Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province and an outspoken critic of the nation’s blasphemy laws, was assassinated on January 3, reportedly by a member of his own security team. Taseer recently urged the government to pardon Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian who faced (and still faces) a death sentence for insulting the prophet Mohammed.
“Moderate” religious leaders are thrilled:
More than 500 Muslim scholars are praising the man suspected of killing a Pakistani governor because the politician opposed blasphemy laws that mandate death for those convicted of insulting Islam.
The group of scholars and clerics known as Jamat Ahle Sunnat is affiliated with a moderate school of Islam and represents the mainstream Barelvi sect.
The group said in a statement Wednesday that no one should pray for Punjab province Gov. Salman Taseer or express regret for his murder. One of his security guards is the suspected killer.
The statement also made a veiled threat against Taseer’s supporters: “The supporter is as equally guilty as one who committed blasphemy.”
Fundamentalist Muslims in Pakistan aren’t twisting their religion to fit some radical interpretation, they’re working off the original. Surah Al-Maidah 5:33 is quite specific in directing that those who defame god or his prophet are to be “killed or crucified or that their hands and feet be cut off from opposite sides or that they be exiled from the land.”
Allah isn’t alone, of course. The Judeo-Christian god is pretty insecure too. Not only does he thirst for the blasphemer’s blood, Leviticus 24:16 says the offender has to die by stoning at the hands of church ladies, deacons and bar-mitzvah ushers:
And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him: as well the stranger, as he that is born in the land, when he blasphemeth the name of the Lord, shall be put to death.
And then — according to Mark 3:29 — the punishment really begins.
If they were fundamentalist Christians instead of Muslims, how would those 500 Muslim scholars feel in the company of, say, Glenn Beck, Rabbi Daniel Lapin or Rev. John Hagee? Pretty well at home, it seems. But that’s just the point: Beck, Lapin and Hagee reside at the fringes of our society. That makes western civilization superior in this regard for one reason: The people in charge of it don’t take Bronze Age superstition seriously.
