Lamenting the rise of extremism in society, Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) Chairman Raghib Hussain Naimi on Thursday said “religious outfits” are manipulating Islamic laws to suit their likes and dislikes.
In an informal interaction with journalists, he stressed that Pakistan’s laws have four separate categories for various acts of blasphemy, adding certain groups misunderstood that all blasphemous acts carried the extreme penalty of the death penalty. He said the punishment for the desecration of the holy Quran was life imprisonment, while the punishment for insulting members of the Holy Prophet’s (peace be upon him) household and his companions was seven years’ imprisonment.
Additionally, he said, the punishment for violation of the Prohibition of Qadianiyat Ordinance was three years’ imprisonment, while the sole blasphemous act that carried the death penalty was blaspheming the Holy Prophet (PBUH). “It is clear in all respects that only the state has the authority and the right to punish those found guilty of committing any blasphemy,” he said, emphasizing that there was no concept of mob lynching in either the law or shariah.
Lamenting that people preferred to act on misconceptions rather than listen to religious scholars, he said mob lynchings were both un-Islamic and contrary to the law of the land. “No one has the authority to issue a fatwa for killing an individual suspected of committing blasphemy,” he said, criticizing religious groups that played to “popular sentiment for political gains.”
To a question on why the CII did not identify and isolate clerics who incited the public over blasphemy, the CII chairman said rising intolerance had made “saner elements” within religious circles afraid of extremists. He also shared his own experience with extremists, noting that when he had declared the fatwa against Chief Justice of Pakistan Qazi Faez Isa over the Mubarak Sani case ‘haram,’ he had received nearly 500 threatening messages, some of them filled with abusive language.
Naimi asserted that the CII had repeatedly pointed out that issuing fatwas calling for someone’s murder or taking the law into one’s own hands were illegal, unconstitutional and against the principles of sharia. “Sharia does not authorize any individual to take another person’s life,” he added.