The Islamabad Bar Association organized a seminar on kidnapping and forced conversion of non-Muslim girls to Islam. They invited kidnapper Mian Mithoo to lecture.
by Massimo Introvigne
Bitter Winter has repeatedly denounced the tragedy of “religious” kidnapping in Pakistan. Every year, dozens of Hindu and Christian girls, most of them minors, are kidnapped, raped, forcibly converted to Islam and married to their captors. We saw as a sign of hope that the Islamabad Bar Association had decided to organize a seminar on February 24 on “Forced Religious Conversion and Its Reality.”
Unfortunately, we had not understood what it was all about. The seminar was in fact about the “non-reality” of forced religious conversion, as those who were misled by the title quickly discovered. They were handed a program where one of the keynote speakers was Mian Mithoo, also known as Abdul Haq. The seminar was indeed an opportunity to applaud him for his bravery in standing against “false accusations.”
Among religious minorities and the more liberal Pakistanis, the scandal in social media was enormous. Inviting Mian Mithoo at a seminar on forced conversion is similar to invite Joseph Goebbels at a seminar on the Holocaust. Of course, Goebbels would have said there was no extermination of the Jews, it was all anti-German propaganda.
Mian Mithoo showed the same attitude. He told his audience that in Pakistan hundreds of young girls from religious minorities just fall in love with older Muslim men, and at the same time with their religion. While evil Hindu and Christian parents do their worst to prevent these Juliets from being with their Romeos, brave Muslim clerics such as Mian Mithoo benevolently help them. The United Nations recently denounced this rhetoric as false, misleading, and hiding the very real crimes of kidnapping and rape.
In fact, Mian Mithoo has earned the Sufi shrine of Dargah-e-Aliya Bharchundi Sharif, in Sindh, of which he is the Pir, the nickname “the conversion factory.” The shrine always saw as his mission converting Hindus to Islam but under Mian Mithoo it hides girls and their captors from the police.
Mian Mithoo and his son have been involved in some 100 cases of forced conversion of religious minority girls, some of which achieved national notoriety, including the one of the Hindu Rinkle Kumari in 2012.
You do not need to take the word of Pakistani Hindus and Christians for this. On December 9, 2022, the British government issued sanctions against “Mian Abdul Haq [Mithoo], a Muslim Cleric from Pakistan, responsible for forced conversions and marriages of girls and women from religious minorities.”
He is surely an eminently qualified speaker for a legal seminar on kidnapping—if you want to learn how to kidnap young girls and get away with it.
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.
