His face says it all. Mufti Mohammad Naeem, rector of one of Pakistan’s largest madressahs, is a deeply unhappy, exceedingly angry man who loses his temper too easily, and becomes abusive on talk shows. For years, he argued that Taliban insurgents enjoyed parity with the state as both, in light of sacred text, were groups of Muslim brothers involved in a conflict.
Since Operation Zarb-e-Azb started, Mufti Naeem has turned the guns of his fatwas at the government. Last week, he initiated an attack – via a video message – on a recent legislation, the Punjab Protection of Women Against Violence Bill, and has been a permanent fixture on current affairs programmes ever since.
Mufti Naeem starts off by asserting the authority of religious scholars in religious affairs. This he does by ridiculing the president and the prime minister for expressing their opinions on religious matters. He calls the prime minister ‘Mufti-e-Azam’ (grand mufti), hinting that the PM is trying to encroach upon turf that belongs to Mufti Naeem and his tribe.
This could have been a good argument had ulema like Mufti Naeem not declared every matter a religious matter (remember Islam is a complete code of life) and staked a claim to veto power over religious matters – ie everything under the sun – and ultimately control over the state. Compare this ambition with the fact that their authority is eroding even over basic religious matters at the hands of online aalims who double as entertainers. People like these aalims because they look better, smile while talking religion and do not smell of sulphur.
Interestingly, during his entire message, he refers to only one verse from the Quran and one Hadith of the Holy Prophet (pbuh), both requiring Muslims to treat women well. However, his five-minute long rant is an attack on a law that is meant to ensure that women are treated well in our society. Instead of religion, his arguments are based on psychology, sociology and politics.
Mufti Naeem claims that this “dangerous law” has been passed by the Punjab Assembly with the sole purpose of destroying our culture, our state and the Islamic system. The terminator law, according to Mufti Sahib, will achieve this aim by increasing the rate of divorce in Pakistan. He refers to a clause in the law that allows the Police to keep a man out of his house for two days if an incident of domestic abuse has occurred. This, in his opinion, will make the situation between the spouses irreconcilable, leading to a divorce. He hurls the threat of divorce four times and has used it dozens of times in his later TV appearances.
Let’s look at a country that uses almost every recipe in the cookbook of Mufti Naeem – Saudi Arabia. According to the Ministry of Justice of the Holy Kingdom, the number of divorce cases registered in the first six months of 2015 was 33,954 while only 11,817 marriages were registered during the same period. In other words, there were three times as many divorces as marriages, working out at 8.4 divorces per hour, against 2.9 marriages.
There is hardly a single Western country, or any country in the decadent Christendom, that can improve upon this performance. However, there is one big difference. Of the nearly 34,000 divorces, there were just 434 initiated by women – known as khula cases. And Mufti Sahib still insists that Allah has granted right of divorce to man because woman is infirm. His problem, it appears, is not with men disposing of their property but women claiming their rights over their own bodies.
Mufti Naeem takes exception to the hotline facility that the new legislation makes available to victims of violence. “In the West, if a woman calls the Police at 2am, they can evict her husband from his house”, he says. He fails to explain why a woman (or a man or a child) can’t invoke the state’s intervention at 2am if she/he is being beaten or raped or feels that her life is in danger. Isn’t it a modern version of the caliph doing rounds in the streets of Baghdad at the dead of the night to make sure everyone one is sleeping tight? Haven’t’ we heard this anecdote from the pulpit ad nauseam? Or was it for Baghdad only? According to the mufti’s logic, the state must stay away because such intervention can lead to divorce.
Mufti Naeem holds that we do not need such laws because the incidence of violence against women is very low in the country – “less than once percent or half a percent”. Perhaps, he is right here. But no one has claimed that women are being abused in every Pakistani family. I am not sure if they teach mathematics at madressahs but Mufti Naeem should be able to calculate that one percent of the women’s population in Pakistan amounts to one million and half a percent amounts to half a million. I do not know of any human rights groups that has presented a figure higher than this. But should we not do anything if five hundred thousand women are tortured and abused every year?
As a person who claims to be the final authority on religious law, Mufti Naeem should have known that all laws are made against deviants who break social norms and are always very small in number. Are there punishments for murder and theft in the Shariah because everyone is out to commit murder or theft, or to protect society from the mischief of people who may be one percent of one percent?
Mufti Naeem claims that such laws can give Pakistan a bad name by bringing unpleasant events to international limelight. He refers to an imaginary Indian case as a best practice where, according to him, “India ki awam” (Indian people – not a mob) burnt down a cinema where a film about a rape incident in India was screened.
Here he reveals what has gone wrong with religion in the twenty-first century. Rather than focusing on the spiritual message, religious leaders are out to protect the honour of their tribes. That’s why we see Burmese monks supporting the genocide of Muslims and Pakistani ulema cheerleading the Taliban.
There is peace in spirituality, but power lies in identity politics. Look at Mufti Naeem and listen to him for a minute and you’d know whether he is about peace or power.
The writer is a social anthropologist and development professional.
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