Mob threats, child marriage, and anti-blasphemy violence

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Welcome

This week, we reflect on the tragic story of Shakil Ahmed, a young Bangladeshi student reportedly driven to suicide after a months-old Facebook post deemed offensive to Islam resurfaced—triggering mob threats and public outrage. Meanwhile in Pakistan, modest legal progress on child marriage faced fierce resistance from Islamic clerics defending the Prophet’s own example. And a new Human Rights Watch report details how Pakistan’s blasphemy laws continue to be weaponized against the poor and marginalized.

Unbelief Brief

Shakil Ahmed, a 24-year-old student at Dhaka University, has been found dead [[link removed]] in his home. Police say they recovered his “hanging body,” and it appears he died by suicide. Reportedly, around “seven or eight months ago,” Shakil published a Facebook post that appeared to insult the Prophet Muhammad. The post was deleted shortly after being published. However, according to his family, images of the post resurfaced and recirculated this past Monday, going viral. “Several hundred” people showed up at Shakil’s family home, threatening them with violence over the post, before Shakil allegedly hanged himself at around 2 AM.

This type of relentless mob vigilantism, dredging up months-old comments, is an all too common feature of devoutly Islamic societies. Shakil is not the first [[link removed]] to have been driven to suicide by such circumstances, and he unfortunately will not be the last. This combination of hysterics and barbarism is a direct result of religious fundamentalism. It makes life worse for everyone in the societies it affects, and it will not end until attachment to ancient and violent dogma weakens.

In Pakistan, underage marriage has just been criminalized [[link removed]] in the capital city of Islamabad. The Child Marriage Restraint Bill raises the minimum marriage for women in the capital from 16 to 18 and prescribes stiff penalties, including prison, for its violation. It is a welcome development in a country where almost a third of girls are married before the age of 18, and 4% even before the age of 15, despite marriage before the age of 16 being nominally illegal for girls.

Notably, this was actually a controversial decision. The dissenters were Islamic fundamentalists, particularly the country’s Council of Islamic Ideology, who deemed [[link removed]] the law “un-Islamic.” Reportedly, they contended that “clauses of the bill, such as fixing the age limit for marriage and declaring marriage below the age of 18 as child abuse and punishable, [do] not conform with Islamic injunctions.” They are, in fact, correct about this; the Prophet himself married a child. Their objections to the law on this basis only lay bare the twisted morality of Islamic doctrine.

Lastly: a new report [[link removed]] from Human Rights Watch details how blasphemy laws in Pakistan “perpetuate religious discrimination and are used to target the poor and minorities in unlawful evictions and land grabs.” Read the full text here [[link removed]].

Until next week,

The Team at Ex-Muslims of North America

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