Passage of Bill on “Apostates” Called Unlikely:
| Christian and government leaders yesterday said they are hopeful that Pakistan’s parliament is unlikely to support the death penalty for Muslims who abandon their faith.
Critics have worried that the Apostasy Act 2006, proposed in May, signaled further reduction of religious freedom in Pakistan, where vigilante enforcement of strict sharia law has been on the rise. In the most high-profile example of such vigilante activity, burqa-clad members of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid or Red Mosque and religious schools had kidnapped people they accused of being prostitutes and harassed police and music/video-shop owners in recent months. The activities prompted a government siege and raid of the heavily-armed mosque members this week in which at least 102 people died. The bill likely will not be approved in its original form by the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Law and Justice, where it is being revised, a member of the committee said. […] Proposed by the Mutahida Majlis-i-Amal (MMA), an alliance of six Islamic parties, the bill states that the testimony of two Muslim male witnesses would be sufficient to sentence to death a male “apostate†or man who changes his religion from Islam. A female “apostate†would receive life imprisonment. According to article 5 of the draft, a convicted “apostate†would have up to 30 days to revert to Islam and avoid punishment. But repeat male offenders who committed “apostasy†a fourth time would not be given a chance to repent. […] Besides the storming of the Lal Masjid mosque this week, the government is countering extremism in madrassas (Islamic schools) and brooking protests from lawyers across Pakistan over President Pervez Musharraf’s dismissal of the Supreme Court Chief Justice in March. […] At the same time, calm returned to two Pakistani villages where death threats against Christians who refused to convert to Islam have not been carried out. Christians in the villages of Shanti Nagar and Charsadda had feared for their lives after receiving letters threatening death if they refused to become Muslim in June and May. Despite rising popular enforcement of strict sharia, the Christians in the two towns have concluded that the unfulfilled ultimatums to convert to Islam in recent months were isolated incidents and not cause for concern over a systematic campaign of violence. |
Hopefully this hopeful optimism becomes some sort of good reality.