TWO news items in your issue of Nov 22 made a very tragic reading. The first was about the burning of a factory of an Ahmadi in Jhelum and the second was about the so-called ulema vowing to resist the liberalisation of Pakistan!

It is the fundamental principle of criminal jurisprudence that mens rea or the intention to commit a crime must be there. Without mens rea no one can be punished for a crime. In order to convict a man for committing a crime, the prosecution must prove that not only did the man commit that crime but also that he had the intention of committing it. In the present case of Jhelum, it was neither alleged (much less ‘proved’) that the owner of the factory had committed the crime of blasphemy nor that he had intention to commit it.

The perpetrators of the crime of burning the factory have no excuse whatsoever to justify their heinous crime.

More than punishing the criminals involved in this case, the need is to teach people to be rational. It is immoral and a sin to hate any individual or community for its beliefs.

We must first teach mosque prayer leaders so that they in their prayer sermons teach the people to love humanity.

In my childhood the only proper way to dispose of old pages of the holy Quran and other holy books was to burn them to honourably dispose of the soiled and torn holy pages. Burning torn and soiled pieces of the Holy Quran can never make the holy Quran extinct, because there are trillions of copies of the Holy Quran in the world and millions of hufaz.

As for the other news item regarding some ‘ulema’ vowing that they would resist attempts to liberalise the country, these people have exposed themselves. They need to be strictly watched so that they do not defile society with their corrupt thoughts and ideology.

Besides, how have you dubbed them ‘ulema’? Far from being ‘ulema’, they are not even well-versed in religious knowledge. They are ignorant people who do not know what is Islam but outwardly they have adopted a style of life associated with men of religion.

To call such ignorant people ‘ulema’ is unfair to the dignity of the word ulema.

Justice (r) Salahuddin Mirza
Karachi

Published in Dawn, November 29th, 2015