been credited with spreading the religion and getting people on the right track, In reality, however, deplorable cases of Muslim clerics leading the path to suffering and misery abound in the recent history of this region. Victory of Islam over “infidels” may have been the clerical agenda in the past; today, their tool of destruction is “blasphemy”. But some of them are also nowhere shy of poking into a personal issue and playing the cock of the walk, forcibly.The new case of persecution of Narowal’s Christians in Punjab province of Pakistan presents another alarming example of the undue intervention of Muslim clerics in matters that are not religious. A Muslim girl eloped with a young Christian man, seeing their love could not cross the barrier of religion thrust in their way by the oppressive society they had around them. This gave a Muslim cleric in the area all the reason (literally, the lack of it) to gather an angry crowd and threaten the Christian families in the neighborhood with dire consequences if they failed to get the eloped girl back to the Muslim community. Consequently, several Christian families had to flee the area.
The hypocrisy of Muslim clerics is way too obvious to ignore. When Hindu girls elope with Muslim men in the country, they defend the elopement as the girl’s conversion to Islam means victory to them. But when a Muslim girl chooses to leave home for a man of another faith, the clerics impose themselves on families of the non-Muslim minority. What is a family matter between a few families is taken unwarranted by them as a religious war – a mini jihad.
Besides the political gains of such planned fury, however, their ulterior motives also show quite manifestly. In this fresh case of elopement, for example, the cattle of the Christian families were seized by the cleric’s crowd. Like in so-called protests against blasphemy and other religious dramas of collective anger, plunder is always a significant motive – in fact, a planned objective. Plunder surely makes sense to people who believe in taking away from others instead of investing time and effort in toil. But placing religion above love is senseless.
