“A Serenade of Self-Destruction “ By Sophia Chawla

March 3rd, 2012. KARACHI, PAKISTAN: A deadly bomb blast ripped through shops and dwellings in a Shia village, killing about 49 Shia Muslims and wounding 135. We see here, once again, an example of the onrushing Sunni-Shia conflict in Pakistan. Now, my knowledge about the causes behind this conflict is highly lacking (except for the fact that, like all other Sunni-Shia conflicts in the Muslim world, there is a dispute over the heir of the Prophet Muhammad), but such conflict further exhumes the troubled role of religion in the founding foundations of Pakistan.

Pakistan was founded in the year 1947 by Karachi-native Qaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. A Shia and “non-devout” Muslim himself (people ascribed this title due to him drinking alcohol and eating pork, two “haram”, or forbidden elements in Islam), Jinnah claimed Pakistan as an “Islamic Republic”, a place where Muslims–who were serious minorities in India at the time–could become the majority by basking in a land of the religious free and by creating ideas and fostering innovations they never had the chance to do in British India because of the surrounding religious-fueled hatred that would suppress them. Although Jinnah’s motives seemed vague and innocent in nature, little did he know that his creation would remain to be one of the biggest political groundbreakers and blunders of modern Muslim history.

The blunders began its slow, slithering course after the Qaid-a-Azam died. His death left the Pakistani people with the title “Islamic Republic” hanging over their heads like a shrill fluorescent light bulb. So to maintain this title of “Islamic Republic”, Pakistan did not exactly enact Sharia law, but instead, tried to “grape pick” select concepts from the Quran to preserve Muslim culture and pride. One of them—which were brewing in the minds of British rulers and Indian Muslim politicians even before Pakistan was created—was the Blasphemy Law. The Blasphemy Law under the British prescribed punishments for intentionally destroying or defiling a place or an object of religion and trespassing on religious beliefs through oral, written and physical action. These Laws were inherited by Pakistan the day it was founded. Departing from a seemingly secular air into the murky waters of a religious zone. The law was morphed and proliferated by “Quranizaiton”. The pinnacle of this Quranizaiton was achieved after 1980, thanks to the notorious Zia-ul-Haq setting off the spark with his Islamizaiton policies. A slew of clauses were added to the chapter of religious offences in the Pakistan Penal Code. Clauses like the anti-Ahmadi laws, the anti-derogatory laws, the anti-Quran laws, the anti-Quran defamation laws, the prophet blasphemy laws and many others were piled on more and more to this measure that the law must be as long as a mini-constitution by now.

Now keep this radically mutated law in mind and drag in the current Shia killings into the picture. We can see that blasphemy is a clumsy finger and concept of shifting blame. And even worse, one can blasphemize their religion by using their own religion. That is the very problem of religious sectarianism: it tears the meaning of blasphemy asunder, leaving it as a disembodied shard of mosaic lying in each sect and these shard have nooks and crannies so inconvenient that never shall they puzzle back together with their lost counterpart. One can be a weapon and victim simultaneously.
Same can be applied in the Shia killings in Pakistan. Their religion is not the religion of Pakistan…

…or, whatever that means.

Right now there is nothing but a serenade of self-destruction in Pakistan, a composition of expressive love by the means of violence and hatred. Muslims kill Muslims. Commonly, religion is meant to be a collective unit of believers to create one, collective identity, a flock of sheep shepherding their way through life. And collectivism calls for interdependence. Interdependence is a rosary that says that you are my other me, my brother, my sister. Therefore, killing you would mean I am killing myself. Given this widely known idea, we can see what exactly the “Islamic Republic” of Pakistan is undergoing. Its people self destruct as they destruct others.