The people of the Indus Basin, who form the majority of Pakistanis, are by nature conservative and by that I do not mean that they are necessarily close minded. What I mean is that on a long enough timeline, they tend to reject extremism of all kinds and this is their greatest strength. This one characteristic is self-evident in our family lives. Religious extremists as well as those who forward a self-righteous creed of any ideology — secular or otherwise — alike are ostracised and sidelined within their homes. It is not unusual to find families balking at the idea of their son growing a long flowing beard and becoming overly religious. Similarly, those who are refuseniks of sorts and preach their doctrine are viewed with suspicion. The relationship between the common Indus man or Indus woman with religion is by its nature pragmatic. It is a sort of an insurance policy, an unspoken agnosticism that seeks to cover all grounds and possibilities, including the possibility of there being an afterlife. Then why do we live in an age of extremism you may ask. Extremism in the post-1970s era is big business. It sells like nothing else. I recently asked a famous but thinking religious scholar of the Deobandi school if there was a possibility of introducing an oath on the Holy Quran for those who accused others of blasphemy. His reply was instructive. He said that ‘mullahism’ is now nothing but a means of livelihood and that economic conditions would ensure that the complainants of blasphemy will indubitably take a false oath on the Holy Quran. In other words, the mullahs have scant regard for their own holy book. It extends beyond mullahs, of course. Great investigative journalists of our time — especially those who write for a certain news media organisation whose Urdu title translates as ‘war’ — are waging a war on reason and hope, all for their own advantage. Consider for example one Urdu columnist’s rabid attack on the person of Ali Dayan Hassan, a well-respected human rights activist for Human Rights Watch. Here I must digress for a moment. Those who have read my columns know very well where I stand on the issue of Balochistan. I have strongly and forcefully argued that the whole case of Balochistan’s separatists is on a weak footing and untenable under law. That, however, is no excuse for any excesses or crimes against individuals with a point of view. The doctrine of state preservation may dictate military action as an extension of the policy but it does not condone human rights abuses against any one set of people and that too indiscriminately. Therefore, I do not see Human Rights Watch’s report as inherently anti-Pakistan but rather a mirror to us as Pakistanis as to how much we have failed in ensuring justice and peace for our citizens, regardless of their religion or ideology. To then accuse Dayan of working on an agenda is just ridiculous. His agenda is determined by the mandate of his position, which is that of a person working for human rights in a difficult situation. Equally pathetic was this Urdu journalist’s position on the Ahmadi issue. Religion and religious profession is a matter that is ultimately between God and man. The basic test prescribed in Islam to be a Muslim is the Kalima. It is simply not permitted either within the doctrine of Islam or the established human rights paradigm that an individual or body X can determine the religion of Y. We do not live in the Middle Ages, and even if we did, the faith of Islam does not allow any ecclesiastical authority or a secular one determining who is a Muslim and who is not. Anyone who professes to be a Muslim or says the Kalima Shahadah is to be taken on the face of it as a Muslim. The rest is left to God. This is also the test — it bears repeating — that the founder-maker of this country, Mr Mohammad Ali Jinnah, put forth when some mullahs tried to bring upon him pressure to turn out Ahmadis from the Muslim League. He refused pointblank. On the contrary, he chose an Ahmadi amongst the Muslim community to plead Pakistan’s case before the boundary commission. The second amendment to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is, therefore, not only morally untenable and religiously barred, but is void ab initio because it violates all principles of natural justice. An upstanding God-fearing judiciary would have struck down the second amendment a long time ago. However, everyone has a stomach to feed and nothing sells like the business of religion. Therefore, when the Urdu columnist in question — let us not hesitate to name him — Ahmed Noorani — who calls himself a veteran investigative journalist — says that Ahmadis are to blame for their plight, he is talking nonsense. Who made Mr Noorani God’s anointed representative on earth to state whether Ahmadis are Muslims or not? Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was a callous, scheming and unscrupulous politician who nonetheless had seen that in 1953 the civil military establishment had engineered the anti-Ahmadi riots to undermine Khawaja Nazimuddin’s Muslim League government. Nazimuddin, a Muslim Leaguer to the bone — and who was infinitely more religious than Bhutto — had refused — keeping with the tradition set by Mr Jinnah — to give in to the mullahs, at the cost of his own government. He and his coterie of fine young ‘liberal’ men — Abdul Hafiz Pirzada and Yahya Bakhtiar — all worthy successors of Richard Rich, First Baron Rich — resorted to every crass argument in the book to carry out the murder of reason and sanity in Pakistan. Thus, an assembly of political opportunists who had come to power after denying democracy to East Pakistan and forcing its secession now decided to play the Council of Nicaea, in the name of a simple religion that balks at the notion of an ecclesiastical council. They too had stomachs to feed. Islam was good for business. The writer is a lawyer based in Lahore and the author of the book Jinnah: Myth and Reality. He can be contacted via twitter @therealylh and through his email address yasser.hamdani@gmail.com