When he was confronted in 2013, the man who claimed that the researchers agreed on the death penalty for blasphemy, his interrogators told that he could not really read Arabic.
This man, the lawyer Ismail Qureshi, is at the center of a new documentary by the Alliance against Blasphemy Politics Pakistan (AABP). He organized an early projection of The inevitable use of blasphemy policy (2024) and a new episode entitled Blasphemy as biddat: intramuslim difference in the era of empires Sunday August 17 at Kitab Ghar. A small group of students, teachers and journalists met to watch the documentaries and have a question-answer session with the Karachi public library team.
Read: The Minister underlines the response to the improper use of blasphemy laws
The documentaries are on article 295-C of the Pakistan Criminal Code or the law on the blasphemy of the country which came in 1986 and was strengthened by the Federal Shariat Court in 1991. Article 295-C says that death is the only punishment for blasphemy against the Holy Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon it) and the law makes its authority an act of blasphemy itself. What the authorities describe as “improper use” of the law is, in fact, its only correct application possible. Unlimited definitions of legislation transform any action into potential blasphemy.
According to the National Commission for Human Rights.
People accused of blasphemy run an extremely high risk of extrajudicial violence. The Center for Social Justice said that at least 104 people had been killed by crowds and in detention between 1994 and 2024. Rights defense groups say that these figures reflect not only the legal application but a wider climate in which accusations are made to settle personal scores, seize goods or cause crowd measures.
On April 13, 2017, Mashal Khan, a 23 -year -old student at Abdul Wali Khan University, was attacked and killed by a crowd following online allegations of blasphemy. An investigation team concluded that allegations had been manufactured. An anti-terrorism court tried 57 suspects in the lynching: one was sentenced to death, five to life imprisonment, 25 received shorter mandates and 26 were acquitted, with other convictions delivered later.
The law claims legitimacy through secular Islamic tradition and learned consensus (IJMA). However, this supposed continuity of the divine command produced a striking statistical anomaly: while the charges of blasphemy increased by 20,000% since 1986, no conviction has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. The best known case is perhaps that of Asia Noreen, a Christian agricultural worker, who was sentenced in 2010 and sentenced to death. After eight years of detention, she was acquitted by the Supreme Court on October 31, 2018 and left Pakistan for Canada.
13 -minute animation Blasphemy like biddat Confresses the idea that these laws are rooted in the timeless Islamic tradition. The thesis of the films is that the most defended legislation of Pakistan is in fact erected on colonial legal foundations and the manufacture of manufactured Islamic scholarships. His “sacred” language was copy-copy of former British legal documents, cases of Australian defamation and American prosecution.
One of the most surprising revelations was the linguistic origins of the law. Thanks to a meticulous textual analysis, the team retraced terms such as “insinuation”, “insinuation” and “imputation” not to Islamic case law, but to the Australian defamation Act, to American legislation on defamation and the statutes of Indian hatred discourse.
And the man who claimed religious authority on these sanctions admitted that he could not even read Arabic and did not understand the texts he claimed to quote. “When we started reading the books of Islamist legal activists from the 80s and 90s, including Ismail Qureshi, it was obvious that they had missed these sources,” said a member of the AABP team while speaking to The Express PK Press Club to the projection. “We met Qureshi almost a decade and it was there that he recognized his lack of training for us.”
The Fabricated Stock Exchange of Ismail Qureshi had transformed the position of the eighth century of Abu Hanifa – that a non -Muslim blasphemy is not liable to death – in its complete opposite, forming the foundations for the decision of Pakistan Federal Shariat Court from 1991. Qureshi was not any author, because the team reveals “He wrote the 295 -C bill and managed to make a Hadd punishment (fixed), without understanding the sources he has cited. ”
Jurists, specialists in Islamic law, historians and legal experts argue that the laws on the blasphemy of Pakistan diverge from the “fiqhi” line of Islamic jurisprudence and are innovations (biddat) born of colonial and post-colonial statistics. This change was not organic, but shaped by colonial interventions aimed at controlling the “passions” of the populations of subjects.
Classic Islamic case law, on the other hand, required strict categorization of crimes, attention to intention and context. This framework has enabled more flexibility than today’s rigid interpretations, which impose severe sanctions regardless of the intention or the circumstances. These laws thus come to conflict with the fundamental Islamic legal principles of evidence, intention and proportionality.
Read more: The IHC command probe on online blasphemy spike
Given the difficult nature of the subject, the AABP has decided to use 2D flat symbolic animation rather than conventional documentary images. This aesthetic choice has created an intellectual distance from what is an extremely emotionally loaded material, which makes room for a rational analysis rather than simple reactions. “Animation offers abstraction and security,” said a member of the team. “This allows us to bypass familiar tropes and loaded images that often cause defensive around the policy of blasphemy.”
Thus, instead of faces or real places, the animation of trembling forms and fusion boxes defined on a calm voice maintains the spectator focused on ideas behind the policy of blasphemy. “In a context where the policy of blasphemy prosperous on the show and the name,” added another member: “Animation becomes a powerful medium to receive the discourse on drama.” Complex legal concepts are broken down with lag lines, stains that swell and shrink and forms that bleed in each other. The use of real television or video media video would have risked transforming the documentary into traumatized voyeurism.
Also: blasphemy probe
The documentaries pass through a meticulous scholarship to distinguish the authentic tradition from its colonial and contemporary distortions. “The first step is to demystify the law to show that the 295-C is not sacred, not divine and not rooted in an Islamic legal consensus,” said the team member. “It is a very modern law based on cultural wars in the 80s.”
For this member of the team, making the film deepened its respect for Islamic legal tradition. “I saw how careful, nuanced and ethical jurists are prudent, in particular unlike hyper-modern and unique laws adopted in the name of Islam.”
