Britain, long the world’s leading exporter of Enlightenment values such as free speech and religious coexistence, now risks becoming a leading importer of Islamic blasphemy outrage. As the U.K. has worked to integrate immigrants from Pakistan, British culture has too often deferred to radical views on blasphemy—allowing activists to impose de facto blasphemy laws.
The latest incident happened last month in West Yorkshire, where students accidentally scuffed a Quran belonging to an autistic 14-year-old boy. Things quickly escalated. A Labour Party councilor said the book had been “desecrated” and that the matter needed “to be dealt with urgently by all the authorities,” including the police. Amid death threats, the school suspended four students even though the head teacher found they had no malicious intent.
In a video widely shared on social media, the mother of the boy whose Quran was scuffed appeared at a mosque—alongside an imam, the local police chief and the school’s head teacher—to apologize and seek forbearance for her son.
The West Yorkshire incident is part of a pattern. In 2016 a man of Pakistani origin stabbed an
Ahmadiyya Muslim
shopkeeper to death in Glasgow. Two years ago death threats forced an English schoolteacher out of his job and into hiding after he showed students a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad. Last year angry picketers forced theaters to withdraw a movie about the prophet Muhammad’s daughter Fatima that allegedly depicted Islamic history through a militant Shiite prism.
Of all places, why is this happening in the U.K., which has successfully integrated immigrants from across the world? The answer leads back to extremist elements in Britain’s 1.6 million strong Pakistani community, says
Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens,
an expert on radical Islam at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
“We’re seeing this aspect of Pakistani Islam bleeding into the U.K. via British-Pakistani preachers with links to antiblasphemy groups in Pakistan,” Mr. Meleagrou-Hitchens said in a phone interview. “To understand what’s going on in Britain, you have to understand Pakistan.”
That’s a sobering thought. Pakistan’s original blasphemy laws date back to colonial rule, but vigilante attacks on alleged blasphemers have become commonplace since the pious dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq instituted the death penalty for the crime in 1986. Since then, more than 1,500 people have been charged with blasphemy-related offenses. More than half were religious minorities—Ahmadiyya Muslims, Christians and Hindus—even though these groups account for less than 4% of the population.
These laws remain popular. A full 75% of Pakistan’s Muslims supported the country’s blasphemy laws in a 2011 Pew survey, the last time the outfit polled this question. In the 2018 elections, Tehreek-e-Labbaik, a shrill pro-blasphemy-law party, polled more than 2.2 million votes—a better showing than several long-established parties. And often the mere accusation of blasphemy is enough to invite vigilante retribution. Last month a mob in Punjab lynched a man accused of blasphemy after storming a police station.
Vigilante killers are at times memorialized as heroes. In 2011 police commando
Mumtaz Qadri
murdered Punjab Gov.
Salman Taseer,
who had publicly sympathized with a Christian woman on death row for blasphemy. Qadri’s grave is now a pilgrimage site.
As Mr. Meleagrou-Hitchens points out, Qadri has a cult following in the U.K. too. That this aspect of Pakistani culture has permeated Britain points to a larger debate about immigration in the West: Should we care more about where immigrants come from?
Though each individual is unique, immigrant groups often retain aspects of their ancestral culture for decades, according to “The Culture Transplant,” a new book by
Garett Jones,
an economist at George Mason University. In a phone interview, Mr. Jones pointed to a large gap between British Indian immigrants on the one hand and Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants on the other in education, income levels and female workforce participation. Mr. Jones wants Western nations to privilege skills over family reunification in immigration, and to give citizens of countries with a long history of liberal democracy a slight edge.
Though Mr. Jones’s work focuses on economics, his general point probably extends to culture more broadly. Technology ties immigrants back to their home cultures in a way that it didn’t even a few decades ago. Many British-Pakistanis remain closely linked to Pakistan through
WhatsApp and Urdu-language TV channels. This doesn’t mean that Britain shouldn’t let in Pakistanis. But by letting themselves be cowed by the radicals among this group, the British have given the world a lesson on how not to manage Islamic extremism.
Fortunately, some politicians are willing to stand up to radicals, while at the same time being careful not to tar peaceful Muslims. In a recent op-ed in the Times, Home Secretary
Suella Braverman
flatly declared that “we do not have blasphemy laws in Great Britain, and must not be complicit in the attempts to impose them.”
Ms. Braverman is right. Britain’s Enlightenment project may have run aground in today’s Pakistan. But the least we can expect is that it doesn’t run aground in Britain too.
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