Ambassador Shabaz
Embassy of Pakistan
Eckerbergsg. 200244 Oslo

Oslo, 28 August 2001

Our ref.: 063/LG/LF

 

Your Excellency Ambassador Shahbaz,

Urgent request for intervention

The Norwegian Humanist Association and the International Humanist and Ethical Union are shocked by the conviction for blasphemy - and the awarded death penalty - to Dr. Younis Shaikh on 18 August this year. Dr. Shaikh went back to Pakistan from England, were he practised as a medical doctor, in order to serve his country and people with his knowledge and expertise. As a humanitarian and a peace activist he founded the progressive group Enlightenment, and in this capacity he met and made friends with many Norwegians.

We are deeply worried at the news that in this century a person can be tried and eventually killed by the state for merely saying that the Prophet Mohammed and his parents could not have been Muslims before the Prophet received the divine revelation. The other charges against Dr. Shaikh - supposedly made in the course of a routine classroom lecture he gave at the medical college were he was working - are equally ill founded, and do not warrant any punishment at all.

We are also deeply concerned about the way the police and the court handled the case of Dr. Shaikh. None of the complainants to the police were eyewitnesses to the alleged offence. The complaint was lodged by leaders of the Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-l-Nabuwat (Committee for the Protection of the Finality of the Prophethood), a very conservative organisation known in the past to have harassed and attacked what they see as non-Orthodox Muslims.

The Norwegian Humanist Association wrote about our concerns after the arrest of Dr. Shaikh in October last year (cf. our letter of 25 October 2000). We are now writing again, in co-operation with the International Humanist and Ethical Union (were a Norwegian, Mr. Levi Fragell, is the current President), in order to ask Your Excellency to forward our concerns to Pakistan’s authorities. We know that His Excellency, President Pervez Musharraf has declared that Quaid-I Azam Ali Jinnah is his political ideal. Therefore, we allow ourselves to remind the President of what Jinnah said in his speech to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947:

Your are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or cast or creed - that has nothing to do with the business of the state.

We would also like to remind the President and Pakistan’s authorities of the verse from the Quran where it says: There is no compulsion in religion [al-Baqarah 2:256.4].

We ask Your Excellency as ambassador to Norway to urge President Musharraf to take the necessary steps to make Pakistan true to the Quaid’s ideals. We also ask for immediate steps to be taken to protect all the religious minorities and non-believers living in Pakistan. And finally we ask that the President intervene in the case of Dr. Shaikh. This case is not worthy of such a great nation as Pakistan.

We thank you for your action on this matter.

Yours sincerely,

 

Lars Gule Levi Fragell Secretary General President Norwegian Humanist Association International Humanist and Ethical Union