PBUY-as-salaam aleikum greeting by an Ahamedia- DEATH
NYTimes.com OP-ED page
Watch What You Say
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan - Before recounting how President Clinton burned alive dozens of Christians (this feint is known in the column trade as baiting the right), let me offer a quick historical quiz: What religion were Muhammad's parents?
You might think that they, like most people in Arabia in the sixth century, probably worshiped tribal gods and idols. It might seem difficult for anyone to have been a Muslim before Muhammad.
Dr. Younus Shaikh, a teacher at a medical college, sits in a brick prison here, after being sentenced to death for blasphemy last year. I couldn't interview him because the warden caught me trying to slip into the prison as a visitor (I didn't look like a family member). But the issues are clear.
During a lecture, Dr. Shaikh digressed and allegedly speculated that Muhammad's parents may not have been Muslims, and that before receiving God's revelations at the age of 40, Muhammad might not have shaved his pubic hair.
That was a scandalous charge: pious Pakistani men shave their armpits and pubic hair but not their faces. As for the speculation about Muhammad's parents, that was held to be blasphemous because of Koranic verses suggesting that prophets like Abraham (and thus why not others?) could be considered Muslims, in the literal Arabic meaning of the word, which is people who submit to God.
Dr. Shaikh is one of several hundred people facing execution in Pakistan from this modern Islamic Inquisition. Many are religious minorities who sometimes are sentenced to death simply for using the standard greeting of the Islamic world, "as-salaam aleikum." That means "peace be with you," but militants say the phrase is reserved for Muslims.
Fundamentally, Pakistan's biggest problem today is not India but this close-mindedness.
One of the few public figures who took on the fanatics is Moinuddin Haider, the interior minister. The radicals responded by shooting his brother to death. So while there are many sensible Pakistanis, few pipe up to counter the weird lies, conspiracy theories and claptrap that ensnare Dr. Shaikh - and all of Pakistan. |
