Daily Times

Zaid Hamid, a controversial televangelist with fantastic (if not completely insane) ideas was arrested in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) last month for making controversial speeches against the ruling Royals, an illegal act according to local laws, which can result in years of imprisonment and hundreds of lashes.
Wrapped in a shroud of secrecy, very little information is getting out in the media about the exact circumstances in which he was arrested and what was the wording or the message of his speech(es) that led the regime to take such an action. All we know is that so far consular access has been denied even after multiple requests. However, his wife has eventually been granted permission to meet him. We also have, at the moment, no confirmation about how long he will end up staying in the Kingdom and if or when he will be allowed to travel back to Pakistan. Sure, there is news in local media reports regarding his verdict of eight years of imprisonment and 1,000 lashes. Nonetheless, they await official verification.
I am sure that from the introduction you have got an idea about my personal feelings towards him. However, to remove any ambiguity (if it exists), let me say: I do not like him at all. In fact, I disagree with him on almost every issue, to the point that I think he is a fraud. In my opinion, he confabulates or exaggerates everything he talks about, which includes but is not limited to Islamic history, the Hadees, the Quran, the independence movement of Pakistan, our armed forces, national politics, the corruption of the current government and the geopolitical situation of the world in which Pakistan sits at the centre. If we put all these separate entities together in one person, we will find a defence specialist, which he claims he is, a religious scholar, which he acts as, an investigative journalist, a historian, a legal expert, a social scientist, a mystic and a soldier with a camouflaged vest! Can you imagine a single individual wearing so many hats on top of the red one that he normally wears?
Among all of his controversial and many times baseless claims, I specifically do not think Pakistan is the centre of the world’s attention nor do I believe that the west pays any heed to us until it finds someone as important as Osama bin Laden hiding a few miles away from Pakistan’s Military Academy in Abbottabad, or after the Mumbai attack, which showed direct links to a Pakistani organisation. To be honest, I believe in the contrary: it is we who seek the world’s attention like a fussy nine-year-old who screams and shouts after he fails to convince his parents to buy him a new toy.
I also do not agree with Zaid Hamid that RAW, Mossad and the CIA are perpetually contriving a crisis-like situation in Pakistan to keep us entangled in their web of conspiracies. To me, it is almost insane to assume that they believe we will realise our own strength overnight and knock them out with a single blow the following morning if they fail to keep our attention diverted. Actually, they might find it humorous if we shared this kind of grandiosity about ourselves and may even recommend psychiatric evaluation for our national, collective bipolar illness!
Having said all that, I still find it unacceptable to stay quiet when Zaid Hamid is incarcerated and probably sentenced in the Kingdom, which nowadays is more of a kingdom of hypocrisy, intolerance and barbarism, just a notch lower than the old Taliban regime in Afghanistan and two notches lower than Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq.
I think, as wrong as Zaid Hamid is in his views, he still is a Pakistani citizen and we should do whatever we can to assure his safety and possibly even his early return to Pakistan. I am not sure how successful our consulate would be after our refusal to send troops to help Saudi Arabia against Yemen but we should not leave any stone unturned.
Not only that, the regime did not budge even under great pressure from the west to release Raif Badawi, a blogger who has been sentenced to 1,000 lashes — 50 per week for 20 weeks — and 10 years in jail for encouraging liberalism and promoting the idea of separating religion from the state in his blog. Also remember that Badawi did not criticise the current regime directly; instead, in some of his writings, he praised King Abdullah for bringing some of the reforms that Badawi wanted to be introduced. This, though, in the absence of the excerpts from his speeches cannot be said about Zaid Hamid.
I must also add in the end that, over time, Zaid has made more enemies here and has befriended very few, if any, in influential circles and no one else is responsible for that but him. Yet, freedom of speech for me is much more important a virtue to protect than any kind of ideological or personal differences.

The writer is a US-based freelance columnist. He tweets at @KaamranHashmi and can be reached at skamranhashmi@gmail.com