Salmaan Taseer's brutal assassination was made worst by the heroic reception that was awarded to his murderer. It is hard to explain to the rest of the world why a guard, who assassinated the man it was his duty to protect, is showered with flowers and blessings. Where in Islam is bigoted religious vigilantism allowed?
The most disturbing aspect of this incident has been the absolute unwillingness of the politicians and the media networks to ask the most important question of all. Are the blasphemy laws Islamic? The fact is they are not. Even the most preliminary research will reveal this crucial truth. The blasphemy laws were enacted by the British when they conquered India. The blasphemy laws were inherited by Pakistan when it adopted the Indian Penal Code 1860 in 1947. The laws were meant to protect the dignity and safety of all religious groups in pre-partition India and then in Pakistan. In the 1980s, Zia-ul-Haq amended these laws to make it easier to convict people on the basis of 'blaspheming' Islam and increased the penalty to a death sentence.
During this lifetime, the Holy Prophet Muhammad (Peace be Upon Him) constantly preached tolerance and equitable relationships with non-Muslim neighbours, the only time conflict was allowed when the ummah was under direct attack from infidels.
The Muslims and the Jews were considered equal citizens of Medina and they had a pact to protect one another if the city was under siege. When Hazrat Abu Bakr (RA) became Khalifa, he ushered the golden age of Islamic expansion and in the decades that followed him the empire grew out from Hejaz towards entire Arab Peninsula, Syria, North Africa, Persia and Central Asia. The Muslims accounted for less than 50 percent of the population of their vast empire; though the Muslims assumed political control wherever they went they saw no need to proselytise or persecute the non-Muslim citizens of the empire.
Under the rule of Muslim khalifas the rights and conditions of women, children and religious minorities improved. The greatest khalifas of the Abbasid and Fatimid empires had Jewish and Christian advisors, courtiers and intellectuals in their kingdoms and other than imposing jizya on their non-Muslim subjects they let them live in peace and prosperity.
On what basis can the Islamic Republic of Pakistan persecute its minorities and strip them of their basic human rights like freedom of thought and speech. The Islam that allows for this type of intolerance is certainly not mentioned in the Holy Quran, the Hadith or in the chronicles of historical Islamic empires.
Salmaan Taseer and Sherry Rehman were wanting procedural amendments in the blasphemy laws in order to prevent these laws from being misused, their action was not in the least bit threatening to sharia or to the spirit of Islam. However, there is something equally important in the chronicles of Islamic empires of past which has been overlooked and that is the correct functioning of the Islamic law and sharia.
According to the clearly-defined system of Islamic jurisprudence as defined by classical jurists like Ibn Rushd, only a mufti is allowed to issue a fatwa. A mufti is defined as a scholar, who possesses an expert knowledge of usul al-fiqh (legal theory) which includes Quranic exegesis, hadith criticism, the theory of abrogation, language and the methods of exploiting the revealed texts and of deriving rulings therefrom. A mufti is also knowledgeable in the realms of positive law (having mastered its difficult and precedent-setting cases), the science of disagreement (ikhtilaf) and arithmetic. In addition, he needs to be aware of a variety of tools needed to practice ijtihad (reinterpretation). The mufti must maintain all these qualifications in the area of law to be able to establish sharia. Only a man of such a calibre is allowed to issue a fatwa (legal ruling). A rote memorization of Holy Quran is not a qualification for issuing any edict that is binding on the ummah. In fact using this logic, an unqualified person, who issues a fatwa declaring a death sentence on someone is doing something against the sharia.
Interpreted diversely in detail by various groups of Muslim societies, sharia is a vast and complex body of knowledge that few in today's day and age are qualified to engage with. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan had made it mandatory for politicians to have college degrees perhaps it is equally necessary in order to best serve the interests of Islam that there be a minimum bar of education that 'maulvis' have to meet before they can even be qualified to preach about Islam let alone issue fatwas, which should be declared the provenance of only those experts that meet the criteria defined in the sharia.