The editor of a leading Pakistani think-tank advocating equity, fairness and gender equality in Pakistan's Islamic Laws has been shot in the mouth. The Daily Times reports:

LAHORE: Al-Mawrid Research Institute's monthly magazine Ishraq's editor Manzoor-ul-Hassan was shot on Wednesday night by unidentified men in front of the Al-Mawrid building in Model Town Extension, sources told Daily Times.

Hassan was walking alone in front of the building at around 9pm on Wednesday night when two unidentified men on a motorcycle shot him in the mouth. Hassan survived but is reportedly in a critical condition.

As we speak, as you sit in your chair, connected to the vast outside world something immense, and like all immense things, something uncontrollable, is happening in Pakistan. The setting is a combustible South Asian nation. The battle is for the equality of Muslim women and simple human dignity. The war within the Law of God has become a war between Violence and Reason. One speaks with the authority of bullets and flame; the other through the authority of pamphlet and humility.

In the late 1970's, there were two Muslim revolutions. One we know well. The other, just as dubious, we ignore. In Pakistan, a military dictator named Zia ul Haq, (within a year) backed by the United States, put an end to Pakistani Democracy, hung the popularly elected leader Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and then went on an Islamist rampage, meticulously "Islamizing" the Pakistani legal code in conformance with a most backward vision of Islamic Law; a vision peddled largely by the illiterate mob maulvis . Under the Islamist assumption that the first step in "implementing" Islam it is necessary to impose the penal law of classical Islamic Law, General Zia ul Haq had the Hudood Ordinance passed. [Hudood is Arabic plural for Hadd, which means 묩mit' or 벥striction.'].The offenses, as defined by the new law, were Offences against Property (crimes of theft and armed robbery); Offenses of Qazf (bearing false witness or making false accusations); Prohibition (drug trafficking and alcohol consumption); and Offense of Zina (rape, abduction of women and zina or adultery).

General Zia was also responsible for a whole breed of blasphemy laws being enacted:

The Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and the Criminal Procedure Code were amended, through ordinances in 1980, 1982 and 1986 to declare anything implying disrespect to Muhammad, Ahle Bait (family of the prophet), Sahaba (companions of the prophet) and Sha'ar-i-Islam (Islamic symbols), a cognizable offence, punishable with imprisonment or fine, or with both.

These blasphemy laws, which are both overbroad and vague, as can be seen by this chart, created a broad set of penalties that in any modern legal code would be deemed excessive. The fact that these laws are usually used as a way to settle vendettas and destroy reputations was neither considered then, nor is considered today, a problem worth remedying.

While there are a number of areas covered in the Hudood Ordinance, it was the penalties related to adultery, which directly impact Pakistani women in a grievous and unjust way, that are up for debate today, and the conflagrations surrounding which have led to this brutal attack on the aforementioned editor.

Under the Hudood Ordinance of 1979, to prove an act of rape, a woman must produce four adult Muslim male witnesses (to the act). Most disgustingly is this next requirement: if a woman fails to prove rape (i.e. to produce four adult Muslim male witnesses to the act), she is jailed, or, better yet, can be sentenced to death for adultery. Pakistan has not needed to produce Kafka, you see, for it had the cruelty of Zia ul Haq (America backed, lest you forget). For a more comprehensive background please see this detailed essay by a Pakistani writer.

Recently, an official commission set up by the government, recommended that the Hudood Ordinance be repealed. Musharraf backs the move and supports the Women Protection Bill. This is not the first time that a Pakistani government has sought to act against the Hudood laws. The democratically elected Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto both tried to investigate and repeal the bill in the 1990's and both times the Islamists plunged the country into tactical killings and semi-violent propagandist protests. The same Islamists are up to their old bullying tricks:

Opposition MPs mostly from the hardline Islamic alliance Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal shouted slogans and tore up copies of the bill before walking out after Law Minister Wasi Zafar introduced the legislation to change the laws.

"Death to (President Pervez) Musharraf," "Those who are friends of America are traitors" and "Allah is Great," the politicians shouted.

"This bill is against Holy Koran and Shariah, we reject it and (will) try to block it in any possible manner," said opposition leader Maulana Fazalur Rehman.

But this time something is very different. The immensity of knowledge is up to the task of meeting the severity of cruelty. This time the voice of reason is speaking back (and for that reason is being shot in the mouth). Even as the fundamentalists try and speak in the name of the Quran and Sunnah, the reformists too are speaking up in the name of Quran and Sunnah. Bolstered by a rock-solid foundation of reasonable Islamic interpretations, put forth by men such as the aforementioned editor, Musharraf and his supporters are turning Islam into a force for good:

President Musharraf said that there is a clear consensus among the scholars of all shades and schools of thought about certain clauses of the Hudood Ordinance which are not in consonance with the Quran and the Sunnah and need to be amended to bring them in conformity with the true spirit and teachings of Islam.

In other words, the Islamists have been struck by the weapon they have long beaten, killed and imprisoned with. The interior minister has announced a plan to hold wide-scale rallies to educate the average Pakistani on the merits of the bill, and on the idea that repealing such laws are perfectly consistent and in consonance with Islam. To do so, the government will be relying on the religious and academic authority of think-tanks and editors such as the ones who are being shot. Ironically enough, some, I would say over-zealous reformists, have manage to turn even the blasphemy laws against the Fundamentalists. It may not be consistent principally but it is certainly good to behold:

ISLAMABAD: A resident of the federal capital has submitted an application with the Secretariat Police to file a blasphemy case against members of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (the fundamenalist group) including opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman.

Ashfaq Chaudhry filed the application against the MMA on Wednesday for tearing up copies of the Women's Protection Bill that contained verses from the Quran in the National Assembly on Monday.

Chaudhry, who is president of the Pakistan People's Movement, Islamabad chapter, said in his application that MMA President Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Deputy Secretary General Hafiz Hussain Ahmed and Liaqat Baloch had also torn copies of the bill.

He said that Muslims across Pakistan had been offended by the act, adding that a case should be registered against the MMA members under the blasphemy law and those responsible given exemplary punishment.

I suppose there is a bit of poetic justice in turning the Hudood against the Hudood Fanatics.

In any case, I hope the enormity of the moment in Pakistan it has been impressed upon all. It appears that a viable "third" way has finally been excavated and discovered. No longer do the forward thinking individuals have to rely solely on socialism or secularism as a way to push back the Islamists. Doing so always had them branded "unfaithful to Islam" and summarily dismissed (although I look forward to a day when the religious leaders themselves will withdraw religion from the public sphere as the American founders once did). Now, with a reformist, progressive (even traditionalist if that's what you want to call it) but ultimately humanist vision of Islam, actively being propogated and upheld by men and women of intelligence and honor, Pakistanis are moving in a directon where they will be able to beat back the severity of Islam by the comapssion of Islam. As I once wrote when I was assumed to be spouting phantasia:

Rather than hammers, it will be creativity and intelligence that will let the ants to emerge from the darkness, and with their superhuman strength, drag the entire garden back towards the sun. What will be curious is the method the reformists will use. The most pressing question is: in light of the fact that Islam, like every other religion and ideology, has produced the best and the worst kind of person, how will the best kind of man now emerge? How will the best kind of man cull and sift the cavalcade of history before him? How will he challenge those who read history as a handmaiden to brutality? In my opinion, he must learn from those that engaged in such redescriptions before. I speak of: Niccolo Machiavelli, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes.

...

There are lessons in the aforementioned thinkers for Muslims. Muslims must take the Quran and describe what it says based on what they know and what they aspire towards. The Fourth Caliph Ali once said: "The Quran is but ink and paper. It is we who speak." For quite some time now it has been the demagogues of the faith who have been speaking. They have been the ones who have managed to describe our history according to their self-serving purpose. They are the Robert Filmer's of Islam. We must step forward and redescribe our history in such a way that it gives you the result you want: peace and prosperity; instead of being a tool for your destruction.

Note that there will be many who will jump at you from the fringes (of ignorance or of naivete) and say: "you are not being faithful to history, yours is a history of violence, a history of war." They will call themselves believers, they will call themselves humanists. In the end they are both myopics who do not wish you to meander from your catacombs of loneliness. Stay stuck to your static yesterday, they say.

We, however, know better. We, however, will simply laugh at them and say, "you are misguided, it is history which must give us its fidelity. It is we who tell the past who we are today, and we who leave history in our wake."

Past is profane.

"The coming only is sacred."

Though they may put pistols in our mouths; our echo will toll like Manzoor ul-Hassan's voice, and it will silence the bullets. Truth will be spoken, even if our shadows desert us.