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In Pakistan, a state of fear among children—inspectors enter schools to ensure Quran reading

PERVEZ HOODBHOY

Magistrates accompanied by rifle-bearing policemen are interrogating 12-year-olds. Their teachers are asked to stand silently in the corner.

Mutawwa’ is Arabic for the once-feared Saudi religious police. Tasked to implement behavioural standards set by oil-fuelled Wahabism, its wings have been clipped by the ongoing liberalisation sweeping the Middle East. But, under Imran Khan, Pakistan is flying elsewhere. To implement the government’s new Single National Curriculum (SNC), strict religious policing of public and private schools has begun. A Pakistani version of the mutawwa is emerging.

Marked as ‘Court Case — Most Important’, in a letter dated Nov 10, 2021, the School Education Department of the Punjab Government issued a directive that, as per orders received from the Lahore High Court, all schools in the province must be rigorously checked for Quranic reading/nazra skills. Each school will be jointly inspected by the head of the district education authority and a district & sessions judge. Cellphone numbers of school principals and teachers, together with a list of several hundred schools targeted for inspection, have been provided.Reading the Quran under a maulvi’s supervision has been a normal, age-old practice in every Muslim household — including that of the writer. But dispatching law-enforcers to enforce a tradition is new and bizarre. Preliminary reports suggest province-wide confusion and chaos, and a state of fear among children, teachers, and school principals.

Magistrates accompanied by rifle-bearing policemen are pouncing upon schools, interrogating seven- to 12-year-old children. Their teachers are ordered out of the classroom or asked to stand silently in the corner. In some cases, school principals have been told to present themselves in person before authorities located in various parts of the province.

Punishments are being handed out. Last week, a sessions judge in Nankana Sahib recommended disciplinary action against three school principals. They were accused of paying insufficient attention to Quran teaching as a separate subject, a requirement of the SNC. Included in the charge sheet is that their schools had “students who had Paras of the Holy Quran and were keeping them in their school bags which is gross negligence”.

This needs explanation. As the reader may know, no copy of the Quran can be kept together with ordinary books. Visiting magistrates accuse children of bringing Quran copies from home inside their backpacks together with their textbooks. But what else can the kids do? Carry two backpacks? Rudimentary schools, such as they exist in villages or poor urban areas, have barely enough sitting room and no storage space. Cupboards, if any, are few while those with locks are still fewer.

Magistrates have also noted that backpacks are thrown around or placed on the floor. According to a school principal in his school at least four accidental drops of the holy book have occurred in a sixth grade class. While these caused a stir subsequent developments could not be known. The severity of punishments — which could possibly include those for blasphemy — means that such incidents are generally hushed up unless they are to be wilfully used against rivals. These are not the only matters that school principals and teachers are worried about. Traditional respect requires that none can turn his/her back to the Quran. What is one to do in a classroom packed with kids? As for wuzu: a majority of schools have no proper toilets or clean water but, as is well known, none may touch the Quran without being properly cleansed.

Using a disguised identity, a female teacher wrote that proper cleansing is particularly problematic for female schools — and even more for mixed schools. As per normal requirement no girl, or teacher, may touch the holy book while menstruating. But the topic is so tabooed that none dare mention it in front of students or higher ups. Could this — rather than laziness — be why some female Quran schoolteachers were unable to explain to the inspection teams their absence from class?

Paradoxically, the squads going from school to school across Punjab are meant to check Quran-teaching standards but their own members are deficient in an important way. SNC prescribes Quran teaching with proper tajweed (pronunciation) of Arabic words. However, this is beyond the capacity of most Quran schoolteachers in the area because they are rarely able to pronounce the letters ‘Qaf’ and ‘A’in’ as in Arabic. Exceptions are madressah graduates who spend their lives honing the skill of accurate recitation. Thus, if the tajweed requirement is to be fulfilled, logically such persons will have to be inducted as regular teachers. This runs counter to emphatic denials made by the education minister, Shafqat Mahmood, who claims that the existing school system is not being madressah-ised.What drove the Lahore High Court to issue its orders so speedily? What was the urgency given a thousand other pending complaints concerning property disputes, theft, fraud, child abuse, rape, and murder? The answer is before us: ideologues in government have seized the reins of power. As in Afghanistan, the population is now at their mercy.

It was not supposed to be this way. Recall that Imran Khan’s SNC was initially advertised as means towards equal opportunities for the rich and poor, regular schools and madressahs. And — this is the most unbelievable part — also about raising the quality of education. So, are we about to see magistrates with armed guards inspecting school laboratories and frequency of science practicals? Checking if libraries are adequately stocked or that toilets are in working condition? Will these squads tell 25 million out-of-school children where to find schools and teachers? Hell is likely to freeze over before that happens.

The fortunate among us will recall school days as being carefree and filled with joy, laughter, and play. This is how it is in much of the world, and this is what every child should have. Afghanistan’s children are not so fortunate and now the children of Naya Pakistan are beset with similar misfortune.

Grim-faced magistrates swooping down upon schools, destroying the authority of teachers and school principals, and putting terror into the hearts of all is a disgrace to the notion of education. It may not end here. How we dress, speak, and think is going to be increasingly policed. Imran Khan’s Pakistan is racing down the path to Talibanisation. https://theprint.in/opinion/in-pakistan-a-state-of-fear-among-children-inspectors-enter-schools-to-ensure-quran-reading/777351/

SHAME SHAME SHAME #Pakistan #Srilanka #sialkotincident - Horror in #Sialkot

ONCE again, we are reminded how far this nation has descended into the abyss. This time the sickeningly familiar ritual of savage violence was enacted in Sialkot where Priyantha Kumara Diyawadana, a Sri Lankan national, was beaten to death on Friday over blasphemy allegations at the factory where he worked as a manager.

The mob then dragged his mangled body out on the road and set it on fire, where individuals on the scene — as if to underscore their utter lack of humanity — took selfies with the burning corpse. Where were law-enforcement personnel who should have protected Mr Diyawadana? How was the situation allowed to escalate to the point it did? What followed the grisly murder was predictable: condemnation by the political leadership, with the government vowing to punish the perpetrators to the fullest extent of the law. The army chief too, almost certainly because the victim was a foreign national, denounced “such extrajudicial vigilantism”.

For the same reason perhaps, religious bodies have also shown alacrity where they usually maintain a deafening silence and issued statements to condemn the lynching. Most ironic among them is the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan, the ultra-right group that proudly claims as its inspiration a man who committed murder in the name of blasphemy.

It is indeed a day of shame for Pakistan. Having repeatedly vented our bloodlust on our own, this time the extremists amongst us turned on an individual who was a guest in this country. Not surprisingly, however, the official denunciations only touch upon the here and now, the tip of the iceberg. The bitter truth is, on the last day of his life, Mr Diyawadana came face to face with the consequences of the Pakistani state’s decades-long policy of appeasing religious extremists. Even though the violent ultra-right outfits once used for strategic objectives began to be reined in a few years ago, other sectarian groups that were radicalised as part of the same process have since gained new ground. As extremism seeped into the body politic, blasphemy increasingly became weaponised, an expedient tool that could be wielded in a variety of situations: to take over the land of minority communities, to settle personal disputes — even to engineer protests to destabilise a sitting government in 2017.

All it takes now is an allegation of blasphemy and an individual or two to incite a mob to commit murder. Who can forget young Mashal Khan, lynched by his fellow students in 2017, or Shama and Shahzad Masih, burned alive in a brick kiln in 2014? These are but three victims in a long chronology of horror. Each act of lynching, each desecration of a place of worship, each life destroyed as a result is an indictment of a state that has long made cynical use of religion as part of its playbook. We must reverse course before the flames of intolerance devour us as a nation.

https://www.dawn.com/news/1662043/horror-in-sialkot

'Ashamed': Pakistan grapples with fallout from mob killing

A shocking and deadly mob attack on a Sri Lankan factory manager accused of blasphemy in eastern Pakistan last week prompted days of soul searching as the man's remains were flown to his home country.

The violence, which was condemned by rights watchdogs including Amnesty International, also drew intense responses from politicians, celebrities and journalists on social media.

"Ashamed!! Sick to my stomach!!," actress Mahira Khan wrote on Twitter shortly after the lynching.

The mob of factory employees in Pakistan's Punjab province tortured and burned a Sri Lankan manager on Friday in an attack that Prime Minister Imran Khan said brought shame on the country.

The killing raised alarm over the potential for accusations of blasphemy to fuel crowd violence in Pakistan, coming just weeks after at least seven policemen were killed in clashes with the radical TLP movement, which has built its identity on fighting what it sees as blasphemy.

Mob killings over accusations of blasphemy are frequent in Muslim-majority Pakistan, where the crime can carry the death sentence.

Other politicians and the country's powerful military also released statements condemning the attack.

"Mob violence cannot be acceptable under any circumstance as (the) state has laws to deal with all offences," said Human Rights Minister Shireen Mazari on Twitter.The victim's body was returned to Sri Lankan officials over the weekend and then flown to his home country, a government source in Punjab province told Reuters.

Punjab's police said arrests were continuing.

"In the last 12 hours, police have arrested seven more key figures, including one involved in planning an attack on a Sri Lankan manager," they said in a statement.

Some politicians and activists argued that broader societal and political change was needed, beyond legal consequences for those involved.

"Arrests should of course be made, but there has to be a clear appraisal of why mobs feel the impunity," said Senator Sherry Rehman, a member of the opposition Pakistan People's Party (PPP).

In an editorial entitled "Horror in Sialkot", leading newspaper Dawn on Sunday criticised Pakistan for "appeasing religious extremists."

"Once again, we are reminded how far this nation has descended into the abyss," the editorial said.

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/ashamed-pakistan-grapples-with-fallout-mob-killing-2021-12-06/

Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari demands punishment for the perpetrators of the Sialkot tragedy without delay

Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has demanded punishment for the perpetrators of Sialkot tragedy without delay and said that if the family of Sri Lankan citizen, Priyantha Diyawadanage, did not get immediate justice, this will bring the country into disrepute internationally.

In a statement issued from Media Cell Bilawal House, Chairman PPP said that today the European Union (EU) as well as the whole world is questioning about the measures taken by us against those who spread hatred, adding that the Sialkot tragedy has put the nation’s image at stake. “Instead of cosmetic measures, the government would have to take concrete steps in this regard,” he added.

Bilawal Bhutto Zardari pointed out that PTI-government’s steps, such as the release of culprits involved in the lynching of policemen last month in Punjab, are encouraging extremists. “To eradicate hatred in the country, it is utmost necessary to target the thinking that tempts the people towards extremism”, he maintained.

Chairman PPP said that if each and every point of the National Action Plan (NAP) had been implemented then reprehensible incidents like Sialkot tragedy would not have happened. “In order to root out extremism, all political as well as religious parties of the country would have to adopt a common approach in this regard,” he urged.

https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/25882/