Imran Khan wants to export Pakistan’s blasphemy laws to the West

Legacies are a funny thing. In one sense what you leave behind acts as a catalyst for progress, instilling in future generations a sense of admiration and ambition. A legacy can show to others that through hard work and determination it’s possible to achieve great things. Take Imran Khan. Considered one of cricket’s greatest all-rounders, he scored almost 4,000 test runs and took 362 wickets. His 138 not out against India in Chennai in 1987 was a glorious and defiant knock. Only a few months later he took every English wicket for just 77 runs. For these and many more feats he was inducted into the exclusive ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.

But whilst Khan’s sporting legacy will be forever looked back upon with respect, his subsequent political career may not be viewed with the same reverence. 

Since becoming prime minister of Pakistan, Khan has instituted a plethora of barbaric practices, including chemical castration for rapists. An irreversible, undignified process that even the “new” Pakistan banned 200 years ago. 

The 68 year-old leader of the Tehreek-e-Insaf party announced this week that he wants to use economic sanctions to force western governments to criminalise insulting the Prophet Muhammed. Khan believes a trade boycott will be an “effective” way to force western nations to implement blasphemy laws. According to the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, current free speech laws are “…hurting the feelings” of muslims across the world.

Pakistan is a strictly religious country. Blasphemy laws are already enshrined within the constitution. Article 295c mandates the death penalty for any “imputation, insinuation or innuendo” against the Prophet.

Without the freedom to criticise religion, we would have been unable to debate the role radical Islam has played in the over-representation of British-Pakistani men in countless child sexual exploitation gangs throughout England – they make up 84 per cent of convictions. The most well know case being Rotherham, where for almost 20 years – and as Professor Alexis Jay revealed – over 1,400 girls were subjected to horrific sexual abuse. The first conviction was in 2010 where five British Pakistani men were convicted of sexual abuse against girls as young as 12. One defendant even argued it was his religious right to have sex with underage girls. Due to the fear of offending local cultural and religious sensitivities, the police and local councils covered it up for over a decade.

Legitimate discussion must be had around any religion. Especially one so irrevocably intertwined with the one of the biggest sexual abuse scandals of recent history. To shut down debate – or in Khan’s absurd contention, an entire country – is quite frankly absurd. It sends the message that Muslims must be protected from difficult questions normal people might have about their religion. 

Due to a slowing economy, Khan’s popularity is waning. In an effort to placate the religious right he wants to introduce the death penalty for rape of children. Yet he governs a country that systematically ignores the role religion plays in child marriage. According to a UNICEF report, 21 per cent of girls in the country are married before they are 18. 

In 2016, Pakistan had to withdraw a bill that would have stopped child marriage after it was declared “un-Islamic” by a religious group. The Council of Islamic Ideology declared it was “blasphemous” to raise the age of marriage for girls from 16 to 18. Clerics for the council wanted to scrap the minimum age criteria as they believe that girls should be able to marry once they’ve reached puberty – which for some can be as young as nine. 

According to Khan’s own logic, supporting and defending women’s rights will become a crime. The same crime of blasphemy was attributed to a women’s march in Islamabad last month when it was discovered they were demanding human rights for women. Hardly a legacy one would wish to take responsibility for? Then again it’s not surprising from a man who backs the public hanging of rapists. A disgusting and horrific crime for sure, but surely one that merits imprisonment. No wonder Amnesty International describes public hangings as “acts of unconscionable cruelty.”  

Someone needs to tell Khan that Britain already has severe restrictions on free speech. Hate crime laws make it an offence to insult or criticise anyone from a minority group. There were even attempts made to rename Islamic terrorism “faith-claimed terrorism” – even though Islamist inspired terror attacks are by far the most dominant in the UK.

We are nothing if we allow religious fundamentalists to curtail our free speech. France has vociferously and bravely defended this most fundamental of rights and has paid for it in blood countless times. When the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo printed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed, two Islamic gunmen burst into their office and killed 12 people, injuring 11. What did they do? In defiance they reprinted them. When the French teacher Samuel Paty was thought to have showed his pupils the same images, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, an Islamist terrorist beheaded him in a suburb in Paris. What did they do? As a tribute to Paty they projected cartoons of the Prophet onto government buildings.

The fight for free speech and free expression has never been so fierce. But we must not surrender this most important of civil liberties. As Laurent ‘Riss’ Sourisseau, survivor of the Hebdo attack sums up: “We will never lie down. We will never give up.”