Editorial
Religious extremism is not Pakistan’s newest problem. It is its most stubborn one. Decades of institutional ambiguity about where legitimate religious sentiment ends and violent intolerance begins have allowed a culture to take root in which disagreement itself has become dangerous. The attack on engineer Muhammad Ali Mirza is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of something far deeper: the belief, now embedded in certain quarters of Pakistani society, that doctrinal differences justify physical violence.
The current government has taken this challenge more seriously than many of its predecessors, and that deserves acknowledgement. But relative improvement is not the same as adequate response. Pakistan cannot afford a standard of success that simply means doing slightly better than before. The scale of the problem demands a response that matches it.
Extremism does not live only in the headlines. It is nurtured quietly in classrooms where curricula teach contempt rather than curiosity, in madrassas where reform remains contested, and in public spaces where the social cost of speaking freely has grown too high for most people to bear. Every time a voice like Mirza’s is met with violence rather than argument, society sends a message to everyone watching: stay silent, stay safe. That message, repeated often enough, produces exactly the compressed, fearful public discourse that extremism needs to thrive.
A state that cannot protect its citizens’ right to think, question, and disagree openly is a state that has surrendered a foundational function. Curriculum reform, meaningful madrassa regulation, and consistent legal accountability for those who incite or commit violence in the name of religion are not optional additions to the national agenda. They are its core.
Pakistan will not move forward by silencing its questions. It will move forward by learning, at last, to answer them.
