Bell: Observing from this hallowed ground

When assassins ended the life of Pakistan's only Christian government minister March 2, they extinguished not only a strong force for human rights but also another large swath of Pakistan's spectrum of freedom. Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan's minister for minorities, had asked that the country's draconian Blasphemy Law be amended to make it (more) consistent with universal human-rights norms. For this he, like Punjabi Gov. Salmaan Taseer in January, paid with his life. An intimidated Pakistani government that had come into office sharing their objective had, apparently, been unwilling to provide Bhatti with any security protection at all. Washington Post columnist Fred Hiatt has noted that Bhatti, shortly before his death, bemoaned that Americans maintain too little contact with the elements of Pakistani civil society that promote interfaith tolerance.

In the days immediately after Taseer's death, Richmonders pursued that dialogue when Pakistani human-rights acitivist Sulema Jahangir visited us to accept, on behalf of her mother Asma Jahangir, the First Freedom Award, bestowed because of the elder Jahangir's active support both in the United Nations and in Pakistan for universal human rights and freedom of conscience. As I heard early on the morning of March 2 of Bhatti's death, I drew some small satisfaction that in this respect at least Richmond had proved true to its historic heritage of concern for freedom of belief and of religion. Bhatti and Taseer sacrificed their lives on that altar. The Jahangirs continue to work toward the same goals in the midst of great peril. Asma Jahangir told the press the day after Bhatti's death that he had only recently warned her that her life is in peril.

To Pakistan's west, the events sweeping the Middle East portend one of those watersheds of history which exceed both comprehension and prediction. If the power of mass protest enduringly removes autocracy in so vast a region of the earth, then the result will indeed be comparable to the end of the Roman Empire, the advent of the nation state, the demise of feudalism, or the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc. But, for all the drama, the jury is still out. Leaderships and political parties have yet to evolve, constitutions have yet to be written and — most of all, mechanisms for the protection of individual human rights have yet to be designed.

For a thousand important reasons, the issue of rights is at the epicenter of the world's suspended judgments. Columnists and commentators have wrestled with the question of whether this is 1848 — the year in which dramatic European revolutions bloomed and then faded — or 1989 — the year in which democracies took hold and gained purchase in Central and Eastern Europe. We will know the answer to that question when we see whether new governments and political cultures are willing to define and defend the rights of their citizens.

That is true not least because the region is at the same time home to an amazing pluralism of religions and beliefs and to some of the most pervasive violations of religious freedom imaginable. We at the First Freedom Center reflect on the name of our own institution as we ponder the Middle East's way ahead. We do so because the freedom of the individual human conscience really is the first and most fundamental of the freedoms which infuse universal human rights. Iran has religious pluralism, but it accords its individual citizens no freedom of belief. Religious pluralism can provide an ideal environment for the strengthening of freedom of belief, but not a sufficient one for its creation.

Richmond, point of origin for the rights of conscience Americans enjoy, will therefore provide an important vantage point for reflection and judgment at this pivotal time. The 1786 Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom can trace its progeny materially and directly to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which all the countries of the now-turbulent region have assented — but which none of them honors. American and other leaders, both current and past, now look with regret on their engagement of autocrats seemingly passing from the scene and on the many instances in which, for pressing material reasons of interests and state, they cut serious human-rights violators serious slack. Were Jefferson still among us, he would urge us to keep watch and to keep the beacon of his statute particularly bright just now.

It is, we think, propitious that we are working to realize our downtown education center as we look to this historic mandate, precisely in these times. We feel fortunate that we will be memorializing Jefferson's accomplishment not so much in marble as in thought — not so much in hagiography as in action. This year, we began the annual publication of a monitoring report on Minority Religious Communities at Risk. We published it the very week that demonstrations began in Tunisia. Its detailed assessments of circumstances and communities in the Middle East provides an interesting background for discerning and assessing where changed circumstances can and must make a difference — if change is to be meaningful.

While it may seem odd to some, we are particularly pleased to be fulfilling our building mission in the context of a hotel project, which will display texts and themes pertinent to religious freedom throughout the structure and contain a library devoted to the subject. What better way to ensure that visitors to our city become aware of this important heritage and learn what we are doing to be true to it? What better way to inform traveling Americans of the challenges of change in the Middle East and elsewhere as they affect the struggle for religious liberty? What better place to hold public programs that both Richmonders and the visitors their city attracts can attend? What better venue for honoring those who, like Sulema and Asma Jahangir, face the dangers of hatred as they continue personally to witness for our own ideals? What better way also to see that the First Freedom Center remains economically strong and viable — equal to its purpose and mission today and in the exciting times to come?

The site where Jefferson's statute came to be is indeed, as we Richmonders think of it, hallowed ground. Because of its complex and often unstable religious diversity, much of the Middle East and of South Asia is hallowed as well — often in competing and inimical ways. We hallow our own patch as a point of origin for the propagation of rights and for the keeping of a bright flame, lighting the way toward those rights for others. We think Jefferson would have wanted it that way, and are glad that our circumstances make that possible. Bhatti's tragic death reminds us how urgent it is to get on with our tasks.