Blasphemy is one of the most contentious issues in contemporary Pakistan. Founded as a safe homeland for Muslims, the country has wrestled with the role of Islam in the state since its inception.

While the overwhelming majority of the population are Muslim, they are far from homogenous in sectarian affiliation or adherence to particular doctrinal positions within Islam. Prior to the Islamisation programme under Zia ul Haq in the 1980s, the laws on blasphemy were largely inherited from colonial era regulations that focussed on protecting religious property. Zia’s regime introduced the idea that insult to core ideas of Islam might also legitimately be regulated by the state. The resulting increase in accusations and prosecutions of blasphemy cases has exacerbated divisions in the country and exposed minority communities to serious risk of prosecution. Arguably, rather than control blasphemy, state legislation has created a mechanism for harassment. This has hit minority communities, especially non-Muslims, particularly hard, as the recent high profile Asia Bibi case illustrates so dramatically.

Speaker:

Dr Yaqoob Khan Bangash is a historian of Modern South Asia. His current research interests are in the emergence of Pakistan as a post-colonial state, with broader interests in decolonisation, modern state formation, formation of identities, and the emergence of ethnic and identity based conflicts. His DPhil thesis was on the accession and integration of the princely states in Pakistan, which has been published by Oxford University Press as A Princely Affair: Accession and Integration of Princely States in Pakistan, 1947–55. He is currently working on a monograph on the imagination of Pakistan as a country after its creation, using the debates of the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan (1947–56) as the basic primary material. Dr Bangash is also working towards a history of Forman Christian College, Lahore. He has published in South Asia Research and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and has written articles for two edited volumes. He also regularly writes for The News, The Express Tribune and other publications. In 2018, he was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and presently is the 2019 Chevening Fellow at the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies.

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