The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

In the name of protecting the honour of Islam or its prophet, children and mentally ill people have been lynched; neighbourhoods put to the torch; and prisoners murdered by their guards. Once, I was trapped in the lobby of Islamabad’s Serena Hotel as a blasphemy protest raged in the street outside. The trigger was a crude video clip, posted to the internet by an obscure group of American Christian fundamentalists, that mocked the Prophet Muhammad. Now, thousands of miles from America, young Pakistanis were battling the riot police. For what, exactly? Yet such passions did have a certain logic. Sometimes, blasphemy was purposefully whipped up by powerful interests – clerics, media personalities, even intelligence agencies – to serve their interests. For some rioters, it was a thinly veiled class struggle – a frustrated howl at a horribly unequal society where the super-rich shamelessly flaunted their privilege and treated the poor with unvarnished contempt.