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LAST week, I attended a performance of The Testament of Mary in London, a monologue about the life and crucifixion of Christ delivered from his mother’s perspective. Based on a novella of the same name by Colm Tóibín, the play complicates the image of the Virgin Mary as a doting, silent mother, giving her a voice that is in turns concerned, sceptical, angry and even funny.
The play raises questions about faith and evokes the uncertainty of times in which new beliefs come into being. It also explores the arrogance and machinations of those who seek to usher in new beliefs at the expense of existing ones. Most powerfully, the play brings the Virgin Mary into a secular realm, depicting her as a mother first and a holy figure second.
In a talk after the play, Tóibín was asked whether Catholics had objected to his script. He described feeling nervous when he saw a minister attend a performance in Ireland, but was surprised to hear from the minister afterwards that he thought it was marvellous. Tóibín also described how performances in the United States were criticised by Christian groups, and often accompanied by ‘stage-managed’ protests outside the venue, but never disrupted by an offended audience member.
Once the discussion was opened up to the audience, a gentleman complimented Tóibín’s writing but concluded his comments by saying that as a devout Christian he disagreed with Tóibín, and pressed him to better explain his views.
Sitting in the auditorium, I could not believe I was inhabiting the same world in which, a day earlier, Rashid Rehman had been shot in Multan for defending a university lecturer charged with blasphemy — that is, for fulfilling his responsibility as a lawyer to uphold the course of justice. Rehman took up the case because no other lawyer was willing to defend a man charged with blasphemy. He took up the case despite the fact that lawyers have been warned by their peers as well as violent extremist groups not to defend those charged with blasphemy. And he continued to defend his client after lawyers illegally appeared in the court where the trial was under way and threatened him with dire consequences.
We already know that open discourse about religion is almost impossible in contemporary Pakistan. We have learned the hard way that the state thinks basic freedoms of speech and religion enshrined in our Constitution are lip service designed to appease the international community (and foreign donors), and not fundamental rights worth protecting. A dwindling number of people are willing to risk their lives to make the argument that free speech, even in matters of religion, is necessary for democracy. The past few decades have also taught us that violence is the most effective speech act in Pakistan, especially since we no longer have the appetite — or even the aptitude — for dialogue.
But when did we become disdainful of justice? When did we decide to diminish the right to be thought innocent until proven guilty, to be given a fair trial in a court of law? Incidents like this highlight that our hard-won democracy is becoming a spectre of the real thing: Pakistan today is increasingly a lawless place where vigilante justice passes for law, and where those who are more violent rule over those who can’t, or won’t, fight.
The horror and injustice of Rehman’s killing is amplified by the nature of those who wished it upon him — members of the legal community. He was threatened by lawyers, and his complaints were registered with the district bar association, which chose to ignore them. This is unsurprising. Members of the same legal community cheered on the killer of Salmaan Taseer, now forever immortalised through the mosque outside Islamabad named after him (to be clear, certain lawyers — and not the legal community as a whole — deserve opprobrium; witness the sanity and courage of the many lawyers protesting Rehman’s murder).
Certain lawyers are not the only ones masquerading as bastions of democratic values. Think of the case that cost Rehman his life — a university lecturer charged with blasphemy by his right-wing students. Think of others who have fallen the same way as Rehman — Taseer, who was condemned to his fate in part by a media personality, herself supposedly an icon of 21st-century Pakistan.
Policy and development discourse celebrates certain trends as signs of progress — a youthful population, a free press, a growing middle-class, urbanisation. These are meant to be antidotes to the backwardness and brutality of illiteracy, rural squalor, and more. But the increasingly intolerant nature of Pakistan’s youth, media and professional and middle classes offers little hope for a country losing sight of itself.
The writer is a freelance journalist.
Twitter: @humayusuf
