No one wants to hear about the degradation of innocent Christian girls, but to remain silent about it would be a greater crime. My hope is that, in sharing news of these crimes, you will not only be better informed of the harsh reality facing so many Christians in Pakistan every day, but also in a better position to help them win justice.

Christians and especially young Christian girls are paying a high price for being Christians in an Islamic society and the proliferation of attacks and accusations in recent months is reaching an unprecedented level. Christian girls are looked down upon with hatred, regarded as inferiors, and treated by men like ‘mal-e-ganimat’ (the term used to describe booty seized during the Islamic war). -- Nasir Saeed

The Islamic concept of justice is based on the divinely-ordained right of human dignity: “we hace honoured the children of Adam” (17.70). if honour, and dignity, is a common heritage of mankind, then it is only logical that they all must be trated as equals. It is important to remember that one of the attributes of God mentioned in the Quran is adl, that is justice, which denotes placing things in their rightful place. The Quran says, “God does command you to render back your Truths to those to whom they are due; and when you judge between man and man, that you judge with justice”(4.58) -- Arif M. Khan

On 13 June, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani’s lawyer, Mohammad Mostafaei, published an article entitled Sakineh on the threshold of stoning and pointed out that there is now no legal obstacle to her execution being carried out at any time. In May 2006 she was convicted of having had an “illicit relationship” with two men and received 99 lashes as her sentence. Despite this, she was subsequently convicted of “adultery while being married", which she has denied, and was sentenced to death by stoning. -- Amnesty  International

In a strong statement to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, June 9, 2010, IHEU main Representative, Roy Brown accused Pakistan of encouraging discrimination and hatred against religious minorities. Citing condemnation of Pakistan by the Muslim Canadian Congress and a recent resolution of the European Parliament calling on Pakistan to remove expressions of hatred from its government approved school textbooks, he reminded the Council and the government of Pakistan that it was government and media support for expressions of hatred that led to the Nazi Holocaust and the genocide in Rwanda. 
 
Speaking to reporters after his statement, Brown accused the Pakistanis of playing with fire by permitting hate speech against minorities to run unchecked.
 
Here is the text of Roy Brown’s statement in full....

Many of the Islamist extremists who came here in recent years did so because they were wanted people in their own countries; they really are political refugees, but they regard us as the enemy, too. Yet the 1951 Geneva Refugees Convention, under which people like Chahal and Qatada were allowed into the UK in the first place, specifically states that asylum "cannot be claimed by a refugee whom there are reasonable grounds for regarding as a danger to the security of the country in which he is". On this basis, they could be sent back if it were not for the ruling of the European court in the Chahal case.

Aside from not letting them in to start with, what can be done? Could we withdraw from the European convention? In theory, yes – but it might mean having to leave the European Union because observing the rights in the ECHR is now a condition of membership. One suggestion is to withdraw from the convention and rejoin the following day having entered a reservation to Article 3. This is possible under Article 57, which allows for a reservation to be entered when a country joins. It is not clear, however, whether this would be valid if a country left and rejoined or even if it would be allowed, since torture is prohibited by a fundamental rule of international law. -- Philip Johnston

I was inspired to write this essay by a Pakistani journalist friend. Later, during a lecture tour in South East Asian countries, where Indian and Chinese origin minorities are also discriminated I noticed that the minorities are palpably anguished. The latest incidents of organized attacks by Bengali Muslims on hill dwelling Chakma tribals in Khagrachari areas firmed up my decision to chronicle a preliminary account of the conditions of the non-Muslim minorities in Pakistan. I had earlier written a piece on the plight of the Pakistani Christians. I have not touched upon the plight of the Shia and Ahmadiya (non-Muslim) communities in Pakistan, which require international attention. Not a single Indian Muslim religious seminary has so far condemned Pakistan for inhuman treatment of the Shia and Ahmadiya communities. -- Maloy Krishna Dhar

It’s my privilege to present a brief case on Gilgit Baltistan on the occasion of Human Rights Council Session here in Geneva.

I represent Gilgit Baltistan Democratic Alliance (GBDA) as chairman of Balawaristan National Front (BNF) being in exile in Brussels because of the ISI’s threat to my life and I am also representative of a lonely nationalist alliance of Balawaristan (China and Pakistan Occupied Gilgit Baltistan) namely GBDA (Gilgit Baltistan Democratic Alliance) which consists of 6 indigenous parties, which demand for freedom and independence from the occupation of both Pakistan and China.---- Abdul Hamid Khan, Chairman, Balawaristan National Front (BNF)

Baluchistan was once a haven of peace. Today the situation here is extremely bad. The operation is going on in Dera Bugti, Koblo, Awaran and Jhalawan and the inhabitants of Balochistan demanding their rights are beng put into jails. The world has an eye on the natural resources of Balochistan. There are projects like Sendak Rekodik where the gold and copper mines have been outsourced to the companies of China and Australia. The manpower in these two companies belongs to the rest of the states. Only a handful of sentries and peons have been employed from Balochistan though hundreds of the engineers in Balochistan are unemployed. -- Md Hashim Noshki (Translated from Urdu by Sohail Arshad)

"The Global Mufti: the Phenomenon of Yusuf al-Qaradawi" is the title of a recently published collection of essays on the life and work of the most well-known and influential TV sheik in the Islamic world.

With his hostility towards religious minorities in the Islamic world and his wholesale dismissal of Muslim life in Europe, the Islamic scholar and television preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi is damaging dialogue and interreligious communication. A commentary by Khaled Hroub

Photo: Doha-based Egyptian scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi

The Indian debate about Islam has remained frozen in a time warp. The mainstream intellectuals who dominate the country’s editorial pages and television channels tend to trace the Muslim world’s problems almost exclusively to the alleged misdeeds of Israel and the US. The Hindu right doesn’t make this mistake, but its tendency to group all Muslims together, its inability to distinguish between Islam as a religion and Islamism as an ideology, and its championing of causes important to the most orthodox Hindu believers shades into bigotry and religious chauvinism.

In Jaipur, Hirsi Ali challenged the assumptions of both groups. She was flatly unapologetic about her views on Islamic theology, but at the same time she urged the audience to think of Muslims as “individuals who are capable of changing their mind”. … Speaking to a packed hall, with her burly bodyguard unobtrusively off-stage, Hirsi Ali spoke about Islam—and its problems with individualism, women’s rights and sexuality—with a frankness unfamiliar to most Indians. She described the faith she was born into as “a dangerous, totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion”. She argued against the moral relativism that has prevented Western intellectuals from scrutinizing Islam as they do Christianity and Judaism. She asked why it seemed impossible to have a sober discussion about the Quran and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad without riling Muslim sentiment, and made the case for bringing the Enlightenment to the blighted lands of West Asia and Muslim South Asia. ---Sadanand Dhume

I wish I could share with you a “success” story as a result of my being a “whistle-blower,” but the reality of things simply do not presently allow it. I admit to you that at one time I did believe that my life would eventually turn for the better, in spite of it all, especially fighting under the banners of “doing right,” “standing up for others” and “speaking the truth.”

But it has been a very long and arduous path I have found myself upon with no end in sight. Rather than a karmic “good” winning in the end over “the forces of evil,” I have experienced what I feel like is a slow and intimate wrath in response to my actions. -- Sam Provance

Ebadi and her colleagues have taken it upon themselves to help secure the human rights and dignities of these women while simultaneously protecting (or perhaps better put, correcting) Islamic values. She told me that part of her job is to help women interpret Islam "correctly" in order to assert their claim to equal rights. She and her colleagues have - on numerous occasions- presented mounds of documentation intended to force the courts to acknowledge that at a minimum, there are numerous possible interpretations of Islamic law, and ideally, to compel them to recognize that their own mandates are in violation of the spirit of Islam. It is a powerful strategy - reclaiming Islam - that has formed the basis for much of the unity and discipline behind the Women's Movement in Iran and which has drawn in supporters from across all demographics, including sex, of Iranian society. -- Shirin Ebadi

Every month a couple of Hindu families (of the 2.44 lakh Hindus in Pakistan) leave the land where they and their parents had been born, to seek refuge, in India. Each one talks of feeling watched, being pushed further into their homes. They celebrate their festivals as quietly as possible or not at all. They pray behind closed doors and many have considered giving their children Muslim first names, except that even that might attract violence. Riding in public transportation is a fraught event because someone might decide that Hindus should sit with them. -- NISHA SUSAN

Bengalis no longer enjoy the freedom of the age of Kabeer or Raheem or our Vedic ancestors

It is outrageous that in this day and age a respected newspaper like the Statesman cannot even publish as innocuous an article as Johann Hari’s “Why should I respect these oppressive religions?” It is being reproduced below courtesy Independent of London where it originally appeared. It seems some obscurantist Muslims had objection to it and so the Stalinist police arrested Mr. Ravindra Kumar and Anand Sinha, the editor and publisher of The Statesman, and curiously without provoking any debate or as far as I know even any coverage in secular democratic India’s independent media.

As you will see in the article below Johann Hari is very balanced and maintains equidistance from all major religions that he mentions. He makes a plea for freedom of expression. His main point is stated in the very first paragraph: “The right to criticize religion is being slowly doused in acid. Across the world, the small, incremental gains made by secularism – giving us the space to doubt and question and make up our own minds – are being beaten back by belligerent demands that we "respect" religion. A historic marker has just been passed, showing how far we have been shoved. The UN rapporteur who is supposed to be the global guardian.”

I am a religious person myself. But I don’t see how anyone can be religious in the true sense of the term without having ever been skeptical about religion, without having been agnostic or even atheist for a time. No truly religious person can ever question the right of others to question religion.  He would have the confidence to know that this questioning person will come to realize the value of religion in general, and maybe his religion too in course of time. He or she will see that as this fellow is questioning religion, he/she has the capacity to someday become religious. But of course those who follow their inherited religion are not going to see it this way. They are the inhabitants of the land of Jahiliya.

Now tell me my Muslim brothers and sisters! Would there have been a religion called Islam in the world today if Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon him) had taken your view of his ancestral religion? Would we have had Islam in the world today if the Prophet had not questioned and rebelled against the religion of his family and clan and tribe? Indeed would we have had any religion, any science, any literature, any philosophy? All progress emanates from questioning established truths.

However, this is no occasion for a discourse on progress. You cannot address followers of ancestral religions, followers of Abu Jahal, and discuss with them concepts of progress. You can just beat them in a war and then they will join you, as the Meccan followers of Abu Jahal joined Islam after their defeat.

I don’t know what the obscurantist Muslims of an enlightened city like Kolakata find objectionable in Johann Hari’s article. Perhaps it is the following passage that has provoked their ire:

Exiled Hindraf leader P Waytha Moorthy slammed the former premier's racist attack as "typical of former Prime Minister Mahathir trying to erase all his wrongdoings during his 22-year dictator-like rule as the country's fourth prime minister." All Malaysians, he said, know that Mahathir was single-handedly responsible for wiping out the impartiality of the legislative, judiciary and executive powers through widespread abuse or power, corruption, nepotism and cronyism as well as destroying racial harmony in multi racial Malaysia. Ahti Veeranggan reports.

The cancellation of a conference of the Ahmadiya community by the Andhra Pradesh Government last Sunday is a gross infringement of the secular principles on which the country is founded, writes The Pioneer, New Delhi, in an editorial comment.

About 490,000 Afghans have been deported from Iran over the past 18 months, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and afghan Ministry of Refugees and Returnees (MoRR) told IRIN. “One hundred and forty thousand undocumented Afghans have been deported so far in 2008, and some 350,000 were deported in 2007,” said Salvatore Lombardo, the UNHCR representative in Afghanistan, adding that most of the deportees were “single males” who had gone to Iran in search of work. Abdul Qadir Zazai, chief adviser to the MoRR in Kabul, told IRIN Tehran was continuing to deport Afghans who are not refugees.