Pakistan: The Madam and the Imam

By HUMA YUSUF

Last month, the police in Peshawar, the capital of Pakistan's northwestern Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, arrested four women and one man for engaging in prostitution, a crime punishable by up to 25 years in prison. The High Court in Peshawar released them after acknowledging that a lack of employment opportunities often forces women into selling sex. But it also ordered Neelam, who was charged with running a brothel, to attend an hour-long class with a cleric at a local mosque every day for a month. After that the police will assess her moral progress and report back to the court. The ruling provoked jokes in cyberspace: "Hope the cleric stays focused and doesn't become a client," read one comment. But it also raised serious concerns about the Pakistani state's growing deference to religiosity, even at the expense of due process. Liberals are alarmed that Neelam was sentenced to repent without being convicted of a crime and that her guilt may have been assumed: the order that she receive religious instruction was issued during a bail plea, before a proper trial. Defense lawyers also say that the police arrested the accused without obtaining search warrants and produced no written complaints and no witnesses during the bail hearing. Nor were any medical examinations conducted for evidence. Islam is the state religion of Pakistan and the Constitution mandates that laws conform with its principles, but most laws, including criminal ones, are based on British secular law. And yet the Pakistani state is increasingly seeking opportunities to assert its Islamic identity in order to keep in step with the Pakistani public, which is growing more anti-American and looking to defend Islam from perceived attacks by the West. The Peshawar High Court's order against Neelam is worrisome not only because it violates her rights, but also because it will likely embolden extremists and spark more instances of religious vigilante justice. In March 2007, in one of the most publicized cases of moral policing in Pakistan, female students of the Jamia Hafsa seminary in Islamabad abducted three women and accused one of them, Shamim, of running a brothel. They released Shamim only after forcing her to "confess" her sins, publicly repent and vow to devote herself to Islam. That incident along with other violent acts in the students' Islamizing campaign of spring 2007 - the abduction of seven Chinese nationals, the intimidation of DVD store owners and the hijacking of a children's library - led to a major armed showdown in July 2007 between the seminary students and state security forces at the Red Mosque, where the students and the religious extremists who supported them sought sanctuary. Today, however, the state seems willing to mimic, rather than condemn, such actions. In August, after entertaining petitions against "vulgarity" in the Pakistani media, the Supreme Court ordered PEMRA, the media regulatory authority, to define obscene content in order to censor it. PEMRA is considering whether to ask the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body that ensures Pakistan's laws comply with Islamic principles, to define obscenity for the purposes of media censorship. The recent court ruling against Neelam comes on the heels of the Pakistani government's naked and opportunistic attempt to burnish its Islamic credentials recently. After announcing a day of protests against the anti-Islam film "Innocence of Muslims" - which the Pakistani prime minister has called "an attack on the whole 1.5 billion Muslims" - it declared Sept. 21 a "day of love for the Prophet" and then sat back while the country erupted on the new holiday. (Protests in Karachi, Peshawar, Islamabad and other Pakistani cities, left 19 people dead.) The government also blocked access to YouTube because the site has not removed the film. The state's zealous, and at times unconstitutional, embrace of Islam is a worrying trend in a country struggling against extremist groups, sectarian violence and routine discrimination against religious minorities. As one newspaper editorial put it, when "a branch of government gets involved in proselytizing," it sets a "dangerous precedent."