ON October 19, a letter to the editor of this newspaper caught my eye for its pathos and appeal to the nation’s humanity. Brother Nazir Masih, senior pastor and founder of Emanuel Church in Islamabad, narrates a story of heartbreak and frustration.

And although the letter is couched in terms of humility and restraint, it contains an implicit condemnation of the religious intolerance that seems to have taken root in Pakistani soil.

Brother Masih writes: “After years of strenuous effort by the Emanuel Church Committee, the Capital Development Authority finally graciously allotted a plot in G8/2 sub-sector, Islamabad, for the building of the church...”

Apparently, after completing all legal and procedural requirements, the committee began construction on the allotted site. “However,” continues Brother Masih, “due to opposition from certain quarters, construction material worth thousands of rupees was removed from the site and the CDA restrained us from raising the building.”

The committee then went to court and obtained a favourable judgment, and CDA was forced to allow construction to re-commence. But “those opposed to the church construction filed another suit and obtained another order prohibiting the construction.” The letter ends in an appeal to the president to intervene.

Behind these simple words lie years of persecution. I can imagine the good brother and his fellow-pastors being shunted from one office to another as their request ran into a web of red tape. And after years of being given the run-around by the CDA bureaucracy, when they finally succeeded in getting the go-ahead, to be foiled by “those opposed” must be deeply enraging.

However, the identity of those who have blocked the project is hardly a mystery. Intolerant zealots have such a stranglehold on this country that the minorities now live here on sufferance. Had a group of Muslims wishing to build a mosque in a western country been treated in similar fashion, there would have been howls of protests across the Muslim world.

And yet, an incident of this nature takes place in the country’s capital where, presumably, the federal government’s writ still runs, and there is no official reaction. Islamabad is the city where General Musharraf has made so many of his pronouncements about the need for tolerance, and expounded interminably on his vision of a progressive Islam.

But Islamabad is also the city where Zia announced his discriminatory Hudood Ordinances and the highly controversial blasphemy law. And despite this government’s announced intent of debating and revising these laws, Ijazul Haq, Zia’s son and now minister for religious affairs, has recently stated that there is no possibility of revising either the Hudood Ordinances or the blasphemy law. So far, neither the prime minister nor the president has overruled Haq.

Should readers feel I have picked on an isolated incident, let me cite another story from another daily, also of October 19. In Wah, 30 kilometres from Islamabad, an 11-year old Christian girl accidentally threw away an old copy of the Holy Quran without realizing what she was doing. A neighbour reported this to the local imam, Maulana Muhammad Ishaq.

Fortunately for the little girl and her family, the maulana agreed that this was an accident, and no blasphemy was intended. (Had she been found guilty of blasphemy, she would have received a mandatory death sentence). An agreement between him and the local church was reached, and it was assumed that the matter had been resolved.

However, the locals threatened to set the house on fire, and the girl’s father, Tasneem Dean, decided to move his family to a safer place. This is despite the fact that an agreement was signed in the presence of the local member of the Punjab assembly, the head of the local police station, three clerics and a representative of the nearby church.

Here the matter now stands. A middle-class family of citizens is unable to return to their home because a group of fundamentalists is threatening them with violence. The local police have said they would be unable to protect the Deans should they return.

Again, had a Muslim family been victimized like this in the West, we would have been denouncing those responsible in newspaper articles and editorials. But in the West, civil rights organizations would have taken up cudgels on behalf of the victims. And the law would have taken cognizance of the threats and moved to arrest those making them.

Despite our claim that ours is a faith of tolerance, the reality is very different, at least in the manner many Muslims practise Islam today. For these extremists “ who now dominate the religious high ground “ minorities have no rights. And in the absence of a strong government response to these threats, provocations and outright attacks, it would seem the extremists are not wrong.

Most major cities in the West have substantial Muslim populations and several mosques. The reverse is not true for the Muslim world, partly because not many Christians would want to live in such a hostile environment. And where such minorities have lived peacefully in the past, they are now under great pressure to leave.

In the recent past, Iraq has seen several of its churches attacked, although it has a Christian population that has been living there long before the advent of Islam. Iraq’s Jewish minority migrated decades ago. Non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia keep a low profile, and are not allowed to build their places of worship.

Before this current phase of intolerance, many Muslim societies welcomed non-Muslims in their midst. The fusion of cultures and faiths enriched both, and led to a flowering of highly cosmopolitan cultures. And yet now, many Muslim societies are characterized by the basest kind of intolerance and exclusivism bordering on xenophobia.

The current cliche is that it is a handful of extremists who are giving the majority a bad name. If this is indeed so, why don’t the moderate majority make themselves heard in loud and clear terms? Why can’t the government of an avowed liberal like Musharraf issue orders to the CDA to stop harassing Brother Emanuel while directing the police to protect the builders?

Similarly, why aren’t the Dean family in Wah getting protection, and the thugs who are threatening them thrown into jail? These steps would send the right kind of signal to the fundamentalists who take the law into their hands on every pretext, making life so difficult for minorities in Pakistan.

Compared to what non-Muslims in Pakistan have been subjected to, the two incidents mentioned here are insignificant. But should the government move swiftly to correct these injustices, it will have made a small start in doing its duty to protect minorities.