Religious Freedom in Pakistan

The title pretty much shows I'm not going to be touching upon a light topic today. I've been wanting to write this entry for a long, long time... more-so because my feelings regarding this issue have been building up in intensity day by day. The whole debate is: "Does giving birth to a child give you the right to determine his/her religion?"

In our subcontinent, and in the West till a few decades ago, the trend has largely been that religion is "inherited" from your parents... just like your ethnicity, your looks, and your allergies.

In Pakistan, for example, no child (even when he/she becomes an adult) can dare think of
changing their religion because of two reasons:

1. The whole household will break down and there will be waves of criticism from the immediate and extended family, from friends (who might soon become ex-friends) and from the society as a whole. Basically your family will disown you and your society will treat you like an outcast.

2. More importantly, under the Islamic law, you will be labeled a "murtid", and are liable to be killed unless you repent and revert. I am not sure how many scholars disagree with this law, but to the best of my knowledge, it is widely accepted.

I completely fail to understand that with such laws, how can we even dare to invite others to Islam. How can we ask someone to leave their religion and become a Muslim if leaving a religion is such a heinous crime? The typical Muslim response to this question is: "That is because Islam is the true religion of God and all the others are not". Come on! With such a self-centered worldview, do you really expect to be living in harmony with the rest of the world?

Imagine you trying to convince someone to convert to Islam... and in return he says "I am convinced that your religion is the true and final religion of God, but if I convert, my government will kill me under the religious law". What will you call their law? Savage? That is exactly what they call us: savage, barbaric, extremists.

The non-flexibility of religion is so ingrained in our heads that hardly anyone even dares to ask questions like "Is there even a God? If yes, is Islam really His true and final religion?" In fact, even the sub-categories of religion are so rigidly defined that no one dares think of changing their sect from one sect to the other. In most cases, that could actually be worse than leaving religion altogether.

Conclusion: I strongly feel that religion is a matter of personal choice, and we really need to help our people understand this. We need to kick back the self-righteousness and and push up the tolerance. As the Radio1 public service announcement very aptly puts it: "Tolerance. It's not just a word. It's what we need."