Kishali Pinto Jayawardena writes

That Mr. Karim could term my article in "Justice" last week on the recent political manoeuvres in Pakistan vis-a-vis attempts to make Sharia Law the supreme law of the land as "hysterical" would be amusing if it was not the typical response that is trotted out whenever any criticism is made about Islamic laws and practices.

I would like to correct Mr. Karim on certain points that he made. He makes reference to my "feeble lumping" together of Islam with Nazism and Apartheid. In the first place, I did not mention Apartheid in my commentary, though I am grateful to Mr. Karim for making that parallel as well. That Nazism and Apartheid were nourished to their infamous heights within the confines of a Christian state is a fact well documented and as well condemned. My point was not about religion but about the manner in which a country's legal system could be subverted from within in order to intimidate vulnerable people and minorities living within that system. I used the Nazi example both to illustrate the deceptively easy way in which this could happen and to stress that it was the devastation that Nazism perpetrated which led to an aggressive evolution of international human rights law and the warning that no state has the absolute right to treat its people the way it wishes.

By harping on my purported "Islam bashing", I can only say in reluctantly clichetic terms that Mr. Karim is missing the wood for the trees. I was not "bashing" Islam by any means. If Mr. Karim had read more carefully, he would have noticed that my article makes the point that basic tenets of Islam do protect non-Muslims and that on the contrary, enlightened Muslims in Pakistan are protesting about practices that they feel contradict this basic premise. My criticism was, in fact, about these practices, the existence of which I substantiated by documented instances that have been raised in international human rights bodies such as the UN Sub Commission on Minorities and which have caused considerable concern. Mr. Karim has not been able to refute any of these instances in practical terms. Instead he launches on a predictable tirade which sees the whole as a Christian conspiracy indulged in by "pro Western" journalists. As a writer who has had no hesitation in critiquing Christian fundamentalism with its obvious biases whenever appropriate, I find his categorisation again highly amusing. The comment that the activists and lawyers whom I have spoken to in Pakistan have dubious antecedents are even more hilarious, given that their integrity and credibility on rights issues have been established by courageous work in their country through long hard years.

I wrote an analysis of on-going events in a neighbouring country that are of concern to us, with specific illustrations and comments by nationals of that country itself. The response by Mr. Karim engages in unfounded character assassination, amidst long historical explanations that are quite spectacularly devoid of any specific rebuttals. It remains for the reader to judge for himself/herself which is the more "hysterical" of the two.

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