She has been happily married to Muslim actor Hassan Ahmed for 14 years. He is now under pressure too.
by Massimo Introvigne
Another sign of the deteriorating situation of inter-religious relations in Pakistan is the media and Internet campaign trying to persuade popular Catholic actress and former model Sunita Marshall that she has a “duty” to convert to Islam.
Sunita Marshall married in 2009 fellow actor Hassan Ahmed. The couple decided to have two wedding ceremonies, one Muslim and one Catholic. They have two children, a boy and a girl, and until recently the question of Sunita’s religion was rarely debated in public. Under Sharia law, a Muslim man can marry a Christian woman (while a Christian man cannot marry a Muslim woman).
However, in June Sunita was interviewed by controversial YouTuber Nadir Ali and grilled on her Catholic faith. The interviewer told her in so many words that she should convert to Islam and repeatedly returned to the subject in an increasingly aggressive mood. This is not surprising since Nadir Ali has publicly defended Muslim clerics accused of organizing the kidnapping, forced conversion to Islam, and forced marriage of young Hindu girls.
Sunita handled the aggressive questions with good grace, telling the YouTuber that her faith is a personal matter, and she should be free to take her decisions about it. In other interviews, she stated she has no intention of converting to Islam.
Netizens in Pakistan debated the issue on social media, with many expressing support for how Sunita answered the attack, although others insisted she should convert to Islam. Soon, criticism involved her husband Hassan Ahmed, who was told he should have asked Sunita to convert to Islam before marrying her (in fact, he had no such obligation under the Sharia).
Ahmed was increasingly embarrassed by the criticism and had to tell media that he hopes his wife would convert to Islam and prays for it, but at the same time respects her personal decisions.
As an answer of sort to criticism, on August 9 through social media Sunita publicly endorsed the August 11 Karachi Minority Rights March, which protested the attacks against Christian churches, the kidnapping and forced conversion and marriage of minority religion girls, and the increasing religious intolerance in Pakistan.
Some Pakistani media have been described as “obsessed” by the question of Sunita’s faith, which proves that extremism is much more influential now than a decade ago, when the actress and her husband lived quietly, and the fact that the two popular actors had different religions was rarely perceived as an issue.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
