Release of Pervez Kambaksh brings relief for some, blood-lust from others
The pardoning and release of Pervez Kambaksh, the young Afghan journalism student, who was jailed in Afghanistan for “blasphemy”, has sparked sighs of relief from his family and howls of outrage from Islamist fanatics.
Pervez was jailed in 2007 after asking questions in his class about the rights of women under Islam. For this, he was originally sentenced to death, but this was reduced to 20 years imprisonment after an international outcry. Now it has emerged that he was pardoned several weeks ago by the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and has fled the country.
Kambakhsh was arrested in October 2007 when he was 23 years old. At the farrago that passed for a trial, prosecutors said he showed “contempt” for Islam by questioning the religion’s treatment of women. He had downloaded an article on the topic from the internet and written comments on the paper.
Human Rights groups around the world — including the NSS — protested about the sentence, organising petitions and write-ins. Jean-Francois Julliard, the secretary-general of Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement “The case will be remembered as a miscarriage of justice marked by religious intolerance, police mistreatment and incompetence on the part of certain judges.”
But hardline clerics reacted with fury at the news. They called for an urgent “ulama”, a meeting of Islamic scholars, to organise protests against the decision. One prominent mullah, Maulavi Hanif Shah Hosseini said: "Kambaksh committed a crime against the Koran and the people who conspired so that he escaped the law have also committed a crime. All the decisions to help this man who disrespected Islam are coming from the foreigners. But the decision to follow along with this came from Karzai and the Afghan government and we disown them. We are going to call for a gathering of the ulama to decide what to do. We are not going to make a big stand against this and any trouble will be the fault of people who helped Kambaksh.”
