Peshawar, Pakistan. An Irish Columban missionary in Pakistan has criticised the “religious extremism” behind violent attacks in the country following a deadly terror attack at the end of January.
A bomb detonated January 30 inside a mosque in Peshawar in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa killed 101 and left hundreds more wounded. The mosque is located inside a high-security compound that includes a police headquarters and counterterrorism department.
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Fr Liam O’Callaghan described it as the “worst possible attack” and “horrendous,” adding that over the last four decades “this extremism has just grown and grown and grown and it has polluted everything”.
“All of my time here, and much longer, we have been living with this reality of extremism,” Fr O’Callaghan said.
While there has been “revulsion”, “shock and anger”, he described it as “almost a worry” that there’s not more of a sense of outrage.
Fr O’Callaghan said that there have been moments of “real fear” during his time in Pakistan, including the first Gulf War and a period of upheaval in the mid-2000s, the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, which broke out after a Danish newspaper published 12 editorial cartoons on 30 September 2005, most of which depicted Muhammad, the main prophet in Islam.
Violence
“There was extreme violence,” Fr O’Callaghan said, continuing, “All western things like KFC or McDonalds or western banks were attacked and vandalised, there was a major emotional outbreak against that – the perceived insult to the prophet in those cartoons”.
Fr O’Callaghan described perceived blasphemy as the issue at the root of many of these outbursts, saying that it’s “horrendously abused” and that accusations of blasphemy often result in mob rule.
“This law has been horrendously misused, where just on an accusation that your man burnt the Quran and then there’s a big emotional thing pumped up by the loudspeakers from the mosque and it’s mob rule. That is for me the most fearful [thing],” he said.
Read Jason Osborne’s full interview with Fr Liam O’Callaghan here.