The popular YouTuber was arrested for reading an anti-rape poem that allegedly includes a verse offensive to religion.
by Massimo Introvigne
Rape of women is a dramatic problem in Pakistan, with an average 11 cases reported daily. The real statistics are probably higher, as many cases go unreported. For many years, women from religious minorities have been especially at risk of becoming victims of rape.
Recently, some brave voices have denounced the situation. One is a young Hindu activist called Asma Batool, whose YouTube channel has become popular with women. She also organized public protests against rape.
Last week, she posted a video where she read a poem by Salman Haider, a Pakistani poet who was in turn accused of blasphemy and lives in exile in Canada. A line of the poem read: “All the gods were witness when rape happened.”
This line was regarded as blasphemous by radical Sunni clerics from Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, a movement connected with the conservative Deobandi school. A FIR (First Information Report) against Batool for blasphemy was filed on August 25. On August 26, a mob led by Deobandi clerics attacked the house where Batool lives with her parents, threatening to set it on fire.
Finally, the young woman was arrested on charges of blasphemy (which may be punished with the death penalty in Pakistan) and is currently in jail in the Abbaspur tehsil in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Activists all over Pakistan are protesting the arrest, claiming that what disturbed the radical clerics is Batool’s mobilization of women to break the silence against rape. Batool exposed a culture where many rapists escape punishment, particularly when they rape women from religious minorities.
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.
