has chosen a setting that seems like a stage set from the colonial past.
Inside the decaying single-story courtroom in the barracks in this sweltering Punjab town, the roof leaks and witnesses` testimony competes with creaking ceiling fans and parrots chirping in mangrove trees outside. Army tailors pedal past on rusting bicycles, and officers` wives stroll beneath brightly colored parasols, chatting languidly as they go.
Over all, a strict protocol prevails. A general testifying for the prosecution gets a red carpet, a ``V.I.P.`` water cooler and snappy salutes from lower-ranking officers serving as judges. Even the bathrooms have a hierarchy -- a neatly signposted urinal for officers, while all others fend for themselves.
The archaisms seem starkly out of step with the modernizing India beyond the barracks` gates. But the issues at the trial of Maj. Manish Bhatnagar, a 29-year-old paratrooper from Bhopal, in central India, are sharply contemporary, and they go to the heart of India`s pride.
The major is charged with refusing an order to attack Pakistani troops holding a Himalayan height inside Indian territory two summers ago. Pakistani Army infiltrators had set off a small-scale war in the Kargil area of Kashmir after penetrating along a 150-mile front, at heights up to 18,000 feet.
After eight weeks of fighting in which Indian troops ascended glaciers, snowfields and rocky crags to attack Pakistani bunkers under heavy fire, the Pakistanis were driven out, but not before more than 850 Indian soldiers and at least 700 Pakistanis had lost their lives.
If convicted, Major Bhatnagar could get 14 years of ``rigorous imprisonment,`` and a lifetime`s disgrace. But in the defiant, explosive defense he has mounted over 50 days of hearings, he has won broad support from fellow officers, military analysts and influential sections of the Indian press.
Supporters see him as a scapegoat for a government and army brass responsible for a slow-starting, inefficiently run campaign that many in India regard as the worst military debacle since India`s humiliating defeat by China in a 1962 border war.
The court-martial, expected to produce a verdict sometime this month, has come at a sensitive time. The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, will be the host of a summit meeting with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler, from July 14 to 16, when the dispute over Kashmir, which dates to the inception of India and Pakistan as independent nations, is expected to top the agenda.
Mr. Vajpayee headed the government at the time of the Kargil conflict, and won re-election afterward in a campaign buoyed by celebrations in virtually every Indian village and town after India repelled the incursion.
General Musharraf was the Pakistani Army commander who devised the plan to seize the Kargil heights, and felt betrayed by what many in his military saw as their government`s failure to give them full backing at Kargil. Three months later, the general overthrew the civilian government that ordered the Pakistani withdrawal after most of the Himalayan strongholds were lost.
Now, both men have committed themselves to seek a compromise on Kashmir that will reduce the risk of major military confrontations, and satisfy the rest of the world that the possibility of either side using nuclear weapons in a future flare-up has been defused. But at the summit meeting, both leaders will be under pressure from wary domestic constituencies and will need to be seen as bargaining from a position of strength.
For Mr. Vajpayee, who heads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has traditionally presented itself as the most vigilant of all Indian parties on Pakistan, a conviction here would be a step toward bolstering the government`s record on Kashmir. An acquittal would be an invitation to more damaging post-mortems about the alleged Kargil bungling.
Even before the court-martial, the government`s self-congratulatory posture after the conflict had taken a battering. Though the infiltrators were eventually expelled, that they had ensconced themselves at all in such a sensitive territory was cause for serious political embarrassment.
Indian press accounts since the Kargil fighting have told of intelligence reports of the Pakistani intrusions going unattended for months in the Defense Ministry`s files, and of soldiers being sent into battle without the lightweight rifles the army had acquired for high-altitude warfare, and with such inadequate supplies of winter clothing and snowshoes that secondhand supplies designated for surplus sales were pulled from warehouses and transferred urgently to the front.
An official inquiry, reporting in December 1999, came to similar conclusions. Citing India`s casualties, it said, ``The best tribute to their supreme dedication and example will be to ensure that `Kargils` of any description are never repeated.``
At the court-martial, Major Bhatnagar has seen to it that none of this is forgotten. Assessed as an outstanding officer by his commanders before the Kargil fighting, he has earned front-page coverage in Indian newspapers with his performances at the trial.
Armed with a suitcase bursting with files assembled during months in custody, he has stalked the courtroom, thrusting papers at the officers serving as judges, demanding silence from prosecution lawyers and refusing demands that he sit down until the presiding officer, Col. Vinod Malik, raises his hand above a bell that summons armed guards.
The word scapegoat has never been far away. ``Have some conscience!`` he told Maj. Vipin Chakrawati, an army lawyer advising the judges, at a recent morning`s hearing. ``You are a very lowly man, lacking moral fiber.``
At another point, he said his concern was for India, not for himself. ``I`m not worried about myself; I`m worried about the truth,`` he said. Moments later, risking expulsion from the courtroom for contempt, he said, ``It`s a conspiracy; this whole trial is to fix me.``
The major`s defense lawyer, Rajneesh Bansal, sweating in a pinstripe suit, has restricted himself to points of law. But outside he has been vociferous. ``This is a farce trial going on,`` he said. ``The generals are making him a scapegoat, when they should be in the dock themselves.``
Vikram Jit Singh, a reporter for The Indian Express who covered Kargil at the front and is now covering the trial, agreed. ``What`s really stirring resentment in all this is the role of the generals,`` he said. ``They`ve all got off the hook, getting plum postings and awards. It`s a V.I.P. system of justice.``
Like the courtroom itself, the testimony has been rich with Victorian echoes. The prosecution has targeted Major Bhatnagar`s character, suggesting that the order to attack at Kargil had found, in the major, that ``all lofty feelings to serve the nation had subsided and become lull.``
The court listened solemnly as an army lawyer read a 19th-century poem by ``the great English poet,`` Alfred Lord Tennyson, celebrating a doomed attack by British cavalrymen in the Crimean War -- ``Theirs not to make reply,/Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.``
After a pause, the prosecutor drove the point home. ``What we find here,`` he said, ``is most precisely the reverse.``
On the key point in the court-martial, the army`s case has been badly shaken. Major Bhatnagar has said he never refused an order to attack a Pakistani bunker at a position known as Point 5203, at a height of 17,700 feet and above a strategic road. What he did, he has said, was to ask that the 80 men under his command be given a month`s rest to recover from joint pains, blisters and bruises after a grueling three-day truck journey, and a further day`s march, from another Himalayan confrontation zone with Pakistan at Siachen, hundreds of miles to the east.
Brig. Devinder Singh, one of the top Indian commanders at Kargil, has testified that he discussed the attack with Major Bhatnagar, but gave no order. Another major who was present has said that he, too, heard a discussion of an attack, but no order. The prosecution, closing its case, sought to finesse the point by saying that since an assault had been planned, any discussion about it would have amounted, ``to all practical purposes,`` to an order.
Less helpful to the major`s case, the prosecution has established that an earlier, failed assault on the height produced heavy casualties, and that Major Bhatnagar discussed the miseries endured with the surviving troops before taking up the matter with Brigadier Singh. Six days after the discussion, with Major Bhatnagar transferred away from the front, another officer led his men into battle, only to find the Pakistani bunker abandoned.
Months later, as inquiries into the Kargil failures began, army prosecutors began focusing on Major Bhatnagar`s actions, and eventually charged him with cowardice, only to move to the lesser offense now being tried: refusing an order to attack.
Only two other officers involved in the campaign, both majors, have faced courts-martial, with one winning acquittal and the other being convicted, for faking a knee injury. But it is the Bhatnagar trial that army commanders who led the Kargil campaign have watched most closely, perhaps few more so than Gen. V. P. Malik, army chief of staff at the time. Now retired in Chandigarh, the 63-year-old general has been given a rough ride by Indian newspapers, which have recounted how he continued with a tour of Poland for 10 days after the Pakistani intrusions began stirring alarm in New Delhi.
A remark he is said to have made at the time -- ``I can`t stop going to the toilet every time a militant crosses the line of control`` -- has entered Indian folklore as has a report that the general with overall responsibility for Indian defenses in the Kargil area was off building a zoo in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, in the eastern reaches of Kashmir, at the time of the Pakistani buildup.
In an interview at his home, General Malik scoffed at suggestions that the army had taken a black eye at Kargil similar to the one it took against China in 1962, when the general, then an infantry lieutenant, was at the front.
``If the Pakistanis see it as a disaster, and they do,`` he said, reaching for a book at his bedside quoting Pakistani generals on their debacle at Kargil, ``I don`t see why we should see it otherwise. Both sides can`t have lost.``
As for the allegations of scapegoating, he was similarly dismissive. ``I don`t think it`s worth talking about,`` he said. ``We`ve looked at all these events with the greatest transparency, and what more do people want?``
Posted by
OMAR1974
Nov 7, 2001 08:01 pm
July 8, 2001, Sunday Agony Over Kashmir Echoes in Indian Courtroom
By JOHN F. BURNS
For one of its most controversial courts-martial in 50 years, the Indian Army has chosen a setting that seems like a stage set from the colonial past.
Inside the decaying single-story courtroom in the barracks in this sweltering Punjab town, the roof leaks and witnesses` testimony competes with creaking ceiling fans and parrots chirping in mangrove trees outside. Army tailors pedal past on rusting bicycles, and officers` wives stroll beneath brightly colored parasols, chatting languidly as they go.
Over all, a strict protocol prevails. A general testifying for the prosecution gets a red carpet, a ``V.I.P.`` water cooler and snappy salutes from lower-ranking officers serving as judges. Even the bathrooms have a hierarchy -- a neatly signposted urinal for officers, while all others fend for themselves.
The archaisms seem starkly out of step with the modernizing India beyond the barracks` gates. But the issues at the trial of Maj. Manish Bhatnagar, a 29-year-old paratrooper from Bhopal, in central India, are sharply contemporary, and they go to the heart of India`s pride.
The major is charged with refusing an order to attack Pakistani troops holding a Himalayan height inside Indian territory two summers ago. Pakistani Army infiltrators had set off a small-scale war in the Kargil area of Kashmir after penetrating along a 150-mile front, at heights up to 18,000 feet.
After eight weeks of fighting in which Indian troops ascended glaciers, snowfields and rocky crags to attack Pakistani bunkers under heavy fire, the Pakistanis were driven out, but not before more than 850 Indian soldiers and at least 700 Pakistanis had lost their lives.
If convicted, Major Bhatnagar could get 14 years of ``rigorous imprisonment,`` and a lifetime`s disgrace. But in the defiant, explosive defense he has mounted over 50 days of hearings, he has won broad support from fellow officers, military analysts and influential sections of the Indian press.
Supporters see him as a scapegoat for a government and army brass responsible for a slow-starting, inefficiently run campaign that many in India regard as the worst military debacle since India`s humiliating defeat by China in a 1962 border war.
The court-martial, expected to produce a verdict sometime this month, has come at a sensitive time. The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, will be the host of a summit meeting with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler, from July 14 to 16, when the dispute over Kashmir, which dates to the inception of India and Pakistan as independent nations, is expected to top the agenda.
Mr. Vajpayee headed the government at the time of the Kargil conflict, and won re-election afterward in a campaign buoyed by celebrations in virtually every Indian village and town after India repelled the incursion.
General Musharraf was the Pakistani Army commander who devised the plan to seize the Kargil heights, and felt betrayed by what many in his military saw as their government`s failure to give them full backing at Kargil. Three months later, the general overthrew the civilian government that ordered the Pakistani withdrawal after most of the Himalayan strongholds were lost.
Now, both men have committed themselves to seek a compromise on Kashmir that will reduce the risk of major military confrontations, and satisfy the rest of the world that the possibility of either side using nuclear weapons in a future flare-up has been defused. But at the summit meeting, both leaders will be under pressure from wary domestic constituencies and will need to be seen as bargaining from a position of strength.
For Mr. Vajpayee, who heads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has traditionally presented itself as the most vigilant of all Indian parties on Pakistan, a conviction here would be a step toward bolstering the government`s record on Kashmir. An acquittal would be an invitation to more damaging post-mortems about the alleged Kargil bungling.
Even before the court-martial, the government`s self-congratulatory posture after the conflict had taken a battering. Though the infiltrators were eventually expelled, that they had ensconced themselves at all in such a sensitive territory was cause for serious political embarrassment.
Indian press accounts since the Kargil fighting have told of intelligence reports of the Pakistani intrusions going unattended for months in the Defense Ministry`s files, and of soldiers being sent into battle without the lightweight rifles the army had acquired for high-altitude warfare, and with such inadequate supplies of winter clothing and snowshoes that secondhand supplies designated for surplus sales were pulled from warehouses and transferred urgently to the front.
An official inquiry, reporting in December 1999, came to similar conclusions. Citing India`s casualties, it said, ``The best tribute to their supreme dedication and example will be to ensure that `Kargils` of any description are never repeated.``
At the court-martial, Major Bhatnagar has seen to it that none of this is forgotten. Assessed as an outstanding officer by his commanders before the Kargil fighting, he has earned front-page coverage in Indian newspapers with his performances at the trial.
Armed with a suitcase bursting with files assembled during months in custody, he has stalked the courtroom, thrusting papers at the officers serving as judges, demanding silence from prosecution lawyers and refusing demands that he sit down until the presiding officer, Col. Vinod Malik, raises his hand above a bell that summons armed guards.
The word scapegoat has never been far away. ``Have some conscience!`` he told Maj. Vipin Chakrawati, an army lawyer advising the judges, at a recent morning`s hearing. ``You are a very lowly man, lacking moral fiber.``
At another point, he said his concern was for India, not for himself. ``I`m not worried about myself; I`m worried about the truth,`` he said. Moments later, risking expulsion from the courtroom for contempt, he said, ``It`s a conspiracy; this whole trial is to fix me.``
The major`s defense lawyer, Rajneesh Bansal, sweating in a pinstripe suit, has restricted himself to points of law. But outside he has been vociferous. ``This is a farce trial going on,`` he said. ``The generals are making him a scapegoat, when they should be in the dock themselves.``
Vikram Jit Singh, a reporter for The Indian Express who covered Kargil at the front and is now covering the trial, agreed. ``What`s really stirring resentment in all this is the role of the generals,`` he said. ``They`ve all got off the hook, getting plum postings and awards. It`s a V.I.P. system of justice.``
Like the courtroom itself, the testimony has been rich with Victorian echoes. The prosecution has targeted Major Bhatnagar`s character, suggesting that the order to attack at Kargil had found, in the major, that ``all lofty feelings to serve the nation had subsided and become lull.``
The court listened solemnly as an army lawyer read a 19th-century poem by ``the great English poet,`` Alfred Lord Tennyson, celebrating a doomed attack by British cavalrymen in the Crimean War -- ``Theirs not to make reply,/Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.``
After a pause, the prosecutor drove the point home. ``What we find here,`` he said, ``is most precisely the reverse.``
On the key point in the court-martial, the army`s case has been badly shaken. Major Bhatnagar has said he never refused an order to attack a Pakistani bunker at a position known as Point 5203, at a height of 17,700 feet and above a strategic road. What he did, he has said, was to ask that the 80 men under his command be given a month`s rest to recover from joint pains, blisters and bruises after a grueling three-day truck journey, and a further day`s march, from another Himalayan confrontation zone with Pakistan at Siachen, hundreds of miles to the east.
Brig. Devinder Singh, one of the top Indian commanders at Kargil, has testified that he discussed the attack with Major Bhatnagar, but gave no order. Another major who was present has said that he, too, heard a discussion of an attack, but no order. The prosecution, closing its case, sought to finesse the point by saying that since an assault had been planned, any discussion about it would have amounted, ``to all practical purposes,`` to an order.
Less helpful to the major`s case, the prosecution has established that an earlier, failed assault on the height produced heavy casualties, and that Major Bhatnagar discussed the miseries endured with the surviving troops before taking up the matter with Brigadier Singh. Six days after the discussion, with Major Bhatnagar transferred away from the front, another officer led his men into battle, only to find the Pakistani bunker abandoned.
Months later, as inquiries into the Kargil failures began, army prosecutors began focusing on Major Bhatnagar`s actions, and eventually charged him with cowardice, only to move to the lesser offense now being tried: refusing an order to attack.
Only two other officers involved in the campaign, both majors, have faced courts-martial, with one winning acquittal and the other being convicted, for faking a knee injury. But it is the Bhatnagar trial that army commanders who led the Kargil campaign have watched most closely, perhaps few more so than Gen. V. P. Malik, army chief of staff at the time. Now retired in Chandigarh, the 63-year-old general has been given a rough ride by Indian newspapers, which have recounted how he continued with a tour of Poland for 10 days after the Pakistani intrusions began stirring alarm in New Delhi.
A remark he is said to have made at the time -- ``I can`t stop going to the toilet every time a militant crosses the line of control`` -- has entered Indian folklore as has a report that the general with overall responsibility for Indian defenses in the Kargil area was off building a zoo in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, in the eastern reaches of Kashmir, at the time of the Pakistani buildup.
In an interview at his home, General Malik scoffed at suggestions that the army had taken a black eye at Kargil similar to the one it took against China in 1962, when the general, then an infantry lieutenant, was at the front.
``If the Pakistanis see it as a disaster, and they do,`` he said, reaching for a book at his bedside quoting Pakistani generals on their debacle at Kargil, ``I don`t see why we should see it otherwise. Both sides can`t have lost.``
As for the allegations of scapegoating, he was similarly dismissive. ``I don`t think it`s worth talking about,`` he said. ``We`ve looked at all these events with the greatest transparency, and what more do people want?``
A Decision to Regret
Agony Over Kashmir Echoes in Indian Courtroom
By JOHN F. BURNS
For one of its most controversial courts-martial in 50 years, the Indian Army has chosen a setting that seems like a stage set from the colonial past.
Inside the decaying single-story courtroom in the barracks in this sweltering Punjab town, the roof leaks and witnesses` testimony competes with creaking ceiling fans and parrots chirping in mangrove trees outside. Army tailors pedal past on rusting bicycles, and officers` wives stroll beneath brightly colored parasols, chatting languidly as they go.
Over all, a strict protocol prevails. A general testifying for the prosecution gets a red carpet, a ``V.I.P.`` water cooler and snappy salutes from lower-ranking officers serving as judges. Even the bathrooms have a hierarchy -- a neatly signposted urinal for officers, while all others fend for themselves.
The archaisms seem starkly out of step with the modernizing India beyond the barracks` gates. But the issues at the trial of Maj. Manish Bhatnagar, a 29-year-old paratrooper from Bhopal, in central India, are sharply contemporary, and they go to the heart of India`s pride.
The major is charged with refusing an order to attack Pakistani troops holding a Himalayan height inside Indian territory two summers ago. Pakistani Army infiltrators had set off a small-scale war in the Kargil area of Kashmir after penetrating along a 150-mile front, at heights up to 18,000 feet.
After eight weeks of fighting in which Indian troops ascended glaciers, snowfields and rocky crags to attack Pakistani bunkers under heavy fire, the Pakistanis were driven out, but not before more than 850 Indian soldiers and at least 700 Pakistanis had lost their lives.
If convicted, Major Bhatnagar could get 14 years of ``rigorous imprisonment,`` and a lifetime`s disgrace. But in the defiant, explosive defense he has mounted over 50 days of hearings, he has won broad support from fellow officers, military analysts and influential sections of the Indian press.
Supporters see him as a scapegoat for a government and army brass responsible for a slow-starting, inefficiently run campaign that many in India regard as the worst military debacle since India`s humiliating defeat by China in a 1962 border war.
The court-martial, expected to produce a verdict sometime this month, has come at a sensitive time. The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, will be the host of a summit meeting with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler, from July 14 to 16, when the dispute over Kashmir, which dates to the inception of India and Pakistan as independent nations, is expected to top the agenda.
Mr. Vajpayee headed the government at the time of the Kargil conflict, and won re-election afterward in a campaign buoyed by celebrations in virtually every Indian village and town after India repelled the incursion.
General Musharraf was the Pakistani Army commander who devised the plan to seize the Kargil heights, and felt betrayed by what many in his military saw as their government`s failure to give them full backing at Kargil. Three months later, the general overthrew the civilian government that ordered the Pakistani withdrawal after most of the Himalayan strongholds were lost.
Now, both men have committed themselves to seek a compromise on Kashmir that will reduce the risk of major military confrontations, and satisfy the rest of the world that the possibility of either side using nuclear weapons in a future flare-up has been defused. But at the summit meeting, both leaders will be under pressure from wary domestic constituencies and will need to be seen as bargaining from a position of strength.
For Mr. Vajpayee, who heads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has traditionally presented itself as the most vigilant of all Indian parties on Pakistan, a conviction here would be a step toward bolstering the government`s record on Kashmir. An acquittal would be an invitation to more damaging post-mortems about the alleged Kargil bungling.
Even before the court-martial, the government`s self-congratulatory posture after the conflict had taken a battering. Though the infiltrators were eventually expelled, that they had ensconced themselves at all in such a sensitive territory was cause for serious political embarrassment.
Indian press accounts since the Kargil fighting have told of intelligence reports of the Pakistani intrusions going unattended for months in the Defense Ministry`s files, and of soldiers being sent into battle without the lightweight rifles the army had acquired for high-altitude warfare, and with such inadequate supplies of winter clothing and snowshoes that secondhand supplies designated for surplus sales were pulled from warehouses and transferred urgently to the front.
An official inquiry, reporting in December 1999, came to similar conclusions. Citing India`s casualties, it said, ``The best tribute to their supreme dedication and example will be to ensure that `Kargils` of any description are never repeated.``
At the court-martial, Major Bhatnagar has seen to it that none of this is forgotten. Assessed as an outstanding officer by his commanders before the Kargil fighting, he has earned front-page coverage in Indian newspapers with his performances at the trial.
Armed with a suitcase bursting with files assembled during months in custody, he has stalked the courtroom, thrusting papers at the officers serving as judges, demanding silence from prosecution lawyers and refusing demands that he sit down until the presiding officer, Col. Vinod Malik, raises his hand above a bell that summons armed guards.
The word scapegoat has never been far away. ``Have some conscience!`` he told Maj. Vipin Chakrawati, an army lawyer advising the judges, at a recent morning`s hearing. ``You are a very lowly man, lacking moral fiber.``
At another point, he said his concern was for India, not for himself. ``I`m not worried about myself; I`m worried about the truth,`` he said. Moments later, risking expulsion from the courtroom for contempt, he said, ``It`s a conspiracy; this whole trial is to fix me.``
The major`s defense lawyer, Rajneesh Bansal, sweating in a pinstripe suit, has restricted himself to points of law. But outside he has been vociferous. ``This is a farce trial going on,`` he said. ``The generals are making him a scapegoat, when they should be in the dock themselves.``
Vikram Jit Singh, a reporter for The Indian Express who covered Kargil at the front and is now covering the trial, agreed. ``What`s really stirring resentment in all this is the role of the generals,`` he said. ``They`ve all got off the hook, getting plum postings and awards. It`s a V.I.P. system of justice.``
Like the courtroom itself, the testimony has been rich with Victorian echoes. The prosecution has targeted Major Bhatnagar`s character, suggesting that the order to attack at Kargil had found, in the major, that ``all lofty feelings to serve the nation had subsided and become lull.``
The court listened solemnly as an army lawyer read a 19th-century poem by ``the great English poet,`` Alfred Lord Tennyson, celebrating a doomed attack by British cavalrymen in the Crimean War -- ``Theirs not to make reply,/Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.``
After a pause, the prosecutor drove the point home. ``What we find here,`` he said, ``is most precisely the reverse.``
On the key point in the court-martial, the army`s case has been badly shaken. Major Bhatnagar has said he never refused an order to attack a Pakistani bunker at a position known as Point 5203, at a height of 17,700 feet and above a strategic road. What he did, he has said, was to ask that the 80 men under his command be given a month`s rest to recover from joint pains, blisters and bruises after a grueling three-day truck journey, and a further day`s march, from another Himalayan confrontation zone with Pakistan at Siachen, hundreds of miles to the east.
Brig. Devinder Singh, one of the top Indian commanders at Kargil, has testified that he discussed the attack with Major Bhatnagar, but gave no order. Another major who was present has said that he, too, heard a discussion of an attack, but no order. The prosecution, closing its case, sought to finesse the point by saying that since an assault had been planned, any discussion about it would have amounted, ``to all practical purposes,`` to an order.
Less helpful to the major`s case, the prosecution has established that an earlier, failed assault on the height produced heavy casualties, and that Major Bhatnagar discussed the miseries endured with the surviving troops before taking up the matter with Brigadier Singh. Six days after the discussion, with Major Bhatnagar transferred away from the front, another officer led his men into battle, only to find the Pakistani bunker abandoned.
Months later, as inquiries into the Kargil failures began, army prosecutors began focusing on Major Bhatnagar`s actions, and eventually charged him with cowardice, only to move to the lesser offense now being tried: refusing an order to attack.
Only two other officers involved in the campaign, both majors, have faced courts-martial, with one winning acquittal and the other being convicted, for faking a knee injury. But it is the Bhatnagar trial that army commanders who led the Kargil campaign have watched most closely, perhaps few more so than Gen. V. P. Malik, army chief of staff at the time. Now retired in Chandigarh, the 63-year-old general has been given a rough ride by Indian newspapers, which have recounted how he continued with a tour of Poland for 10 days after the Pakistani intrusions began stirring alarm in New Delhi.
A remark he is said to have made at the time -- ``I can`t stop going to the toilet every time a militant crosses the line of control`` -- has entered Indian folklore as has a report that the general with overall responsibility for Indian defenses in the Kargil area was off building a zoo in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, in the eastern reaches of Kashmir, at the time of the Pakistani buildup.
In an interview at his home, General Malik scoffed at suggestions that the army had taken a black eye at Kargil similar to the one it took against China in 1962, when the general, then an infantry lieutenant, was at the front.
``If the Pakistanis see it as a disaster, and they do,`` he said, reaching for a book at his bedside quoting Pakistani generals on their debacle at Kargil, ``I don`t see why we should see it otherwise. Both sides can`t have lost.``
As for the allegations of scapegoating, he was similarly dismissive. ``I don`t think it`s worth talking about,`` he said. ``We`ve looked at all these events with the greatest transparency, and what more do people want?``
Posted by
OMAR1974
Nov 7, 2001 08:01 pm
July 8, 2001, Sunday Agony Over Kashmir Echoes in Indian Courtroom
By JOHN F. BURNS
For one of its most controversial courts-martial in 50 years, the Indian Army has chosen a setting that seems like a stage set from the colonial past.
Inside the decaying single-story courtroom in the barracks in this sweltering Punjab town, the roof leaks and witnesses` testimony competes with creaking ceiling fans and parrots chirping in mangrove trees outside. Army tailors pedal past on rusting bicycles, and officers` wives stroll beneath brightly colored parasols, chatting languidly as they go.
Over all, a strict protocol prevails. A general testifying for the prosecution gets a red carpet, a ``V.I.P.`` water cooler and snappy salutes from lower-ranking officers serving as judges. Even the bathrooms have a hierarchy -- a neatly signposted urinal for officers, while all others fend for themselves.
The archaisms seem starkly out of step with the modernizing India beyond the barracks` gates. But the issues at the trial of Maj. Manish Bhatnagar, a 29-year-old paratrooper from Bhopal, in central India, are sharply contemporary, and they go to the heart of India`s pride.
The major is charged with refusing an order to attack Pakistani troops holding a Himalayan height inside Indian territory two summers ago. Pakistani Army infiltrators had set off a small-scale war in the Kargil area of Kashmir after penetrating along a 150-mile front, at heights up to 18,000 feet.
After eight weeks of fighting in which Indian troops ascended glaciers, snowfields and rocky crags to attack Pakistani bunkers under heavy fire, the Pakistanis were driven out, but not before more than 850 Indian soldiers and at least 700 Pakistanis had lost their lives.
If convicted, Major Bhatnagar could get 14 years of ``rigorous imprisonment,`` and a lifetime`s disgrace. But in the defiant, explosive defense he has mounted over 50 days of hearings, he has won broad support from fellow officers, military analysts and influential sections of the Indian press.
Supporters see him as a scapegoat for a government and army brass responsible for a slow-starting, inefficiently run campaign that many in India regard as the worst military debacle since India`s humiliating defeat by China in a 1962 border war.
The court-martial, expected to produce a verdict sometime this month, has come at a sensitive time. The Indian prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, will be the host of a summit meeting with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan`s military ruler, from July 14 to 16, when the dispute over Kashmir, which dates to the inception of India and Pakistan as independent nations, is expected to top the agenda.
Mr. Vajpayee headed the government at the time of the Kargil conflict, and won re-election afterward in a campaign buoyed by celebrations in virtually every Indian village and town after India repelled the incursion.
General Musharraf was the Pakistani Army commander who devised the plan to seize the Kargil heights, and felt betrayed by what many in his military saw as their government`s failure to give them full backing at Kargil. Three months later, the general overthrew the civilian government that ordered the Pakistani withdrawal after most of the Himalayan strongholds were lost.
Now, both men have committed themselves to seek a compromise on Kashmir that will reduce the risk of major military confrontations, and satisfy the rest of the world that the possibility of either side using nuclear weapons in a future flare-up has been defused. But at the summit meeting, both leaders will be under pressure from wary domestic constituencies and will need to be seen as bargaining from a position of strength.
For Mr. Vajpayee, who heads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has traditionally presented itself as the most vigilant of all Indian parties on Pakistan, a conviction here would be a step toward bolstering the government`s record on Kashmir. An acquittal would be an invitation to more damaging post-mortems about the alleged Kargil bungling.
Even before the court-martial, the government`s self-congratulatory posture after the conflict had taken a battering. Though the infiltrators were eventually expelled, that they had ensconced themselves at all in such a sensitive territory was cause for serious political embarrassment.
Indian press accounts since the Kargil fighting have told of intelligence reports of the Pakistani intrusions going unattended for months in the Defense Ministry`s files, and of soldiers being sent into battle without the lightweight rifles the army had acquired for high-altitude warfare, and with such inadequate supplies of winter clothing and snowshoes that secondhand supplies designated for surplus sales were pulled from warehouses and transferred urgently to the front.
An official inquiry, reporting in December 1999, came to similar conclusions. Citing India`s casualties, it said, ``The best tribute to their supreme dedication and example will be to ensure that `Kargils` of any description are never repeated.``
At the court-martial, Major Bhatnagar has seen to it that none of this is forgotten. Assessed as an outstanding officer by his commanders before the Kargil fighting, he has earned front-page coverage in Indian newspapers with his performances at the trial.
Armed with a suitcase bursting with files assembled during months in custody, he has stalked the courtroom, thrusting papers at the officers serving as judges, demanding silence from prosecution lawyers and refusing demands that he sit down until the presiding officer, Col. Vinod Malik, raises his hand above a bell that summons armed guards.
The word scapegoat has never been far away. ``Have some conscience!`` he told Maj. Vipin Chakrawati, an army lawyer advising the judges, at a recent morning`s hearing. ``You are a very lowly man, lacking moral fiber.``
At another point, he said his concern was for India, not for himself. ``I`m not worried about myself; I`m worried about the truth,`` he said. Moments later, risking expulsion from the courtroom for contempt, he said, ``It`s a conspiracy; this whole trial is to fix me.``
The major`s defense lawyer, Rajneesh Bansal, sweating in a pinstripe suit, has restricted himself to points of law. But outside he has been vociferous. ``This is a farce trial going on,`` he said. ``The generals are making him a scapegoat, when they should be in the dock themselves.``
Vikram Jit Singh, a reporter for The Indian Express who covered Kargil at the front and is now covering the trial, agreed. ``What`s really stirring resentment in all this is the role of the generals,`` he said. ``They`ve all got off the hook, getting plum postings and awards. It`s a V.I.P. system of justice.``
Like the courtroom itself, the testimony has been rich with Victorian echoes. The prosecution has targeted Major Bhatnagar`s character, suggesting that the order to attack at Kargil had found, in the major, that ``all lofty feelings to serve the nation had subsided and become lull.``
The court listened solemnly as an army lawyer read a 19th-century poem by ``the great English poet,`` Alfred Lord Tennyson, celebrating a doomed attack by British cavalrymen in the Crimean War -- ``Theirs not to make reply,/Theirs not to reason why,/Theirs but to do and die.``
After a pause, the prosecutor drove the point home. ``What we find here,`` he said, ``is most precisely the reverse.``
On the key point in the court-martial, the army`s case has been badly shaken. Major Bhatnagar has said he never refused an order to attack a Pakistani bunker at a position known as Point 5203, at a height of 17,700 feet and above a strategic road. What he did, he has said, was to ask that the 80 men under his command be given a month`s rest to recover from joint pains, blisters and bruises after a grueling three-day truck journey, and a further day`s march, from another Himalayan confrontation zone with Pakistan at Siachen, hundreds of miles to the east.
Brig. Devinder Singh, one of the top Indian commanders at Kargil, has testified that he discussed the attack with Major Bhatnagar, but gave no order. Another major who was present has said that he, too, heard a discussion of an attack, but no order. The prosecution, closing its case, sought to finesse the point by saying that since an assault had been planned, any discussion about it would have amounted, ``to all practical purposes,`` to an order.
Less helpful to the major`s case, the prosecution has established that an earlier, failed assault on the height produced heavy casualties, and that Major Bhatnagar discussed the miseries endured with the surviving troops before taking up the matter with Brigadier Singh. Six days after the discussion, with Major Bhatnagar transferred away from the front, another officer led his men into battle, only to find the Pakistani bunker abandoned.
Months later, as inquiries into the Kargil failures began, army prosecutors began focusing on Major Bhatnagar`s actions, and eventually charged him with cowardice, only to move to the lesser offense now being tried: refusing an order to attack.
Only two other officers involved in the campaign, both majors, have faced courts-martial, with one winning acquittal and the other being convicted, for faking a knee injury. But it is the Bhatnagar trial that army commanders who led the Kargil campaign have watched most closely, perhaps few more so than Gen. V. P. Malik, army chief of staff at the time. Now retired in Chandigarh, the 63-year-old general has been given a rough ride by Indian newspapers, which have recounted how he continued with a tour of Poland for 10 days after the Pakistani intrusions began stirring alarm in New Delhi.
A remark he is said to have made at the time -- ``I can`t stop going to the toilet every time a militant crosses the line of control`` -- has entered Indian folklore as has a report that the general with overall responsibility for Indian defenses in the Kargil area was off building a zoo in Leh, the capital of Ladakh, in the eastern reaches of Kashmir, at the time of the Pakistani buildup.
In an interview at his home, General Malik scoffed at suggestions that the army had taken a black eye at Kargil similar to the one it took against China in 1962, when the general, then an infantry lieutenant, was at the front.
``If the Pakistanis see it as a disaster, and they do,`` he said, reaching for a book at his bedside quoting Pakistani generals on their debacle at Kargil, ``I don`t see why we should see it otherwise. Both sides can`t have lost.``
As for the allegations of scapegoating, he was similarly dismissive. ``I don`t think it`s worth talking about,`` he said. ``We`ve looked at all these events with the greatest transparency, and what more do people want?``
A Decision to Regret
My dear fellow you are misinformed if you think the Pakistan army `ran away` at Kargil! Please read the New York Times article by John F. Burns this past summer `Agony over Kashmir Echoes in an Indian Courtroom`. Also read `A History of the Pakistan Army` by Brian Cloughley, 2nd edition.
The Indian Army admitted that it lost at Kargil. The only reason Pakistan army left was U.S diplomatic pressure. The Indian army had only taken a dozen key points back at high cost. The Pakistan army still held over 120.
Incidently, within Pakistan itself there has been a concerted attempt by the army to dub Kargil a defeat. Why? Because If it was known they won militarily, (they lost politically) it would reduce animosity for India within Pakistan, sort of seem to even the score for Dec 1971. The Pakistan army does not want that. Not now. Trust me. Thats why Pakistani generals all say they lost in their books.
Posted by
OMAR1974
Nov 5, 2001 07:24 pm
Re: reply #480 KARGILMy dear fellow you are misinformed if you think the Pakistan army `ran away` at Kargil! Please read the New York Times article by John F. Burns this past summer `Agony over Kashmir Echoes in an Indian Courtroom`. Also read `A History of the Pakistan Army` by Brian Cloughley, 2nd edition.
The Indian Army admitted that it lost at Kargil. The only reason Pakistan army left was U.S diplomatic pressure. The Indian army had only taken a dozen key points back at high cost. The Pakistan army still held over 120.
Incidently, within Pakistan itself there has been a concerted attempt by the army to dub Kargil a defeat. Why? Because If it was known they won militarily, (they lost politically) it would reduce animosity for India within Pakistan, sort of seem to even the score for Dec 1971. The Pakistan army does not want that. Not now. Trust me. Thats why Pakistani generals all say they lost in their books.
Biases of the American Press
June 27
Interest-based system
It was refreshing to read Z. Ali Mallah`s common sense view (letter, June 22 ``Interest based system``)that, ``World countries will stop investment as they will be no commitment of returns. People who have extra money in Pakistan will also stop depositing money in the bank for the very same reason.``
I would only like to add that in the absence of viable market-Islamic financial instruments, when the world has become a global village, capital flight is inevitable, as excess capital always seeks the highest return without regard to national ideology, only individual self-interest.
At that point, if the government is unable to pay its domestic debts, it will simply become insolvent, and when all the widows and pensioners who invest in national savings schemes queue up to ask for their principal (the face value of the government bonds they currently hold) they will all be told to go to hang themselves.
What a triumph for unelected Mullahism that will be! All will be equally hungry, poor, and destitute, just like in Afghanistan. Then, once mass despair with `Western influenced government institutions, and the absence of accountable government` has fully set in, the Mullahs can take over the government and run an utterly unabashed totalitarian state in which no one else has either modern democratic rights,half a say, or a free opinion. There won`t be any free press either. I assure you all of that.
What a master plan!
OMAR MIRZA
New York, USA
Posted by
OMAR1974
Jul 2, 2001 12:11 pm
Published Dawn Letters to the ed Wednesday,June 27
Interest-based system
It was refreshing to read Z. Ali Mallah`s common sense view (letter, June 22 ``Interest based system``)that, ``World countries will stop investment as they will be no commitment of returns. People who have extra money in Pakistan will also stop depositing money in the bank for the very same reason.``
I would only like to add that in the absence of viable market-Islamic financial instruments, when the world has become a global village, capital flight is inevitable, as excess capital always seeks the highest return without regard to national ideology, only individual self-interest.
At that point, if the government is unable to pay its domestic debts, it will simply become insolvent, and when all the widows and pensioners who invest in national savings schemes queue up to ask for their principal (the face value of the government bonds they currently hold) they will all be told to go to hang themselves.
What a triumph for unelected Mullahism that will be! All will be equally hungry, poor, and destitute, just like in Afghanistan. Then, once mass despair with `Western influenced government institutions, and the absence of accountable government` has fully set in, the Mullahs can take over the government and run an utterly unabashed totalitarian state in which no one else has either modern democratic rights,half a say, or a free opinion. There won`t be any free press either. I assure you all of that.
What a master plan!
OMAR MIRZA
New York, USA
The Making of a Successful Marriage
The availability of a support system is a great contributor to stable marriages. The support system is a network of friends and relatives that can be relied upon in case of any misunderstanding. Both partners can discuss the problem with their respective friends. By discussing the problem alone can put it in a proper perspective. In North America, there is a great emphasis on individual growth and independence. This factor alone prohibits sharing of concerns and aspirations with friends. In the Eastern society, the extended family and friends provide a network that keeps marriages on track. The lack of this support system has started to manifest in the second generation of immigrants.``
Comment: The true value of a support system, especially grandparents and the presence of brothers and sisters living nearby for the married couple is reliable and FREE BABY SITTING SERVICES. The ready availablity of such services helps keep the married couple SANE. The unavailability of such services is enough to drive anyone, anywhere, in any country, quite MAD.
---OMAR
Posted by
OMAR1974
Apr 12, 2001 03:35 am
RE: ``Support SystemThe availability of a support system is a great contributor to stable marriages. The support system is a network of friends and relatives that can be relied upon in case of any misunderstanding. Both partners can discuss the problem with their respective friends. By discussing the problem alone can put it in a proper perspective. In North America, there is a great emphasis on individual growth and independence. This factor alone prohibits sharing of concerns and aspirations with friends. In the Eastern society, the extended family and friends provide a network that keeps marriages on track. The lack of this support system has started to manifest in the second generation of immigrants.``
Comment: The true value of a support system, especially grandparents and the presence of brothers and sisters living nearby for the married couple is reliable and FREE BABY SITTING SERVICES. The ready availablity of such services helps keep the married couple SANE. The unavailability of such services is enough to drive anyone, anywhere, in any country, quite MAD.
---OMAR
Biases of the American Press
* * *A.B. Vajpayee has broken his promise to allow the APHC to visit Pakistan, why then is this NOT mentioned in this `objective` report ? In fact this `iniative` of Vajpayee`s is really a step backwards from his earlier promise, but note that it is being POSITIVELY reported rather than negatively, w/o any mention of the previous promise, on which India has clearly reneged, because it was never serious to begin with.
--OMAR Mirza
India Rebuffed on Proposal for Kashmir Talks _____Special Report_____
• Kashmir on the Brink
Associated Press
Friday, April 6, 2001; Page A29 NEW DELHI, April 5 -- India offered today to hold peace talks with Kashmiri separatists living abroad as well as those in the disputed Himalayan region. The offer was immediately rebuffed by the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a key umbrella organization of political and religious groups in Kashmir, which demanded that the Pakistani government should be part of a tripartite dialogue.The government`s invitation to separatist and political groups living in India and abroad came four months after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee ordered a temporary cease-fire against Islamic guerrillas fighting for Kashmir`s independence or unification with Pakistan. The statement offered no hope, however, of immediate negotiations with Pakistan, which has fought two wars with India over control of Kashmir since gaining independence from Britain in 1947. India accuses Pakistan of training and arming Islamic separatists who have been fighting since 1989 against Indian rule in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India`s only state with a Muslim majority. Pakistan, an overwhelmingly Islamic nation, says it provides only moral and diplomatic support to the rebels.Today`s statement did not say when the dialogue would begin or with whom.``The government decided to embark upon a political dialogue with all sections of the peace-loving people of the state, including those who currently live outside it,`` the statement said. ``It is expected that . . . all political parties, nongovernment organizations, trade unions, social and religious bodies from all the regions of the state will participate.``Abdul Ghani Bhatt, a spokesman for the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, demanded that the Indian government allow a delegation of the group`s leaders to visit Pakistan to discuss the Indian offer with the Pakistani government and key militant groups there.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
Posted by
OMAR1974
Apr 6, 2001 08:43 pm
I think I`d like to refocus this discussion on the bias of the American press in reporting events with a current concrete example of what I`m talking about on reporting from the subcontinent folks, from the Washington Post today.* * *A.B. Vajpayee has broken his promise to allow the APHC to visit Pakistan, why then is this NOT mentioned in this `objective` report ? In fact this `iniative` of Vajpayee`s is really a step backwards from his earlier promise, but note that it is being POSITIVELY reported rather than negatively, w/o any mention of the previous promise, on which India has clearly reneged, because it was never serious to begin with.
--OMAR Mirza
India Rebuffed on Proposal for Kashmir Talks _____Special Report_____
• Kashmir on the Brink
Associated Press
Friday, April 6, 2001; Page A29 NEW DELHI, April 5 -- India offered today to hold peace talks with Kashmiri separatists living abroad as well as those in the disputed Himalayan region. The offer was immediately rebuffed by the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a key umbrella organization of political and religious groups in Kashmir, which demanded that the Pakistani government should be part of a tripartite dialogue.The government`s invitation to separatist and political groups living in India and abroad came four months after Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee ordered a temporary cease-fire against Islamic guerrillas fighting for Kashmir`s independence or unification with Pakistan. The statement offered no hope, however, of immediate negotiations with Pakistan, which has fought two wars with India over control of Kashmir since gaining independence from Britain in 1947. India accuses Pakistan of training and arming Islamic separatists who have been fighting since 1989 against Indian rule in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, India`s only state with a Muslim majority. Pakistan, an overwhelmingly Islamic nation, says it provides only moral and diplomatic support to the rebels.Today`s statement did not say when the dialogue would begin or with whom.``The government decided to embark upon a political dialogue with all sections of the peace-loving people of the state, including those who currently live outside it,`` the statement said. ``It is expected that . . . all political parties, nongovernment organizations, trade unions, social and religious bodies from all the regions of the state will participate.``Abdul Ghani Bhatt, a spokesman for the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, demanded that the Indian government allow a delegation of the group`s leaders to visit Pakistan to discuss the Indian offer with the Pakistani government and key militant groups there.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
Ghazali On Women In Islam
Is it/could it be considered blasphemy to refer to God`s gender as female, in Islam by a Muslim in print?
Posted by
OMAR1974
Dec 17, 2000 10:05 am
Question for all.Is it/could it be considered blasphemy to refer to God`s gender as female, in Islam by a Muslim in print?
Democracy in Pakistan: The Missing Link?
Polarization of society
TODAY in Pakistan, there is very little concept of a meaningful Pakistan citizenship as befitting a free people. Sectarian and ethnic identity is how individuals are defined by the state in its relation to society. (And why not, if the government itself uses this form of identity to impose a rigid quota system on jobs and opportunity, instead of merit as the sole criteria).
The reason for this failure to create ``Pakistaniyat``, is the failure of successive governments to provide for the participation of the people in the running of their own country in a meaningful manner and the fact that the national decision-making process has been confined to an un-elected few for much of Pakistan`s history. Thus, relatively few have developed a stake in Pakistan (witness the large number of people fleeing abroad today), and some people have dubbed it, ``a failed state``. This is the strongest case for a democratic Pakistan I can make.
Zia attempted to create a Pakistani identity on the basis of religion alone, but as the Quaid-i-Azam recognized in 1947, even among the Muslims there are significant religious differences. That attempt of Zia to create this definition of a citizenship (``Pakistaniyat``) based on religion, in the absence of representative democratic institutions, and in fact, as a deliberate substitute for them, has led to religious wars being fought in Pakistani streets today, and the polarization of society as never before, 20 years down the road.
That Pakistan has been cursed by corrupt, unaccountable `democrats`, reflects poorly on the workings of the institution of an independent judiciary. What is needed is a powerful, independent prosecutor`s office to investigate and bring charges of corruption against sitting members of the ruling party to deter the plunder as it occurs, and bring them to account and disqualification, while they are in office. This is the democracy Pakistan has never had.
The present government is to be commended for encouraging the growth of real grassroots democracy that will give ordinary Pakistanis a meaningful stake in the country`s affairs.
However, a military government, however transient, needs no thoughtless encouragement from its own citizens to abridge their constitutional liberties. In the Pakistani culture of autocracy, no individual rights can ever be taken for granted.
The growth of law making by ordinances as opposed to the passage of laws by freely-elected parliaments composed of representatives of the people has already worked to erode the very notion of any positive individual rights.
OMAR MIRZA
New York, USA
Posted by
OMAR1974
Dec 15, 2000 01:21 pm
Lead letter to the Editor in Dawn, December 15thPolarization of society
TODAY in Pakistan, there is very little concept of a meaningful Pakistan citizenship as befitting a free people. Sectarian and ethnic identity is how individuals are defined by the state in its relation to society. (And why not, if the government itself uses this form of identity to impose a rigid quota system on jobs and opportunity, instead of merit as the sole criteria).
The reason for this failure to create ``Pakistaniyat``, is the failure of successive governments to provide for the participation of the people in the running of their own country in a meaningful manner and the fact that the national decision-making process has been confined to an un-elected few for much of Pakistan`s history. Thus, relatively few have developed a stake in Pakistan (witness the large number of people fleeing abroad today), and some people have dubbed it, ``a failed state``. This is the strongest case for a democratic Pakistan I can make.
Zia attempted to create a Pakistani identity on the basis of religion alone, but as the Quaid-i-Azam recognized in 1947, even among the Muslims there are significant religious differences. That attempt of Zia to create this definition of a citizenship (``Pakistaniyat``) based on religion, in the absence of representative democratic institutions, and in fact, as a deliberate substitute for them, has led to religious wars being fought in Pakistani streets today, and the polarization of society as never before, 20 years down the road.
That Pakistan has been cursed by corrupt, unaccountable `democrats`, reflects poorly on the workings of the institution of an independent judiciary. What is needed is a powerful, independent prosecutor`s office to investigate and bring charges of corruption against sitting members of the ruling party to deter the plunder as it occurs, and bring them to account and disqualification, while they are in office. This is the democracy Pakistan has never had.
The present government is to be commended for encouraging the growth of real grassroots democracy that will give ordinary Pakistanis a meaningful stake in the country`s affairs.
However, a military government, however transient, needs no thoughtless encouragement from its own citizens to abridge their constitutional liberties. In the Pakistani culture of autocracy, no individual rights can ever be taken for granted.
The growth of law making by ordinances as opposed to the passage of laws by freely-elected parliaments composed of representatives of the people has already worked to erode the very notion of any positive individual rights.
OMAR MIRZA
New York, USA
Democracy in Pakistan: The Missing Link?
Polarization of society
TODAY in Pakistan, there is very little concept of a meaningful Pakistan citizenship as befitting a free people. Sectarian and ethnic identity is how individuals are defined by the state in its relation to society. (And why not, if the government itself uses this form of identity to impose a rigid quota system on jobs and opportunity, instead of merit as the sole criteria).
The reason for this failure to create ``Pakistaniyat``, is the failure of successive governments to provide for the participation of the people in the running of their own country in a meaningful manner and the fact that the national decision-making process has been confined to an un-elected few for much of Pakistan`s history. Thus, relatively few have developed a stake in Pakistan (witness the large number of people fleeing abroad today), and some people have dubbed it, ``a failed state``. This is the strongest case for a democratic Pakistan I can make.
Zia attempted to create a Pakistani identity on the basis of religion alone, but as the Quaid-i-Azam recognized in 1947, even among the Muslims there are significant religious differences. That attempt of Zia to create this definition of a citizenship (``Pakistaniyat``) based on religion, in the absence of representative democratic institutions, and in fact, as a deliberate substitute for them, has led to religious wars being fought in Pakistani streets today, and the polarization of society as never before, 20 years down the road.
That Pakistan has been cursed by corrupt, unaccountable `democrats`, reflects poorly on the workings of the institution of an independent judiciary. What is needed is a powerful, independent prosecutor`s office to investigate and bring charges of corruption against sitting members of the ruling party to deter the plunder as it occurs, and bring them to account and disqualification, while they are in office. This is the democracy Pakistan has never had.
The present government is to be commended for encouraging the growth of real grassroots democracy that will give ordinary Pakistanis a meaningful stake in the country`s affairs.
However, a military government, however transient, needs no thoughtless encouragement from its own citizens to abridge their constitutional liberties. In the Pakistani culture of autocracy, no individual rights can ever be taken for granted.
The growth of law making by ordinances as opposed to the passage of laws by freely-elected parliaments composed of representatives of the people has already worked to erode the very notion of any positive individual rights.
OMAR MIRZA
New York, USA
Posted by
OMAR1974
Dec 15, 2000 01:21 pm
Lead Letter to the Ed Published DAWN: Dec 15thPolarization of society
TODAY in Pakistan, there is very little concept of a meaningful Pakistan citizenship as befitting a free people. Sectarian and ethnic identity is how individuals are defined by the state in its relation to society. (And why not, if the government itself uses this form of identity to impose a rigid quota system on jobs and opportunity, instead of merit as the sole criteria).
The reason for this failure to create ``Pakistaniyat``, is the failure of successive governments to provide for the participation of the people in the running of their own country in a meaningful manner and the fact that the national decision-making process has been confined to an un-elected few for much of Pakistan`s history. Thus, relatively few have developed a stake in Pakistan (witness the large number of people fleeing abroad today), and some people have dubbed it, ``a failed state``. This is the strongest case for a democratic Pakistan I can make.
Zia attempted to create a Pakistani identity on the basis of religion alone, but as the Quaid-i-Azam recognized in 1947, even among the Muslims there are significant religious differences. That attempt of Zia to create this definition of a citizenship (``Pakistaniyat``) based on religion, in the absence of representative democratic institutions, and in fact, as a deliberate substitute for them, has led to religious wars being fought in Pakistani streets today, and the polarization of society as never before, 20 years down the road.
That Pakistan has been cursed by corrupt, unaccountable `democrats`, reflects poorly on the workings of the institution of an independent judiciary. What is needed is a powerful, independent prosecutor`s office to investigate and bring charges of corruption against sitting members of the ruling party to deter the plunder as it occurs, and bring them to account and disqualification, while they are in office. This is the democracy Pakistan has never had.
The present government is to be commended for encouraging the growth of real grassroots democracy that will give ordinary Pakistanis a meaningful stake in the country`s affairs.
However, a military government, however transient, needs no thoughtless encouragement from its own citizens to abridge their constitutional liberties. In the Pakistani culture of autocracy, no individual rights can ever be taken for granted.
The growth of law making by ordinances as opposed to the passage of laws by freely-elected parliaments composed of representatives of the people has already worked to erode the very notion of any positive individual rights.
OMAR MIRZA
New York, USA
Ghazali On Women In Islam
PLEASE POST THE CORRECT CITATIONS FOR THE SOURCES
you used for this compilation, along with the correct page numbers, publishers, year and place of publication. I forwarded this article to some people. They just said in response that its all a lie spread to malign Islam and that Ghazali never said all this, only book unchanged is the Quran Sharif. You should have put all the citations at the end of the piece for each quote, having anticipated this reaction.
BTW, I highly reccomend the book TALIBAN by Ahmed Rashid (Journalist for The Telegraph & Far Eastern Economic Review) to everyone, well worth reading. All about the impact on Pakistan in the past 21 years, since its involvement with Afghanistan, & the Taliban. Available at www.desistore.com. The book does describe the actual implementation of the Islamic society as per Ghazali.
Posted by
OMAR1974
Dec 13, 2000 08:01 pm
ATTENTION A.SHIRAZ,PLEASE POST THE CORRECT CITATIONS FOR THE SOURCES
you used for this compilation, along with the correct page numbers, publishers, year and place of publication. I forwarded this article to some people. They just said in response that its all a lie spread to malign Islam and that Ghazali never said all this, only book unchanged is the Quran Sharif. You should have put all the citations at the end of the piece for each quote, having anticipated this reaction.
BTW, I highly reccomend the book TALIBAN by Ahmed Rashid (Journalist for The Telegraph & Far Eastern Economic Review) to everyone, well worth reading. All about the impact on Pakistan in the past 21 years, since its involvement with Afghanistan, & the Taliban. Available at www.desistore.com. The book does describe the actual implementation of the Islamic society as per Ghazali.
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