Man with a conscience

JUST when I thought Pakistan was surely slipping into the very darkest depths of an abyss of lies, hate and intolerance from which there could be no possible return, emerges a man with a conscience and courage to change my mind.

Today it was proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that the trumped up case against 11-year-old Rimsha, the Christian girl accused two weeks ago of blasphemy and desecrating the Holy Quran, was the deliberate doing of a certain Imam Khalid Chisti, who not only instigated and manipulated the whole incident, but was also responsible by his actions for the displacement of more than 600 terrified Christians from the fringes of the Islambad colony they called home.

This man deliberately and willfully burned pages of the Holy Book and blamed it on a clueless little girl and other Christians of the colony, whipping up a frenzied mob seeking blood and more.

For two weeks that little girl and her family have been locked up in a high security prison as if they were the worst kind of murderers. For two weeks religious zealots and Muslims blinded by self-righteousness have been demanding she be punished.

For two weeks it has been thrust down everybody’s throat that Pakistan's draconian Blasphemy Law, the hideous and twisted brainchild of that ruthless military dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, was unchallengeable and unquestionable. Today the fallacy and danger of that belief was laid bare.

And today the truth came out in all its shining glory courtesy a man of conscience. In a stunning revelation to news channels and the police, Hafiz Mohammed Zubair, an Imam from the same mosque of which Khalid Chisti was the senior prayer leader, told how a man had brought a shopping bag filled with torn up pages of a religious book/pamphlet to which Chisti added by tearing pages off a Holy Quran from the mosque.

It was not a Christian or a Hindu that tore the pages but an Imam, a man given the responsibility of calling the faithful to prayer and propagating Islam. A man entrusted with the task of teaching tolerance and peace, the very values Muslims proclaim are of foremost import.

When Zubair had asked Chisti why he had torn the pages and was instigating trouble, the senior Imam had snapped at him: “Because this is the only way to get rid of these Christians."
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And that is how Rimsha came to be in the eye of the storm, a storm that has stirred up a heated debate and concern in Pakistan and abroad.

I salute the honesty and courage of this man, Hafiz Mohammed Zubair. May God protect him and give him strength to always speak the truth.

Now as a Christian Pakistani, I would like to say a few things that need to be said.

The Christian community, which makes up a small number of the total population of Pakistan, has never been safe, never been prosperous, never been respected and its members have always been treated as second hand citizens. Nay, worse even than street dogs.

This despite the fact tha we have shown the utmost loyalty to our country, have performed bravely and have even laid down our lives in the wars Pakistan has fought, (Wing Commander Mervyn Middlecoat, a Pakistan Air Force fighter pilot was involved in a number of aerial battles during the 1965 and 1971 Indo-Pakistan wars as did Group Captain Cecil Chaudhary... and there were other as well who gave a good account fo themselves in the army, navy and police), educated hundreds of thousands of Muslim children in mission and Catholic schools, and made the every day life of so many Muslims so much easier by doing median jobs they consider beneath their dignity, cleaning streets and their homes.

                                                        

In turn, our women and girls have been kidnapped, raped, forcibly married and converted. Our men have been constantly pushed into the background and deprived of their rightful dues.

Who we are and what we are can be summed up by this joke told to me very early on in my life by a school teacher who happened to be an ex-PAF officer. I recall, he asked: “Do you know what the white in the Pakistani flag stands for?”

“No,” I said.

“The white stands for you minorities… the Christians, Hindus and so forth…”

I nodded. I had not known.

“And…” he continued with a smirk and a chuckle, “Have you noticed how the flag pole is always up the white part of the flag. The bamboo is always up your asses!!”

Sitting here in the comfort of my home in the United States, I recall that day and so many others.

I recall that day in 1965, with Indian war planes dumping bombs near GHQ, Rawalpindi, and the ground and walls shaking in the most horrible way, my father had come home, his face furious, his hands shaking in anger. I was just five year’s old and was terrified of the explosions that rocked our house just a few miles from GHQ. But one look at my father’s face and I forgot the quaking earth and rattling windows.

“We have to go,” he said, “I have been transferred to Multan and we have to leave immediately”.

My father was in the police. At the time he was a sergeant, one of a select group of Anglo-Indian officers kept on to make the Police look good... a quirky image thing. He was one of the four officers that did pilot duty for the President of Pakistan, Field Marshall Ayub Khan. Just a few years earlier he had been part of Queen Elizabeth’s escort group when she had visited Pakistan.

“I have been told that as a Christian I am a security risk,” he told my mother.

So in the midst of the war we moved to Multan. It took us almost three days. Our train was shot at by Indian paratroopers hidden in a cane field, we managed to get caught in the worst dog fight of the war over Lahore Railways Station…. and I remember the roaring jets and tracer bullets lighting up the sky to this day. It was terrifying.

My father, who was a police officer, was a security risk because he was a Christian!

This was a man ho had opted to live in Pakistan rather than India at the time of partition.

When I was eleven I came across my first taste of being a Christian in Pakistan. I was a sixth grader studying in Multan’s LaSalle High School, a school run by brothers of a Catholic order.

“You can’t drink water from the cooler,” I was sternly admonished by a teacher named Chauhan, “…it’s only for Muslim boys. You have made the water unpure.”

He clouted me across the ear.

I never understood what he meant. But my ear hurt most horribly and I finally mustered the courage to tell my father. I remember he did not say a word, but went to his chest-of-drawers, which was always kept locked. When he returned he had his pistol in his hands and was putting bullets in the clip.

It took all my mother’s persuasion and good sense to keep him from going to the school and shooting that man.

I never told my father about any further mistreatment ever again. I was his only son and it would be too much for him to tolerate.

So I got used to being called a “choora” … a derogatory term for a sweeper or street cleaner. I got called a ‘kafir’… an infidel. I got told I would never go to heaven. I was permanently reminded not to touch food items or glasses of water or it would become ‘p’leet” …. unclean!

When I finally managed to make it to the relative comfort of the ninth grade, I believed perhaps it would be different. I was mistaken.

This time it was not the boys but a particular teacher who decided to take his religion inspired ire out on me, another Christian boy named Robert and a few others, a couple of Parsis (Zoroastrians) included.

Munir was the name of this particular individual and he had a sadistic streak that ran deep and a hatred for non-Muslims to match. Munir was supposed to teach mathematics, but at least once in the week he would put the maths books down and he would preach… yes he would preach Islam and he would sing na’ats. His voice would take on a sharp, hysterical edge and those of us who were not Muslims would wriggle and fidget in our seats in discomfort.

We understood not a word of the Arabic he used, neither did most of the Muslim boys, and I know now, that neither did he. It was all by rote. 

Then he would fix us with a stare and say: “There is no redemption for you. No hope for you. There is only one way; become Muslims.”

When there would be no answer forthcoming from us, he would get angry, take out the maths text book, and ask one of us to do a particularly difficult problem or even one we had no idea about. Of course none of us could.

This is when Munir would come into action. He would say. “Kuttay, tum saaray kuttay / All of you are dogs.”

He would then order us to get on our knees and elbows and crawl three to four times around the class room. All the while he kicked us, punched us and beat us with a whip like cane.

It was degrading and we cried. At fourteen and fifteen years of age… we cried like girls.

None of us told our parents but we did get together and swore that when our matric exam would be done we would teach him a lesson.

We never did.

I went into sports, became a very successful track and field star. Set some records, won some medals at the national level.

They hated me. They planned against me. They stole my shoes and my equipment. But they never could get the better of me. There was an inner defiance and need to prove that I was better… it inspired me to higher heights.

One day, at an inter-collegiate meet in Lahore, I was told by one of my Muslim friends, “Steve you are a fantastic athlete and a great guy… but it would be so much better if you were a Muslim.”

Did it ever occur to him that God had intended me to be better at the broad jump and triple jump than he and this was God’s gift to me? Would I be a better jumper if I was a Muslim? Would I be a better human being?

At another track meet, this one in Wah, I won four gold medals… but my happiness was tarnished. A track official accused me of disrespecting the ‘talwaat'. He said I had been ‘dancing.’

And so it carried on; more accusations, more abuse, more aggressive persuasion to convert.

In 1988 I got married.

I married a Muslim girl.

Yes I did.

She’s a Pathan and her family comes from the tribal areas.

Her family has been wonderful and helped us survive the first few years during which we shifted homes no fewer than 17 times. We feared for our lives and we had every reason to. No place was safe for us.

In Islam a Muslim man can marry a Muslim woman and she can retain her religion. The children follow the religion of their father i.e. Islam. However, a Muslim woman cannot marry a Christian man and this is punishable by death by stoning.

I have been married now for 24 years and have four daughters.

In 2009 my family was held up at gunpoint by extremist gunmen just 200 yards from a government installation and we only survived after they insisted we convert to Islam and recite the ‘kalima’. It was matter of survival so we did.

They put a gun to my head and threatened to shoot me. They threatened to kill my family.

We survived.

If God had not intended it, I and my family would not have survived.

There are a hundred and one stories I want to tell you about Christians in Pakistan, the dangers they face, my personal story, how I survived, how I once offered ‘namaz’ all the way from Karachi to Lahore in the company of  group of mullahs, how I was forcibly converted to Islam by another bunch of mullahs in a newspaper office, how my wife and I were photographed as we walked near our house by two bearded men in  car, how we feared for our daughters’ safety…

And just how afraid we were all the time while in Pakistan; always afraid somebody would find out about our marriage or frame us for blasphemy.

Blasphemy… it was the big one that really worried us and gave us sleepless nights. We had plans … all sorts of contingency ones. We lived traumatized lives. It was fear of the worse kind…

But I would need a book to tell you all….

And so…stay with me. That book is coming.

I would like to reiterate, before I sign off, that although I and my family are safe in the United States, some of biggest support and help has come from Muslim friends, family and community members and people we don’t even know. These people are true Muslims and I love them all for they have proved time and again that before being Muslim they are human first.

Not all Muslims are bad, only those who are more Muslim than others and who don’t know or ignore the fact that Islam teaches tolerance, peace and moderation. There is no place extremism of any sort. It is haram.

It was a Muslim of the best kind today that inspired this blog post.

And that is why I once again would also like to honor Hafiz Muhammad Zubair for he has not only saved the life of an innocent girl but has shown goodness as only God bestows upon his favorites.

May he stay blessed and safe.

Tonight my prayers are for him and his family.