Fanatics in all the wrong places

On 26 January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced that it had received allegations from Israel that twelve of its employees were directly involved in Hamas’ attack on Israel last October. These employees, some of whom are alleged to have participated in massacres of Israelis, have now been sacked, are dead, or are under investigation by UNRWA. Israel has also accused 190 of the UNRWA’s Gaza employees of being operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This is not the first time that the UNRWA, founded in 1949 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees created by the first Arab-Israeli War, has been accused of lax hiring practices. Last November, one of the released Israeli hostages claimed he had been held in an attic by a UNRWA teacher.

Now, a slew of countries, including the UK and the US, have stopped their funding for the UNRWA. Combined, these countries contributed over 60 per cent of the UNRWA’s budget in 2022. Whether this is a fair response or not (after all, the UNRWA is now more than ever a lifeline for besieged Palestinians), the allegations are worrying. What hope can there be of a just and stable settlement to this interminable conflict if even the aid agencies of the UN are harbouring violent extremists?

Speaking of fanatics popping up in unwelcome places, Dr Wahid Shaida was suspended by NHS England last month for being the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir was itself proscribed as a terrorist organisation shortly before Shaida’s suspension. But just why the head of a woman-hating, homophobic, Islamist outfit, who had openly celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie and the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, was allowed to practise medicine in the first place is puzzling. One ought not to persecute others for their private beliefs, however distasteful, but it strikes me that such bigotry and fanaticism might have an adverse effect on a doctor’s ability to treat his or her patients fairly – particularly the female, gay, and Jewish ones. In any case, with the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Shaida’s suspension is certainly justified; though he is still, for some reason, registered with the General Medical Council.  

And then there is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency since last October. Johnson seems to be an avowed Christian nationalist and his pre-Speaker career highlights include advocating for the criminalisation of gay sex and helping Donald Trump’s demented and spurious legal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Read about all this and more in a white paper released by the Congressional Freethought Caucus on 11 January.

It is a sad, sad irony that the very nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals by a group of secularists and freethinkers, including the two great Toms (Paine and Jefferson), is home to some of the world’s most backward and most powerful Christian fundamentalists.

Modi’s triumph and the decay of subcontinental secularism

Meanwhile, India’s great secularist tradition continues to decay under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule. On 22 January, Modi officially opened a new temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, proclaiming that ‘After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]. I want to congratulate every citizen of the country on this historic occasion.’

With elections on the horizon, Modi’s fulfilment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist dream was obviously a vote-getting ploy. Little, of course, was made of the fact that the temple’s site was once home to a centuries-old mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The mob were convinced that the mosque had originally been erected by Muslim invaders over an earlier temple where Ram had been born. (Leave it to the religious to desecrate the sacred sites of their rivals.) Riots provoked by the destruction of the mosque killed thousands.

So: communal strife, destruction of ancient buildings, the death of thousands—and all thanks to religious fantasy. And now the vandalism and horror of 1992 are being erased because Narendra Modi wishes to stir up his supporters. In doing so, his assault on India’s rich secularist history reaches new heights. Here is the triumph of Modi.

And this prompts a further reflection: from Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that ‘religion poisons everything.’

The Navajo Nation vs NASA

On 6 January, one of the great crises of our time arose. The White House hastily convoked a meeting, attended by officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration among others, to meet the crisis head-on. For a commercial lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, was due to launch in a couple of days—and its payload contained human remains which were to be buried on the Moon.

What, you might ask, was the problem with that? It has been done before, and the Moon is quite a beautiful final resting place. Many people, myself included, would feel honoured to be fired out into space to rest forever on the Earth’s closest fellow orb. Allow the Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren to explain:

‘The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology… The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.’

Yes, really! This is no different from Catholics or Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on others. The only surprising thing is that it was paid such heed. The only proper response to this sort of thing is: Who cares? Or, perhaps, Too bad!

Of course, the reason no such firmly secularist response was given in this case is because the Navajo are a minority and they have faced terrible oppression. Guilt-ridden liberals who would happily scoff at, say, Catholic calls to ban homosexuality, are unable to do the same when it comes to indigenous people staking their own arrogant claims to religious privilege. This is an act of unintentional bigotry. It suggests that indigenous people cannot be held to the same standards as others and that their superstitions, which they are clearly incapable of throwing off, must be indulged.

But as citizens of democratic nations, nobody has the right to make special claims for themselves based on religion, let alone impose their beliefs on others. That is the essence of secularism. It does not matter whether the demand for privilege comes from a powerful bishop or an oppressed minority.

The Navajo case is representative of a more general trend: the indulgence of indigenous superstition in the name of inclusivity. Other instances include the adoption of such superstitions in American museums and the credence given to ‘indigenous science’ or ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ even in such august journals as Science. In New Zealand, meanwhile, where the embrace of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (in this case, Māori ways of knowing) has gone the furthest, a Māori local district councillor defied the secularist mayor during a meeting and recited a prayer.

If Narendra Modi and Mike Johnson are examples of the religious right flaunting its power, are the claims of the Navajo and the Māori examples of the religious ‘woke’ left in action? At least, the ‘woke’ left tends to support these claims. As ever, the only solution is the secularist one of fairness: nobody, however powerful or oppressed, gets a special pass for their beliefs, nor do they have the right to impose those beliefs on others.

Muslims v Michaela

The legal case currently being pursued against Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School by fundamentalist Muslims angry at the school’s restriction of Muslim prayer has stirred up something quite unusual, but also very heartening: an outpouring from across the political spectrum of sympathy for secularism. But, as Megan Manson of the National Secular Society notes, this sympathy is somewhat shallow, given its ignorance (or ignoring) of the UK’s deeply anti-secular education system – never mind its overtly religious political system. Still, who knows? Perhaps the intimidation meted out to Michaela by aggrieved fundamentalists and the wave of public sympathy for the school will inspire the country to finally cast off all the vestiges of theocracy.

Postscript: the Conservative MP Mike Freer has just announced that he will stand down at the next election. Why? He is scared of the Islamists who have been intimidating him for years. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive given that he was in the line of sight of the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess in 2021. As Rakib Ehsan writes in The Telegraph, ‘Freer’s decision to walk away from British politics for fear of his personal safety is yet another example of the Islamist-inspired erosion of British parliamentary democracy.’

An irreligious king?

On a related note, talk of Prince William’s irreligiousness compared to his father and grandmother caused some speculation that he might cut ties with the Church of England upon becoming King. Alas, such rumours were quickly dispelled, but not before they provoked some amusing grumbling from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside some thin guff in place of any serious reasoning about the truth of Christianity (never Hitchens’ strong point, and something he usually and wisely avoids), there was one point with which I found myself agreeing: ‘If this stuff is not true, or is marginal, or if we do not really believe it, then there is no purpose in having a King, or a Prince of Wales. We might as well have a President in a nice suit.’ Indeed—and huzzah!

The resurrected exorcist

The Daily Star, citing ‘a recently unearthed interview with [an] obscure Spanish magazine’, says that the Pope’s former exorcist Gabriele Amorth (who left this vale of tears in 2016) believed that the Devil is responsible for political evil and corruption. Even Hitler and Stalin, according to Father Amorth, are to be explained by old Nick’s seductive whisperings. Spooky!

But come now. Aside from its obvious foolishness, this is an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. Never mind the hard and necessary work of bothering to explain the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin in rational terms, so that we might understand and stop such men from gaining power ever again. No, no: it was the Devil! Just pray and obey our ancient and constipated moral teachings and all manner of thing shall be well.

Remember: this was the Pope’s exorcist. So, quite apart from the fact that the Pope still believes in exorcism like some medieval peasant, until quite recently his exorcist was a plain idiot. But what do you expect from the Catholic Church? And millions, if not billions, take the Pope’s pronouncements very seriously. The human species is still, clearly, very immature.

Some more wisdom from Father Amorth:

‘I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist… Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering… The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse.’

‘I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week. Everyone is vulnerable. The Devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was.

‘Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. Ninety per cent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic.

‘If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you.’

Well, there you go: harmonise your aura with the Lord above, then that rascal Lucifer won’t be able to get you, and there’ll be no evil in the world! Because, of course, no evil has ever been committed by godly men…

Enter Russell Crowe

Apparently, Father Amorth was the subject of a (highly dramatised) movie starring Russell Crowe last year. According to the summary on Wikipedia, ‘[Amorth] learns that a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, an exorcist, was possessed, which let him infiltrate the Church and do many evils. Amorth also finds the Church covered this up…’ This does not, so far as I know, represent anything done or claimed by the real Amorth, but it does chime with his comments given above—and what an easy escape for the Church! All its many crimes throughout history were just a satanic aberration. It was the Devil all along! Thank the Lord for that. Let us never trouble ourselves again about the Inquisition, or Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, or the Crusades, or child sex abuse, or…

So much for mea culpa, never mind mea maxima culpa, then.

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Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Christian nationalism in the US

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

British Islam, secularism, and free speech

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Monarchy, religion, and republicanism

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’ –interview with Graham Smith

The post Faith Watch, February 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

‘We are Hindus. Shoot to kill us, but don’t take our children away from us by force. We have no other demand; we simply beg for the safety and protection of our children.’

These heart-wrenching words were shared by Amree Maharaj as she recounted the alleged forced conversion of her daughter, Chanda Maharaj, aged 14. Amree, aged 50, lives with her two other daughters and elderly husband in a rented one-room house, situated on the outskirts of a dirty and unpleasant pond in the slums of Hyderabad, the second largest city in the southern province of Sindh, Pakistan.

[Extract from Korai’s interview with Amree here.]

In addition to Chanda, Amree is equally concerned about the well-being of her two other daughters, Sona, aged 17, and Bhagwati, aged 16. Their mother fears that they too might be forcefully converted to Islam: underage Hindu girls are always in danger. When I interviewed her in April for the Freethinker, Amree told me that she would prefer them to be married early to Hindu men rather than forcibly converted to Islam.  If the girls are taken, she says, ‘I cannot bring them back.  No one comes to our help.’

Amree, who looks older than her age due to malnutrition and stress, tearfully related how her daughter Chanda was forcibly converted to Islam by a Muslim man. She firmly believes that Chanda, who loves her family, would not have willingly left them. 

Chanda Maharaj appeared before a local court in Hyderabad in February 2023 after repeated protests against the police by her family and human rights activists. Since she was underage, and the provincial law prohibits marriage before 18, the court sent her to a safe house. But since then, Chanda’s family has lost track of her.  

Amree’s family is Dalit: the lowest caste in Hindu society, who often face discrimination in terms of education, employment opportunities, and access to basic necessities. For many Dalit families and others from religious minorities, the risk that their daughters will be forcibly converted to Islam is a serious and ongoing concern. In Pakistan, more than 96 per cent of the population are Muslim. The constitution guarantees freedom of religion. However, there is no legislation against religious conversion of any kind, so long as it is (supposedly) unbiased and voluntary.

Chanda and her two sisters were employed at the same textile mill near their home. They earnt only 1. 25 USD each per day, with which they supported their parents (their father is unable to work due to physical weakness, and their mother is a housewife). On 12^th December 2022, all three sisters went to work – but only two returned home in the evening.  

Despite their efforts, Chanda’s family were unable to locate her. This led them to believe that she had undergone a forced conversion, as similar incidents had occurred before involving young Hindu girls.  

Chanda’s sister Bhagwati, two years older than her, met the family and her sister in court and scolded them for not contacting Chanda sooner. She found her younger sister fearful and trembling when she appeared before the court. When Chanda’s lawyer suggested sending her to a safe house run by the provincial government, which is designed to offer refuge to women in need, Bhagwati was dismayed. She held her hands together, as if praying, and begged the state authorities to send her younger sister home.

* *

Forced conversion to Islam remains an ongoing issue in Pakistan. It particularly affects underage girls in religious minorities, including Hindus, Christians and others. Another victim of this practice was Rinkle Kumari, 19, from the town of Mirpur Mathelo, who was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam and married in 2012.

Kumari’s case was heard at all levels, from the local court to the Supreme Court of Pakistan. In an effort to ensure her safe return, and despite numerous threats from her kidnappers, Kumari’s maternal uncle, Raj Kumar Wanjara, fought for her cause.  

When I interviewed him, Wanjara claimed that Kumari consistently expressed her desire to be reunited with her mother throughout the legal proceedings. However, regrettably, she was unable to achieve success in her plea: instead, she was handed over to Naveed Shah, the Muslim man who claimed to be her husband after her conversion.

[Extract from Korai’s interview with Wanjara here.]

According to Wanjara, while Kumari’s statement was recorded in the Supreme Court of Pakistan, it was recorded not by the judge, as would usually be the case, but by the court registrar, because the judge refused to do it. This raises serious doubts as to the claim made by their opponents that her alleged free decision to stay with her new husband was in fact made without external pressure. When the highest authorities responsible for justice in Pakistan exhibit such behaviour, says Wanjara, it raises the question of whom families like his should turn to in order to obtain justice.

The quest for justice for their cherished niece took a devastating toll on Wanjara’s family, resulting in hardships and break-up. Some family members were compelled to seek refuge in India, while others were settled in Karachi. In addition, their once-thriving business in Mirpur Mathelo, their hometown, incurred substantial losses and was ultimately forced to close.

As a result of his attempts to rescue his niece, Wanjara himself says that he has encountered numerous challenges and threats. These include extortion attempts by the Taliban and threatening phone calls from Afghanistan while he was conducting his business in Karachi.

The forced migration from Pakistan, the persistent threats, the fear and the anguish, took a heavy toll on Wanjara’s father, Manohar Lal, who suffered a heart attack at the age of 70.

Wanjara vividly recalls the last words his niece spoke to the local media in 2012: that she would never receive justice after being forcibly married to a Muslim man against her wishes. He last saw her in the Supreme Court on the day, over a decade ago, that the court handed Kumari over to Shah. Since then, Kumari’s family have not seen her and do not know where she is. When her father passed away, she was not even able to attend the final funeral rites and ceremonies. Her last words have been echoing in her uncle’s mind, haunting him in his daily life.

Just a week after our interview, Wanjara unexpectedly passed away in Houston. 

* *

The province of Sindh in Pakistan is home to the majority of Hindus, who are recognised as an indigenous group. Two districts within the Thar desert, Umer Kot and Tharparkar, have a significant Hindu population, approximately 54 per cent and 43 per cent of the districts respectively.

Two Muslim clerics actively and vocally involved in the conversions are Mian Abdul Haq, known as Mian Mithu, of the Bharchundi shrine in the northern part of Sindh, who last year was banned from entering the UK for ‘violations and abuses of human rights’, and Pir Ayub Jan Sarhandi, in the part on the border with India. Additionally, numerous lesser-known clerics have also been allowed to perform conversions without any intervention from state authorities.

Sarhandi, whom I interviewed for this article, emphasises his family’s commitment to promoting and upholding Islam. He strongly denies targeting Hindus and emphasises Islam’s teachings of harmony, coexistence and inclusivity. He believes that conversion serves the cause of Islam. He claims that those who convert are genuinely impressed by Islam. Muslim clerics maintain that the conversions are voluntary and based on the individual’s admiration for their religion.

* *

However, religious minorities in Pakistan, especially Hindus, have in recent years felt increasing fear about the risk of forced conversions to Islam. While this phenomenon has existed in Pakistan for many years, it experienced a significant surge during the Afghan war, with the emergence of Pakistan’s jihadi wave. Since then, the pace of conversions appears to have been escalating, perhaps in part due to social media. Mian Mithu was himself a member of the National Assembly from 2008-13 with the support of his political party, the Pakistan People’s Party; after the Kumari incident, the PPP expelled him from the party and cancelled his membership.

As a result of the risk of conversion, many Hindus have chosen to migrate to India to seek a safer environment. Mohan Lal, an activist from Lyari, one of Karachi’s oldest localities, told me in an interview last month that forced conversions have reached a shocking level: in the last 20-25 years, around 200 families from the area have left and settled in Gujrat India.

Lal himself was kidnapped twice after he encouraged the community, when two girls had been kidnapped and forcibly converted, to register their cases with the police. ‘Sadly, the state is not on our side, which is why all this is happening,’ he said.

Wanjara attributes the discriminatory mindset against Hindus to a deep-rooted hatred for Hindus among extremist Muslim groups, leading to the effective ‘silent genocide’ of Sindhi Hindus in Pakistan, who are in practice either eradicated or forced to migrate to India. And all this, he argues, is going on under state sponsorship.

Wanjara also makes the point that it seems implausible that Hindu girls, who have no knowledge of Islam, would be sufficiently ‘impressed’ by it, as Sarhandi claims, to run away from their families and convert. He emphasises that there is a significant degree of freedom available to girls within their own community, including the liberty to select their own life partners and to engage in activities like dance and music. He argues that it is improbable that these girls would choose to move to a Muslim environment that would place extreme restrictions on them.

For his part, Amar Lal Karnani Menghwar, the Hindu organiser of of Pakistan Darawer Ittehad, a minority rights organisation, would not rule out the claim that the conversions to Islam are often forced, but argues that, in some cases, girls convert willingly. The girls who are targeted with forced conversions and subsequent marriage to Muslim men are driven by deception, poverty and lack of security. Underage girls, Menghwar argues, are easily influenced by unscrupulous clerics who exploit their dreams of a better life.

* *

Numerous research papers have been published on the issue of conversion in Pakistan. Two notable ones are ‘Forced Conversion of Religious Minorities in Pakistan: A Socio-Cultural Perspective’, a position paper by the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace (whose name has since substituted ‘National’ for ‘Catholic’) in collaboration with the European Union, and ‘Forced Conversion of Minorities in Pakistan and Legal Challenges’ by academics Aisha Rasool and Kamran Abdullah. According to a 2010 estimate, approximately 20-25 Hindu girls were forcibly converted to Islam every month in Pakistan; as Rasool and Abdullah show, the practice has certainly not stopped since then. Motives behind these forced conversions include the confiscation of property, the aim of displacing religious minorities, retaliation or revenge targeting females, sexual desire, pressure from extremist groups, and self-glorification.

In interviews conducted for the CCJP-EU report, ten girls from different regions were selected as case studies. Nine of them shared their experiences of being abducted and coerced into converting, and later forced to marry their abductors, while only one claimed that her coercion was not forced. The research also highlights the case of two underage Dalit girls named Reena and Raveena, who were recorded reciting the Kalima (Islamic declaration of faith) while still having (Hindu) Holi colours on their cheeks.

* *

Currently, Pakistan does not have a specific law in place to regulate religious conversions. In December 2016, the Sindh provincial assembly in Pakistan passed the Criminal Law (Protection of Minorities) Act 2015. This prohibits forced religious conversions and restricts children from converting until they reach the age of majority (18).

Religious political parties of Pakistan opposed the legislation, especially section 4(1), arguing that it contradicts Islamic principles. The governor of Sindh has since regretted his assent and returned the Act to the assembly for reconsideration. It currently remains in this state of limbo; Muslim religious parties are demanding its repeal while the Hindu minority support it. The Muslim opposition to the law is despite the fact that under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), to which Pakistan is a signatory, the state is obliged to uphold commitments against forced conversions. The ICCPR, in Article 18(4), recognises the right of parents to determine their child’s religion until they reach adulthood; Pakistan is among the signatories to this convention.

In 2019, while Imran Khan was Prime Minister of Pakistan, he established a parliamentary committee to resolve the issue of forced conversion. However, no progress was made in drafting legislation. Senator Lal Malhee, a member of the committee, subsequently revealed that Muslim members of the committee were unwilling to act because of pressure on the ruling party Pakistan Tehreek Insaaf (PTI) from extremists. The committee was subsequently abandoned.

* *

In Pakistan, the absence of a law about conversions to Islam or official oversight of the process enables conversions to be made informally by any cleric, who can simply recite the Kalima and declare the person converted to be a Muslim; there is also no lower age limit, so even minors can be lawfully converted. Critics argue this process is being manipulated and exploited.

Clearly, the state is failing to protect religious minorities in Pakistan against forced conversion to Islam. As a result, Hindus have resorted to alternative measures, such as early marriages, to safeguard their children.

Wanjara emphasises the severity of the situation: Hindu communities may even resort to extreme measures, including killing their daughters, to avoid them being converted against their will and married to Muslims.

In Thar Gawaria and Karia, two Hindu communities in Sindh, early marriages are prevalent as a protective measure: daughters as young as ten may be married off to avoid the risk of forced conversion and marriage outside the community. Karnani Menghwar claims that there have been no reported cases of individuals converting to Islam for three decades: this appears to be because children are married within the community early.  

* *

Dr Shershah Syed, a renowned gynecologist specialising in fistula repair, spoke to me about the consequences of underage marriages, particularly the risks associated with early pregnancies. Underage marriage can be perilous, he explains, especially during childbirth, as it increases the likelihood of complications such as pelvic fractures and obstetric fistula. In Pakistan, thousands of women suffer from obstetric fistulas each year – a 2013 estimate put the figure at 4,500-5,000. Underage marriage can also have long-lasting and harmful psychological effects.

These risks, Syed argues, must be addressed in order to safeguard the health and wellbeing of young girls involved in underage marriages.

Dr Farhana Malik, a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Karachi, emphasises that child marriage is distressing and harmful, depriving young girls of their rights and personal development. These girls are forced into adult roles without the necessary understanding, emotional maturity, or physical readiness. This negatively impacts their physical and mental health, as well as their access to education and personal growth.

The practice of underage marriage has severe consequences on girls’ mental and emotional well-being, often resulting in fear, anxiety, depression and confusion. They also face a higher risk of domestic violence, says Malik, and may be at risk of suicidal thoughts.

Muslim clerics hold differing opinions on child marriage, with some advocating for its legitimacy based on their interpretation of Sharia law. The cleric Sarhandi, for instance, has criticised laws forbidding marriages below the age of 18 in Sindh, considering such laws a violation of Sharia principles.

He argues that nightfall (nocturnal emissions), or the onset of menstruation, are indicators of maturity and therefore marriageability according to Sharia, even if they occur well below the age of 18.

While compiling this story, I read about another incident involving a 14-year-old girl named Sohana Sharma Kumari that was brought to light earlier this month. She was allegedly abducted with the intention of forced conversion, and she is seen in a video clip crying out to be reunited with her parents.

The continuing practice of forced conversion and marriage in southern Pakistan is causing a significant divide and fostering animosity between the Muslim and Hindu communities. In Sindh, supposedly a province where the majority of Muslims and Hindus have love and respect for each other, extremist religious groups are responsible for this situation. Even Sindhi nationalist political parties in Sindh condemn such conversions.

To resolve this problem and stop the damaging practice of forced conversion and marriage of young girls, many people believe that the state should intervene and legislate about conversion practices. It is not only a question of young girls being converted and married to Muslims; the alternative, in which their frightened families marry them off underage to other Hindus to prevent them being married to Muslims, may well also cause them harm, and certainly takes away their autonomy. In addition, both Muslim and Hindu customs make it very difficult for women to pursue education after marriage: once they are bound to a man, they usually have little option but to raise children and look after the home.

Altogether, underage marriages pose harm to women from both Muslim and Hindu communities. It is high time something was done to stop them.

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The post Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community appeared first on The Freethinker.

Festivals are an important PR opportunity. When they are religious festivals, they become a way of exhibiting the beliefs that the organisers want to showcase, and the image of the religion that they want to project. In South Asia, such festivals are often grotesque illustrations of majoritarian muscle-flexing.

Ram Navami witnessed a surge in violence against Muslims in India last week. The celebration of Ram’s birth provides the Hindutvaadis in India with the chance to reaffirm the deity as a symbol of Hindu supremacism. Chants of ‘Jai Shree Ram’ (‘glory to Lord Ram’) were weaponised by Hindutva mobs that had been emboldened by the triumphant construction of the Ram Temple on the disputed Ayodhya site. In the 16^th century, a mosque was built on the site, which many conservative Hindus believe was the birthplace of Ram, by the founder of the Mughal Empire; in 1992, the mosque was demolished by radical Hindu mobs.

The weaponising of Ram Navami mirrors a similar weaponisation of the ‘love’ for Muhammad in Pakistan. The Islamic festival of Eid Milad-un-Nabi, the commemoration of Muhammad’s birth, has often been marred with violence against the constitutionally excommunicated Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The latter has been targeted for commemorating any Islamic festival, owing to the community’s belief in their sect’s founder, which is deemed by Islamists as sacrilegious. Ahmadiyya Muslims believe their 19^th-century founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, is an Islamic messiah; clerics of other sects deem this belief contradictory to Muhammad’s status as the final prophet of Islam.

Similarly, during the Islamic month of Ramadan in recent years, people have been imprisoned, fined or left to languish in Pakistani jails, or beaten up by Islamist mobs in both Pakistan and the officially ‘secular’ Bangladesh. The Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and other jihadist groups in the region like Isis, often increase militant activity during Ramadan. They claim that jihad during the holy month is more rewarding, citing the victory in the Battle of Badr in 624 AD. According to Islamic tradition, this battle was the first between Muhammad’s army and the pagans of Mecca. The triumph of the outnumbered Muslims has been attributed by many Islamic theologians to the month of Ramadan.

As Islamic militancy has spawned regionally, and indeed globally, Hindutva radicalism has also caught the imagination of many in Hindu-majority Nepal. Meanwhile, Buddhist extremists are hoping to erase religious minorities in Sri Lanka and Bhutan.

Varieties of supremacism

In comparing varieties of religious extremism in South Asian states, it is important to stress the differences as well as similarities between them. Despite its precipitous anti-Muslim plunge under the Hindutva regime, Hinduism in India is not (yet) as dominant as Islam in Pakistan, where the religion is more brazenly institutionalised. For instance, not only is Islam the state religion in Pakistan, its supremacy is codified in the penal code. Sharia is used both to sanction violent penalties and also to legally discriminate between crimes committed against the majority and minority religious communities, such as blasphemy.

Multiple mosques remain under construction in India, whose constitution still dubs it a ‘secular nation’. In contrast, not a single Hindu temple has been constructed in Pakistan over the past 75 years, while around 95 percent of minority places of worship have been erased since the country was created in 1947.

In Afghanistan, like Pakistan, religious supremacy for Islam is etched in law via antediluvian sharia clauses. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s constitution upholds the ‘foremost position’ for Buddhism in the country, codifying the protection of this ideology as the ‘duty of the state’. In contrast, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan remain formally secular, despite attempts by hardliners to give precedence to the religion of the majority. In Bangladesh, for instance, Islamists are demanding codification of sharia, and using Islam to suppress women’s rights or vandalise Hindu temples. In turn, the government looks to counter the religionist narrative – albeit unsatisfactorily – by issuing reminders of the country’s secular identity or of the fact that it does not have a state religion.

Despite these differences, religious supremacism is a common ailment in South Asia and often manifests itself in similar ways.

Across the region, the elevation of the majority’s religion, whether in law, government narrative, or via unhinged majoritarian radicals, results in its own fragmentation and an internal contest among the divisions to assert their supremacy within the religion. Different factions within the majority’s religion struggle to establish their interpretation of religion as the true one in their country. For instance, just as Islamic extremism in Pakistan has evolved into a quest to subjugate minority Muslim sects, and the millennia-old subjugation of ‘lower’ Hindu castes is upheld by the Hindutva regime in India, so, in Sri Lanka, the propagation of the Theravada strain has accompanied the rise of Buddhist radicalism.

Whenever such a contest erupts within an ideology, especially one that is propounding supremacism, those with the loudest voices are the advocates of a more fundamentalist, radical interpretation of their religion. The result is that minorities even within the majority religion are sidelined, and anyone who does not toe the radical line is shunned by the dominant faction as a ‘traitor’ or ‘blasphemer’ – two terms which have come to be used interchangeably. In a region increasingly in the grip of religious nationalism, allegations of this kind have been used against dissenters in an unrelenting assault on freedom of speech and thought.

Freethought under attack

Examples of the religious oppression of dissenters can be found across South Asia. Perhaps the most punitive cases are found in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which have blasphemy laws that prescribe death for criticism of Islam. In Pakistan, the blasphemy law encourages vigilante violence against those who offend Islamic sensibilities. A recent example of this was the death of Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan, in the town of Sialkot in December. He was lynched by an angry mob after being accused of removing posters with Islamic prayers printed on them. Bangladesh has also witnessed a witch-hunt against blasphemy: hit-lists have been released of freethinking bloggers, with Islamists forcing atheists and secularists to flee.

At present, India’s blasphemy law treats all religions equally, and does not sanction death for offence to any religion. However, in 2018, a Member of Parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Jannata Party (BJP) introduced a private member’s bill that would have imposed the death penalty for cow slaughter – in other words, a Hindu blasphemy law. Although the bill was rejected after a debate, BJP members have vowed they will seek to introduce it again.

In different parts of India, slaughtering cows can attract various legal penalties, including imprisonment, although in some parts it is not criminalised. However, allegations of selling or consuming beef can still encourage Hindutva mob violence across the country, just like blasphemy accusations in Pakistan or Bangladesh. For example, in June, a man was lynched in Rajasthan for transporting cattle, while another was thrashed last month for ‘suspicion’ of carrying beef in Mathura.  

Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is the dominant religion, has also seen mob violence similarly fueled by claims of attacks on Buddhism. In March, a 600-strong Buddhist mob broke into a church demanding that the worship be halted. While the country has not so far invoked jurisprudential protection for religiously-motivated suppression by the majority in the manner of India or Pakistan, incidents such as radical Buddhists instigating mob violence against minorities are becoming increasingly common.

Religiously motivated mobs form the first line of attack against freethought. Religionist governments use them to intimidate dissenters, while at the same time using the hordes’ extrastate identity to distance themselves from the consequences. The governments of India and Pakistan, for instance, would on the surface urge citizens to not take law into their own hands. At the same time, however, they profit from pressure by vigilantes which practically quash any debate on whether such laws – which effectively protect the intangible sensibilities of the majority’s religion – should even exist.

But dissent is also being silenced via official channels in South Asia. These days, courts in Pakistan have even imposed the death penalty for ‘sacrilegious’ WhatsApp messages. The Indian state is clamping down on all forms of art that a sufficient number of Hindus can claim to be offensive to Hinduism, such as film, theatre festivals or digital streaming productions. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, the government’s ‘Buddhist Publications/Texts Regulatory Act’ enables the state to dictate what can be published, especially in the realm of religion, including what can and cannot be said about Buddhism and its founder.

There are complex political roots behind the move of these governments to silence criticism of the official religious line. Ethnicism, regionalism, linguistics and a wide array of other factors all support the respective power structures in each state. Overall, however, religion is the binding force that upholds the autocratic machineries in South Asia. The dominance of a particular religious and political ideology in each state is an obstruction to all kinds of freedoms, but above all to displays of conscience which challenge the ideology in question.

The hegemony of religion

South Asia has been a melting pot of organised religions from around the globe, Abrahamic and dharmic, for millennia. Although Islam is Abrahamic in origin, two Islamic strains from the Sunni sect take their appellations from cities in India: the Deobandi and Barelvi. The latter, Barelvi, originated as a syncretic brand of Islam that merged Sufi, Indic and dharmic characteristics. South Asia’s indigenous polytheistic and nontheistic faiths have similarly coopted rigid monolithism; as a result, the principle of religious and philosophical pluralism is being sacrificed at the altar of unyielding homogeneity.

One characteristic of South Asian culture, which was well established long before the arrival of the Abrahamic faiths, is its subservience to superstition and attribution of paramount authority to religion. This culture remains entrenched today in the different states, regardless of which religion is dominant. But while those embracing theocratic constitutions – such as Afghanistan and Pakistan – would have no qualms about flaunting religious authority, even supposedly secular states in the region are more or less subservient to religious hegemony.

Secularism in India, unlike in Western countries, has translated into letting different religions have their own spheres of influence, while the state claims to treat all religions equally. The consequence of this has been that, in practice, religion has increasingly been allowed to interfere in civic life. This can be seen in the way in which cow vigilantes are now forcing everyone to make dietary and ritualistic choices based on Hindu beliefs.

Elsewhere in the region, states are letting religions rule their communities, thereby eroding their claims to secularity. The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, for example, in a 2007 ruling on a case against mosque loudspeakers, maintained that the country is ‘secular’. However, it has elsewhere conceded that its constitution only mandates the protection of Buddhism, while the minority religions are not similarly safeguarded. This underlines the point that establishing the constitutional supremacy of one religion inadvertently breaches minority rights, even when they might be separately engrained in law.   

The current situation in India demonstrates the way in which allowing different religions to govern communities plays into the hands of the majority. Once the followers of a dominant religion are given the power to impose its rules on their own community, by a religionist ‘mission creep’, they try to extend its authority even to nonbelievers.

Moreover, the custom of creating separate spheres of influence for different religions may ostensibly be designed to safeguard minorities, but in practice, it can hinder social progress. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the minimum age for marriage is 18 years, but the child marriage of Muslim girls is allowed because Islamic sharia governs family law in Muslim communities, since religious laws are allowed to rule domestic matters. This undermines women’s rights. In India, Muslim men were permitted to ‘instantly divorce’ their wives under sharia law until 2019, even though the practice had already been outlawed in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Allowing religious ideologies to be imposed on different communities inevitably leads to clashes and contradictions within the state. For instance, the court in the Indian state of Karnataka last month upheld the ban on ‘unessential’ religious symbols in secular schools. This led to a gross contradiction in the right to don religious garbs, wherein Muslim girls could not wear the hijab but Sikh boys could continue to wear turbans.

A secular state should not be determining which practices of any given religion are or are not ‘essential’. Instead, the state should uphold a uniform civil code which applies equally to the entire population. Where the adherents of some religions are treated preferentially to those of other or no religions, freedom of thought and expression cannot but suffer in the process.

‘Progressive’ suppression

In some cases, even advocates of liberal and progressive views have felt a misguided obligation to support the religious hegemony. The widespread liberal support for sexist Islamist modesty tools as symbols of ‘liberation’ is a case in point.

But a religion is just another ideology. A truly liberal approach is not to treat schoolchildren wearing religious clothing any differently from those wearing flags of a political party or jerseys of a particular sports team. Where there is good reason for imposing a uniform dress code, such as in a school, no exceptions should be made on the grounds of religion, any more than they would be in the case of manifestations of a political or sporting affiliation.

In India, defending the Muslim right to flaunt Islamic garb could be interpreted as challenging the already skewed religious narrative in the country, since the targeting of Islamic practices, regardless of how regressive they might be, stems from Hindu majoritarianism more so than any adherence to secularism. However, many self-avowed liberals or progressives in the West have called their own countries’ institutions ‘Islamophobic’ for treating Islam like other religions. Once again, secular progressivism should mean that religious beliefs and practices are treated the same as any other ideology. It does not mean that they should be viewed with a misplaced reverence, or especially privileged.

The support for religious dogma by progressives, in misguided defence of human rights, has unfortunate repercussions in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the same dogmas are used as a tool of oppression. The claim that satirising Islam is an attack on Muslims – even in states that allow significantly harsher mockery of the majority’s religion, such as France – is being used as a ‘progressive’ argument in countries like Pakistan, where criticism of Islam is violently suppressed.

This in turn has adverse effects on debate on religion in these countries, where both religionists and liberals seek to ‘reclaim’ religion. In Pakistan, for instance, the goalposts have been shifted so that the question is no longer whether Islamic dogma should have any bearing on whether people should be executed for blasphemy, but on whether blasphemy is, as some liberals now argue, ‘un-Islamic’.

Many progressives, like Pakistani-born American author Qasim Rashid, cherry pick Islamic theology so as to suggest that violence has ‘nothing to do’ with Islam. At the same time, minorities – including Rashid’s own Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Pakistan – are being violently suppressed, explicitly using 1,400-year-old Islamic laws against blasphemy. Opposing discrimination against Muslims should not translate into liberals’ defending Islamic scriptures against their critics, or into propagation of the term ‘Islamophobia’ in countries where fear of Islam is perfectly rational.  

India, which has a long tradition of self-questioning and indigenous criticism of Hinduism, is now seeing staunch secularists lecturing Hindu nationalists on what it actually means to be Hindu. This is a classic ‘no true Scotsman’ argument, since it claims that that anyone using violence in the name of Hinduism is not a bona fide member of the religious community. Such an approach is a cop-out, since it looks to avoid addressing the Hindu roots of Hindutva; it is also a clear surrender to religion, and religious identity, as the undisputed power centre of both the religionist and secularist spheres.

India’s upholding of Hindu traditions as the bedrock of Indian civilisation is mirrored in Sri Lanka’s promotion of Buddhist heritage as intrinsic to its national identity. The association between civilisation and religious tradition has reaffirmed the latter as central to political dynamics in Sri Lanka, where loyalty to the Buddhist heritage was initially codified in the constitution and is now being rammed home by majoritarian mobs.

Altogether, there is less and less room for political discourse in South Asia that does not involve religious frames of reference.

Denying universalism

While adherents of Islamic and dharmic doctrines see their religious beliefs as antithetical to one another, today they use similar arguments to defend their religion’s supremacy. Such arguments have been dutifully propagated by progressives in those countries as well. Where national environments have become increasingly hostile to religious self-reflection, those in power simply label criticism of Islamic or Hindu traditions – especially that originating in foreign countries – as a ‘western’ narrative.

As a result, critics of organised religion are increasingly silenced in South Asia. The unequivocal rejection of religious doctrine or tradition is depicted as a ‘western’ value; thus, anyone who advocates this view can be accused of being disloyal to their community. The criticism of religion is also dismissed as being grounded in an insufficient understanding of religious doctrine. This approach implies that criticism of religion is itself illegitimate; thus only those who believe in the religion, or at least refrain from criticising it, have the right to discuss it in the first place.

But denying the ability to criticise the majority’s religion freely is to deny a tradition which has deep roots both in India and among many Muslim philosophers. Moreover, to label freethought and the criticism of religion as illegitimate is to imply that they have no relevance in South Asian countries. In fact, though, freedom of thought and speech are universal human rights, which ought to be just as inalienable here as in the West.

There is no reason why the practice of thinking and speaking freely need automatically lead to a complete rejection of all theology. The crucial point is that the advancement of a pluralistic, tolerant and liberal democracy is only possible if no one religion is privileged above others, and if criticism of all religions is freely permitted. For that to transpire in our neck of the woods, freethought needs to be wrestled back from the South Asian ideologues who have pushed all matters of social, civilisational, and human significance into the intolerant domain of religion.

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