Irfan Husain

WORDS can kill as surely as bullets. Ask those mourning the death of Luqman Ahmed Shahzad, an Ahmadi gunned down a few days ago, just how deadly words can be.

The victim was murdered five days after a Geo TV religious broadcast in which Owaisi, a cleric invited by the popular host, Amir Liaquat, pronounced that Ahmadis were a danger to Pakistan and Islam. In 2008, two Ahmadis were killed in Sindh soon after a cleric declared Ahmadis to be wajibul qatal, or deserving of murder on the same host’s programme.

Over the centuries, hate speech has been used to demonise minorities in a bid to marginalise — and all too often kill — those seen as the ‘other’. Also, by directing public anger against weak, vulnerable groups, rulers deflect attention away from their own failings.


In most societies, incitement to violence is a crime.


Thus, Jews in France were made the scapegoats for the defeat in the war against Germany in 1870. Ironically, German Jews were blamed when Germany was defeated by the Allies in the First World War. Rising anti-Semitism across Europe led to the Holocaust carried out by the Nazis in the Second World War. Jews were as much the victims of Hitler’s verbal campaign as they were of the gas ovens in German concentration camps.

In post-9/11 America, the word ‘terrorist’ is now almost synonymous with ‘Muslim’. And as we have seen in TV images of the ongoing racial unrest in the United States, stereotypes of violent young blacks evoke a violent response from white police officers.

More often than not, images and words call up old racial and religious memories. Extremist Islamic groups invoke the Crusades when composing their anti-West, anti-Israel narrative. In the West, ancient memories of Ottoman armies still linger. Long after the threat had subsided, mothers in England would warn their children to behave, or “the Turks will come and get you”.

But clerics and politicians are not the only ones who use words to manipulate people. Marketing experts know which buttons to push to get us to buy things we don’t need. The sociologist Vance Packard documented this sophisticated assault on our psyche in his classic work The Hidden Persuaders written over fifty years ago.

Another author to discuss the power of words is Max Barry who, in his recent book Lexicon, conjures up a secretive group of poets who train adepts to control people by using special words. In this novel, words are not used just to manipulate, but to kill.

It was George Orwell who really explored the frightening extent to which politicians control entire populations through words. In 1984, his story of a totalitarian future state, the government uses Newspeak to communicate with the populace. Individualism is attacked as ‘thoughtcrime’, and everybody is under constant surveillance.

Our leaders, for their part, often invoke ‘the ideology of Pakistan’ without ever clearly defining it. From Bengali nationalists in 1971 to Baloch secessionists now, dissidents have been dubbed ‘miscreants’. Sadly, a brainwashed majority has accepted the state’s one-sided narrative.

In most societies, incitement to violence is a crime, so a TV chat show guest who openly calls for members of a persecuted minority to be murdered would normally be charged. But when this happened in 2008 on the religious show, the offending guest walked off even though his words may have resulted in two murders.

Although Geo has apologised for the recent broadcast, it nevertheless allowed Amir Liaquat to unleash an unrepentant rant on his show where he threatened his detractors on social media with lawsuits.

Another person to threaten his critics is Maulana Abdul Aziz of Lal Masjid, the cleric who tried to flee in a burqa after ordering his cohorts to fire upon troops who went in to clear the mosque of the heavily armed militants who had gathered there. Although the firefight resulted in scores of deaths, the court found Abdul Aziz innocent of all charges, and the media made him a saint and a hero.

Here again, emotive words were deployed by his supporters to turn the truth on its head. Although we had all witnessed the months-long build-up to the final shootout, together with all the lawlessness caused by young seminarians at the behest of Abdul Aziz and his brother, sections of the media made it seem that it was the government that had precipitated the violent climax to the drama.

Perhaps the most lethal weapon in Pakistan today is to accuse somebody, preferably a non-Muslim, of blasphemy. Such a charge doesn’t have to be substantiated in any legal sense since it cannot be repeated in court for fear of compounding the original blasphemy. Thus, there can be no defence. And even if a judge does declare the accused not guilty, chances are that he or she will be killed either in jail, or on being released.

These are difficult days for Pakistani Ahmadis, Hindus, Christians, Sikhs as well as Shias. Ultimately, it’s all about words.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, January 3rd, 2015