Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
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Raza Saeed
Raza Saeed is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Warwick Law School, UK. His fields of research include socio-legal studies, critical legal theory and human rights from the perspective of Pakistan's pluralistic legal architecture.
Abstract
While a genealogical exploration of the dichotomy between the real (legal) and the ideal (justice) may provide us with an understanding of the historical and ideological relationship(s) between the two, a focus on this binary alone acts to conceal the multiplicities inherent in each of these terms. Just as there exist multiple manifestations of legalities/realities, these manifestations correspond to diverse notions of the ideal and justice. These realities and ideals overlap and conflict, and affect each other's creation, transformation or transplantation. A historical glance at Pakistan's current Blasphemy Laws provides us with an insight on how the real/legal emerging from a particular notion of the ideal/justice was mediated and transplanted through colonialism and became the real/legal manifestation of a different kind in a different locality.
About the author
Raza Saeed is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Warwick Law School, UK. His fields of research include socio-legal studies, critical legal theory and human rights from the perspective of Pakistan's pluralistic legal architecture.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
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- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
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- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
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- Book Review
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Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
