Muslim Girl Electrocuted For Marrying Out of Caste in Pakistan

By Mohammad S.Solanki (Executive Editor)
Sunday, January 23, 2011

ISLAMABAD : Although it was buried towards the end of the story, IOL News reported a less known fact about Islam as it is practiced in India and Pakistan. There is in many Muslim communities a caste system, similar to that found in Hinduism.

Saima Bibi, 17, a  Pakistani Muslim girl who fell in love with a neighbour boy and ran off with him to Karachi. Unfortunately for her, there is a local honour code that punishes not only fornication but elopement as well. A village council, known as the panchayat, decided that Bibi had besmirched the honour of her family and declared a death sentence upon her. IOL described Bibi’s condition as follows.

“There are signs of torture and burns on her neck, back and hands which are most probably caused by electrocution,” said the police official, Zahoor Rabbani, from Bahawalpur district in east Pakistan where the alleged killing took place. He was speaking to Reuters by telephone.”

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani publicly expressed his dismay at the attacks, which shed a sorry light on unIslamic traditions and practices that are tolerated in Pakistani Islam.

What is the origin of a caste system in Pakistani Islam? Professor Yoginder Singh Sikand, head of the Centre for Studies on Indian Muslims at Hamdard University in New Delhi wrote as follows

“The vast majority of the Indian Muslims are descendants of converts from what is today called ‘Hinduism’. Individual conversions to Islam in medieval times were rare. Rather, typically, entire local caste groups or significant sections thereof underwent a gradual process of Islamisation, in the course of which elements of the Islamic faith were gradually incorporated into local cosmologies and ritual practice while gradually displacing or replacing local or ‘Hindu’ elements. In other words, conversion was both a social as well as a gradual process. Because it was a collective social process, the original endogamous circle prior to conversion was still preserved even after the group undergoing the process had witnessed a significant degree of cultural change. Hence, even after conversion to Islam marriage continued to take place within the original caste group. This is how Muslim society came to be characterized by the existence of multiple endogamous caste-like groups. Because mass conversion to Islam was also rarely, if ever, a sudden event, but, rather, generally took the form of a gradual process of cultural change, often extending over generations, many of the converts retained several of their local, pre-Islamic beliefs and practices. It was thus not the influence of Hinduism among a previously ‘pure’, ‘uncontaminated’ Muslim community as such, but, rather, the continued impact of Hindu beliefs and customs on the converts who still remained within a largely Hindu cultural universe and retained many of its associated beliefs and practices, that explains the continued hold of caste-related practices and assumptions among large sections of the Indian Muslim community.”

This is not the only instance of Muslim caste related murders in Pakistan. Many of the estimated 650 yearly “honour killings” in Pakistan are related to violations of caste restrictions that are highly questionable under Islamic law. It is ironic that this murder that was committed to protect the “purity” of Bibi’s family is based upon a thoroughly contaminated version of Islam.

How often do Muslims coopt non Islamic practices to convert entire communities. Another instance where this has taken place is with “female genital mutilation, practiced in many African Muslim countries. Female genital mutlilation persists despite its widespread repudiation by Islamic scholars.

Killing and mutilating in the name of religious purity all too often masks a profound religious impurity. Saima Bibi’s father and uncle stand accused in her murder. It is they and not she who have disgraced her family.