Salmaan Taseer

Salmaan Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province
who was assassinated  in January 2011

The death of Salman Taseer at the hand of his bodyguard, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, sparks a troublesome look at the culture of Pakistan surrounding the blasphemy laws.  The blasphemy laws, at their most basic level, are meant to protect Islam by inflicting strict punishments upon those who are deemed to be insulting the prophet in any fashion.  The Islamic website Islam Watch, had an article about how the killer of Taseer had widespread support for his actions.

Taseer had already gained infamy among the religious sects in the region when he tried to get Aasia Bibi, who was given the death penalty for blasphemy and is currently appealing it, a presidential pardon.  His actions in calling the blasphemy law a black law only increased the disdain he received from Pakistani clerics who believed that his call for amendments to the law made him guilty of blasphemy.

The article in question, “Widespread Support for Salman Taseer's Assassination in Pakistan”, covers how Qadri received wide spread support as a defender of Islam and a hero who brought down a blasphemer.  Something that I found interesting is how the article was only written from the viewpoint of the clerics and citizens who supported the action.  The title itself reads immediately that the assassination was universally supported in Pakistan, it doesn’t mention anything about condemnations for Qadri’s actions other then a passing mention that the victim should have been tried in court.  While this article was written before Qadri received two death penalties for the killing, it doesn’t even mention the possible punishment for Qadri’s actions, but rather gives  reasons why Taseer deserved to be killed for indirectly insulting the prophet by voicing his doubts about the blasphemy law.

The article is split in sections, which upon reading, seems to give the impression that everyone in Pakistan supported Qadri’s death.  It starts with a short history of the killer up to the present date, mentioning his history as a member of the Punjab police and his actions leading up to the killing.  Within this section, it doesn’t mention Taseer’s death, it goes from Qadri reporting for duty to his family being taken into custody, an interesting omission regarding the central issue.

This is followed by a statement by five hundred clerics and scholars that amount to a justification of Taseer’s death and how Qadri was a hero of Islam saying “that this brave person has maintained the 1400 years of Muslim tradition, and has held the heads of 1.5 billion Muslims of the world high with pride”.  The fact that these are community leaders openly supporting the action and praising it argues the viewpoint that Qadri’s actions in the murder of Taseer were not only correct, but an example of how a Muslim should act in accordance with tradition.  This leads to a rather foreboding conclusion of what these clerics define as a brave and prideful act.

Sections after this maintain a viewpoint of how Taseer’s death was foretold by Divine Law and they should not mourn his death.  Even making allusions that Taseer’s opposition to the blasphemy were due to outside influences, mentioning explicitly the U.S. and other Western powers.  Political leaders also give statements questioning his judgment, saying he invited trouble for himself and that his approach was blunt.  These sections argue for Taseer’s apparent incompetency and making his death seem not only justified, but inevitable.  The article finishes mentioning Facebook groups praising Qadri, not mentioning if there are any groups mourning Taseer.

The fact that the article gives such an analysis from so many political and community leaders, people who are models for the country, saying that this assassination was an expected outcome, provides an argument that the actions, while rash, were acceptable within the country’s culture.  This speaks volumes about the nation’s views on religious tolerance and what they deem honorable and dishonorable behavior based on their ideological beliefs of what justice is.

- Scott Holmstadt

Malik Mumtaz Qadri, Taseer's assassin

      The LA Times article ‘With killing of governor, Pakistan’s government in turmoil’ from January 5, 2011 discusses the political ramifications of Taseer’s assassination, and also reports the circumstances of his murder in vivid detail. In just the first sentence of the report you can sense how the killing would affect Pakistan and global relations:
“The brazen assassination Tuesday of a popular and progressive Pakistani governor allied with the nation's president threw an already teetering U.S.-backed government into even greater turmoil.”
      Utilizing powerful rhetoric like “avowed opponent of religious extremism”, “enduring unhappiness” and “draconian blasphemy laws”, the reader is argued into taking up an emotional response to Taseer’s killing, specifically one which stands against the murder of a politician for their ideas and policies.
      Also quoted in the article are various political figures and party spokespeople mourning Taseer’s murder, one saying he was a "brave man … one of a long list of martyrs in our party." Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari ‘praised Taseer's "composure, resilience and courage"’ while Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani called for a three-day national mourning period. The US State Department also issued a statement calling Taseer’s death “a great loss”, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered condolences to the Pakistani ambassador. The article goes on to highlight the ongoing political crises rising in Pakistan following the governor’s assassination, and how his death “derail[ed] meetings … between top Pakistani officials and a senior Afghan delegation, including President Hamid Karzai, to discuss efforts to bring the Taliban to the bargaining table.”
      Written by Western journalists reporting from Pakistan, you can get a sense of how non-Islamic cultures may tend to look upon Islamic nations like Pakistan as prone to radical and politically- or religiously-motivated assassinations such as Taseer’s and how unstable international relations with such a country and its government (with deep religious ideals) can be. “Zardari has been under heavy U.S. pressure to act decisively against insurgents who use tribal borderlands as a sanctuary and a staging ground for attacks on U.S. and other Western forces in Afghanistan … [b]ut Zardari's government has been weakened domestically by other problems: enduring unhappiness over its handling of last year's devastating floods, a stumbling economy and a virulent homegrown insurgency.” Without an outlet to these Middle Eastern cultures, we might otherwise fail to grasp how and why a Pakistani governor could be killed (by one of his own bodyguards, no less) for his criticism of a law condemning to death anyone who insults Islam, and his push to pardon a woman facing death “for allegedly defaming Islam”.
      The rhetoric and the views brought forth in this article highly contrast to the Islam Watch article Scott discussed, which focused its reporting on those who saw Malik Qadri (the man who shot Taseer) as a champion of Islamic ideals and believe that the governor deserved to die for his political actions. Did Salmaan Taseer deserve to die because he appeared to support “the perpetrators of blasphemy against Prophet [Muhammad]”, or is Qadri simply an Islamic extremist whose anger over criticism of a law written to protect his feelings was taken out on the politician who was one of those criticizing this blasphemy law, and who he was supposed to protect? That all depends on who you ask.

- Mike Wadsten

In the same vein as the LA Times article, an article printed by the New York Times entitled Killing of Governor Deepens Crisis in Pakistan further elaborates on the Western viewpoint, wherein the rhetoric of the article condemns the assassination and claims that the murder in fact, ‘plunged the government deeper into political crisis...’ a viewpoint probably not shared by those who feel that the assassination was, in fact, justified.
The article also speaks of increased ‘militant infiltration’, as to portray those involved are extreme radicals: a wholly western perspective as we have seen based on the viewpoints of the articles out of Pakistan.
The previous article in favor of the assassination place blame on the US for having influence over Taseer, while the viewpoints from the Western articles continually remind the reader of the “religious extremist threat”.
The article goes on to call for “progressive” (in quotes as to differentiate it as a cultural viewpoint instead of a truth) politicians, who are obviously in a state of fear, to continue their work to amend the blasphemy laws. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even went on to say she was saddened by his loss and that she “admired his work to promote tolerance.” This is just one of many examples of this dichotomy of viewpoints presented within the articles. The cultural differentiations promises to cause anyone, depending on the culture, to find one article or the other preferable, and the other to be extreme.

- Ryan Decker

The opposing viewpoints here, and in other articles regarding this event make a good case for why the history, and the news in a smaller historical context, is a construction of culture and rhetoric. That everything has a ‘partial’ point of view wherein a particular viewpoint is always pushed onto the reader; in a larger historical sense, and in the news that we see each, and everyday.