Mobilisasi Kebencian

Salman Taseer adalah bekas gubenur propinsi Punjab di Pakistan. Dia diangkat menjadi
gubernur tahun 2008. Dia dibunuh tahun 2011. Penyebabnya adalah karena dia menentang
hukum penistaan agama yang amat keras di Pakistan. Penentangan itu dia ucapkan dalam satu
talk-show di TV lokal.

Kasus penistaan agama ini bermula dari hal yang sangat sehari-hari. Adalah sekelompok
perempuan desa sedang memanen bersama. Salah satu dari perempuan itu adalah Aasiya
Noreen atau yang kemudian lebih dikenal dengan nama Asia Bibi. Kebetulan pula,
perempuan yang sehari-hari bekerja sebagai buruh tani dan suaminya buruh pembuat batu
bata ini, beragama Kristen (Katolik). Sebagaimana umumnya kaum Kristen di Pakistan dan
Asia Selatan, mereka berasal dari kelas dan kasta terendah.

Kejadiannya berawal dari sesuatu yang sangat sepele. Bibi minum dari gelas yang sama
dengan perempuan-perempuan lain yang Muslim. Terjadilah percekcokan karena mereka
yang Muslim menganggap Bibi yang bukan Muslim itu kotor, sehingga tidak boleh minum
dari gelas yang sama dengan mereka. Hingga disinilah muncul percekcokan, dan itu berubah
menjadi soal agama. Dalam adu mulut Bibi dituduh mengatakan sesuatu yang menghina
Nabi. Otomatis, ini adalah soal penghinaan dan penistaan agama. Di Pakistan, hal yang
demikian ini juga berarti surat kematian yang sudah ditandatangani.

Kasus ini memancing kemarahan yang meluas di masyarakat Pakistan. Provokasi terjadi
dimana-mana. Mereka yang merasa saleh merasa terhina kesalehannya. Mereka yang taat
pada Tuhan, yang sesungguhnya menganjurkan untuk tidak boleh membunuh, justru merasa
perlu untuk membunuh. Demi membela Tuhan!

Bibi pun diadili. Seperti kehendak masyarakat luas, pengadilan pun menghukum mati dirinya
karena melakukan penistaan terhadap agama.

Kekerasan pun meledak dimana-mana. Seorang menteri untuk urusan minoritas yang
kebetulah beragama Kristen, Shahbaz Bhatti, dibunuh. Demikian juga Salman Taseer.
Gubernur Punjab ini mengajukan petisi agar Asia Bibi dibebaskan.

Taseer dibunuh ketika dalam perjalanan keluar makan siang bersama temannya.
Pembunuhnya adalah pengawalnya sendiri, Malik Mumtaz Qadri, yang menghujani dia
dengan 27 kali tembakan memakai AK-47.

Proses pengadilan Malik Mumtaz Qadri pun berbelit. Dia lama tidak ditahan. Namun
akhirnya pengadian memutuskan dia dihukum mati. Pada tanggal 29 Pebruari kemarin, Malik
Mumtaz Qadri akhirnya menjalani hukuman mati.

Reaksi publik Pakistan sangat mengejutkan. Ratusan ribu orang turun ke jalan untuk
mengiringi pemakaman Malik Mumtaz Qadri.

Aatish Taseer, putra Salman Taseer, kemudian menulis sebuah esei di New York Times
tentang pemakaman pembunuh ayahnya itu. Ini adalah salah satu prosesi kematian paling
besar di Pakistan setelah Benazir Bhutto dan si Bapak Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinah.
Sekaligus ini mungkin adalah prosesi kematian terbesar untuk seorang pembunuh. Orang-
orang ini, demikian keluh Aatish Taseer, "terdorong bukan oleh cinta mereka kepada yang
mati namun kebencian mereka kepada yang dibunuh."

Disini kita melihat sebuah kasus dimana negara berusaha tegak dengan akal sehatnya, yakni
menghukum mati dia yang membunuh. Namun, sebagina masyarakat Pakistan memiliki
kehendak lain. Untuk mereka, hukum haruslah mendukung kebencian mereka. Inilah yang
mereka pertunjukkan dengan mobilisasi kebencian besar-besaran.

Haruskah kita bersyukur bahwa hal seperti ini tidak terjadi di Indonesia? Hei, siapa bilang
tidak terjadi? Seperti di Pakistan, di sini pun kita melihat para politisi -- termasuk politisi
yang berjubah agamawan -- sibuk memobilisasi kebencian. Kita terluka ketika kita diberitahu
oleh para politisi itu bahwa agama kita dinistakan. Kita marah dan menumpahkan amarah itu
menjadi kebencian yang teramat sangat.

Namun kita lupa bahwa ada yang berpesta pora dengan kemarahan dan kebencian kita itu!

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/my-fathers-killers-
funeral.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-
heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-
region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

Tulisan ini telah diposting sebelumnya pada 12 Maret 2016. Dimuat kembali dengan editing
seperlunya untuk menyesuaikan dengan konteks kekinian.

Photo: Reuters
==

My Father’s Killer’s Funeral

By Aatish Taseer
March 11, 2016

People surrounded the ambulance carrying the body of Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri
in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.CreditFaisal Mahmood/Reuters
ON Feb. 29 — a bad day for anniversaries — Pakistan executed my father’s killer.

My father was the governor of Punjab Province from 2008 until his death in 2011. At
that time, he was defending a Christian woman who had fallen afoul of Pakistan’s
blasphemy laws, which are used by the Sunni majority to terrorize the country’s few
religious minorities. My father spoke out against the laws, and the judgment of
television hosts and clerics fell hard on him. He became, in the eyes of many, a
blasphemer himself. One January afternoon his bodyguard, Malik Mumtaz Hussain
Qadri, shot him dead as he was leaving lunch.

Mr. Qadri became a hero in Pakistan. A mosque in Islamabad was named after him.
People came to see him in prison to seek his blessings. The course of justice was
impeded. The judge who sentenced him to death had to flee the country. I thought
my father’s killer would never face justice.

But then, in the past few months, it became possible to see glimmers of a new resolve
on the part of the Pakistani state. The Supreme Court upheld Mr. Qadri’s death
sentence last October. Earlier this year, the president turned down the convict’s plea
for mercy — which, at least as far as the law goes, was Mr. Qadri’s first admission
that he had done anything wrong at all. Then on the last day of last month came the
news: Pakistan had hanged Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri. How would the country —
not the state, but the people — respond?

I spoke to my sister in Lahore and for a moment we dared to hope that Pakistan,
which had suffered so much from Islamic terrorism, might turn a corner. A lot had
happened in the five years since Mr. Qadri killed our father. There was attack after
hideous attack. In December 2014, terrorists struck a school in Peshawar, killing 132
children. Was it possible that Pakistan was tired of blood and radicalism? Had people
finally begun to realize that those who kill in the name of a higher law end up
becoming a law unto themselves? Had the horrors of the Islamic State in Iraq and
Syria done nothing to dampen enthusiasm for Islamism? Perhaps. I hoped.

But when a BBC interviewer asked me about this, something made me equivocate. I
said it was too early to say and that we should be careful not to confuse the hardening
resolve of the Pakistani government with the will of its people. Mr. Qadri’s funeral
was the next day. That would give a better indication of the public mood.

And so it did.

An estimated 100,000 people — a crowd larger than the population of Asheville, N.C.
— poured into the streets of Rawalpindi to say farewell to Malik Mumtaz Hussain
Qadri. It was among the biggest funerals in Pakistan’s history, alongside those of
Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of the nation, and Benazir Bhutto, the former
prime minister, who was assassinated in 2007. But this was no state funeral; it was
spontaneous and it took place despite a media blackout.

As pictures emerged of the sea of humanity that coalesced around the white
ambulance strewn with red rose petals that carried Mr. Qadri’s body, a few thoughts
occurred to me: Was this the first funeral on this scale ever given to a convicted
murderer? Did the men who took to the street in such great numbers come out of
their hatred of my father or their love of his killer? They hardly knew Mr. Qadri. The
only thing he had done in all his life, as far as they knew, was kill my father. Before
that he was anonymous; after that he was in jail. Was this the first time that
mourners had assembled on this scale not out of love but out of hate?

And finally, I wondered, what happens when an ideology of hate is no longer just
coming from the mouths of Saudi-funded clerics but has infected the body of the
people? What do you do when the madness is not confined to radical mosques and
madrasas, but is abroad among a population of nearly 200 million?

The form of Islam that has appeared in our time — and that killed my father and so
many others — is not, as some like to claim, medieval. It’s not even traditional. It is
modern in the most basic sense: It is utterly new. The men who came to mourn my
father’s killer were doing what no one before them had ever done. As I watched this
unprecedented funeral, motivated not by love for the man who was dead but by
hatred for the man he killed, I recognized that the throng in Rawalpindi was a
microcosm of radical Islam’s relationship to our time. It drew its energy from the
thing it was reacting against: the modernity that my father, with his condemnation of
blasphemy laws and his Western, liberal ideas, represented. Recognizing this doesn’t
pardon the 100,000 people who came to grieve for Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, but
it reminds us that their existence is tied up with our own.

Aatish Taseer is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Way Things Were” and
a contributing opinion writer.