It was a Friday, the day of jumu’ah or congregational prayer, and the Muslim staff at the bank in Gujranwala, Pakistan, headed to the nearby mosque. As usual, Farrukh Mustaq Gill stayed behind, using the quiet afternoon lull to catch up on work or take a bit of a break.
His family has been Presbyterian for generations, marking them among a small minority. Altogether Christians make up just 1.6 per cent of Pakistan’s 152 million people. The vast majority—just over 96 per cent—are Muslims. But religion had rarely posed a problem for the Gill family until that afternoon in September of 2010.
The phone rang. It was Farrukh’s father, Mushtaq Gill, who worked as a teacher and administrator at a Christian school in the city. “Can you come to my office right away?” he asked.
Farrukh arrived to find his father sitting in his office with three men.
“And those people were very strange,” Farrukh recalled. “One of them was a small guy with a beard in Pakistani shalwar kameez. Two were very tall, broad, stern looking people. I thought what kind of people they are?”
They were from Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau, the agency responsible for internal intelligence gathering and analysis. They had intercepted several letters addressed to mosques and madrasahs, all containing blasphemous material about the Prophet Muhammad and allegedly signed by Farrukh and Mushtaq.
It was a serious allegation. Under section 295-C of Pakistan’s penal code, blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad is punishable by death or life imprisonment.
Angry crowds have been known to beat and kill Christians and other religious minorities on the smallest hint of an accusation of blasphemy. One of the most notorious incidents was a riot on Aug. 1, 2009 in Gojra. At least 40 homes and a church were set on fire and eight Christians, including a seven-year-old child, were killed. Most of them were burned alive. In that case, it was alleged that a father and son had desecrated pages containing verses from the Qur’an.
“I told them I know the consequences of blasphemy,” Farrukh said. “Blasphemy is a big issue in Pakistan. I’m a literate guy, I’m a professional, I have good relationships with the Muslims. Why would I do this?”
For a month, the Intelligence Bureau contacted the family frequently. Everyone was worried. Farrukh and his wife Farzana, a beautician, were expecting their first child. Farrukh and Mustaq stopped going to their offices. What if someone learned about the letters? Were they in danger?
Then communication grew less frequent. Then it stopped. Slowly life returned more or less to normal. The family welcomed little Imran, a beautiful baby girl, into the world. Shortly afterward, Farrukh was promoted to the bank’s regional office. “But in the back of our mind we still had that fear,” he said.
It was well founded. On April 15, 2011, Mushtaq called while Farrukh was at home having lunch. Don’t go back to the bank, he said. I’m coming with the police. Then he hung up.
The father and son were arrested and taken into protective custody. Blasphemous letters and burned pages from the Qur’an had been found outside the mosque near their home. Muslim leaders were stirring up the crowd after the Friday prayers, calling for the alleged blasphemers to be punished.
With Farrukh and Mushtaq in police custody, the rest of the family tried to flee. A Muslim neighbour warned them hundreds of people were coming and they would burn them if they didn’t get out. Their Christian neighbours refused to take them in their cars, saying if they were seen to be involved then they might be attacked, too. Safdar, Mushtaq’s wife, a nurse who had worked for about three decades in a hospital in the city, called another Muslim friend and he agreed to help them escape in his vehicle.
From inside the police station, Mushtaq and Farrukh could hear the crowds. The police managed to keep the mob from burning their home, but other Christians in the neighbourhood fled.
Farrukh and Mushtaq spent the night in prison, worried they might be killed in custody, hoping and praying that their family was safe somewhere. A day later they were transferred to a facility where high profile criminals were imprisoned.
“Big walls, lots of policemen, lots of prisoners,” Farrukh said. “When we entered we could hear someone being tortured.”
They were placed in a large cell with about two-dozen other men, all of them Muslims, some of them radicals who had been arrested on terrorism charges. For a pair of Christians accused of blasphemy, it felt like a death sentence.
“Don’t tell anybody you are Christian,” Farrukh said a police officer told him. “Never tell anybody inside that you are here for blasphemy, otherwise they will kill you inside. Just keep calm, make a story, and try to spend the night, and the next morning we’ll shift you to the nearby cell.
“I said no, we are not going to go because they will kill us. We cannot hide ourselves. We are not going to lie about being Christians. But we had to go. At that time we said don’t worry, if God was with Daniel at the time he was in the lion’s den then He’s going to be with us when we are here. That’s how we entered into that cell.”
The other prisoners gathered around them, curious about why they were there. Farrukh and Mushtaq simply said they didn’t know.
Their fellow prisoners speculated about what might have happened—maybe you lost a cellphone and someone used it to do something criminal, one suggested. They gave Mushtaq pillows, sheets and food, because he was a teacher and thus highly respected. They assured them there was probably some mistake and they would be released soon. They called them their guests. “It was a miracle,” Mushtaq said.
The other prisoners were not quite as happy when they woke Farrukh and Mushtaq for the morning prayer the next day and discovered they wouldn’t pray with them because they were Christians. But they let them be. The next day, the two men were moved.
The rest of the family was placed under house arrest. They were brought to the prison each day. Sometimes the police would interrogate family members together, sometimes individually. Every few days they would be moved to a new house to keep them safe.
“Outside there was a lot of danger for us,” Farzana said with her husband, Farrukh, translating. “We had very little. We were dependent on people for everything.”
Imran was only five months old and Farzana was expecting their second child. They had made so many plans for their little girl. If Farrukh was killed inside, what would life be like for her? How would she manage? Farzana wiped tears from her eyes as she spoke.
“I could see only darkness. It was hopeless at that time.”
On the 21st of April, five days after they had been imprisoned, Farrukh was taken to the torture room.
“I had no idea where they were taking me,” he said. “But somehow in my heart I knew something bad was going to happen. Every day we used to hear people crying in pain and agony as they were tortured. And whenever we used to hear this, one thing would always come into our mind: Tomorrow it would be us.”
They shone a bright light to keep him awake, he said. They would contort his body in painful positions and beat him with bamboo rods.
From the cell downstairs, his father could hear him when he cried out.
“He used to hear and pray for me,” Farrukh recalled. “He used to sing psalms loudly; I could hear it during this and that gave me a bit of strength to move on. But I kept on saying to them I have not done this. But they were saying you will accept it one day.”
On the fifth day he broke down. “That day I decided I’m not going to take any more suffering. I said okay fine, stop this, I will accept even though I haven’t done this. There is no other choice for me.” He signed a confession. By taking responsibility he hoped the police might let his father and the rest of his family go.
But then their second miracle occurred. The inspector in charge of their case—a man Farrukh said was notorious for his cruelty and efficiency in extracting confessions—was transferred. The new inspector wasn’t happy with the work that had been done on the case, and set about interviewing people about the Gills, getting the opinion of psychologists and handwriting experts who compared samples of their writing with the blasphemous letters.
Beyond the walls of the prison, a rumour got out that the two men were going to be found innocent and released. Suddenly new letters surfaced, these ones allegedly written by Farrukh’s brother and sister, this time they were accompanied by an entire char-marked Qur’an. But unbeknownst to the perpetrator, both the siblings were under house arrest.
People were outraged. Houses, a church and a Christian school were attacked, and members of the crowd clashed with police. About 100 people were arrested.
One of the Gills’ Muslim neighbours was among those arrested in the aftermath. A couple of boys said he had given them the letters and burned Qur’an pages that they placed outside of the mosque back on April 15.
“In Pakistan this is a normal thing,” Farrukh said. The country’s blasphemy laws are often used to settle personal vendettas, or to force families to leave their homes and sell their property.
The culprit confessed. But the case still posed a problem for the police. The allegations against the Gills had already prompted riots. Would people really believe the Christians were innocent and a Muslim committed the blasphemy? They didn’t think so.
The Gills were released on June 2, but the police advised them not to go home. They wouldn’t be able to guarantee their safety if they stayed in Gujranwala. Instead, they advised them to go to a remote area, change their names, try their best to ensure no one connected them with the blasphemy allegations. The story had been widely publicized, along with pictures of Farrukh and Mushtaq. It would be hard to escape.
Thus began a nomadic existence, moving from place to place, never staying too long in someone’s home lest the stigma of the blasphemy allegations rub off on their hosts. The longest they were able to spend somewhere was a hospital about an hour’s drive west of Islamabad. Farrukh and Mushtaq were required to stay indoors. “So even though we were out of jail, we were still in jail,” Farrukh recalled. Farrukh and Farzana’s second daughter, Anaiah, was born there in hiding.
Their escape from Pakistan might be another miracle. A rich Korean businesswoman, whom they had never met before or since, visited Pakistan on a mission trip and offered to help them get to Vietnam and pay their expenses for one year.
They flew out on Jan. 18, 2012 with newly minted passports. They even met an old friend on the plane—Rev. Sampson Javaid who now lives in Toronto.
In Vietnam they were provided with a house and jobs at a garment factory that produced clothing for Forever 21 and assorted other brands. It was a relief for Farrukh and Mushtaq to be able to leave the house during the day and live their lives without the constant shadow of fear. Yet the future remained unknown.
Farrukh began to explore possibilities. His web of connections expanded across the globe. People he knew referred him to other people they knew. Those people connected him with yet more people who might be able to help. Eventually, he got in touch with Rob Shropshire, program coordinator with Presbyterian World Service & Development, and began exploring the possibility of the family coming to Canada as refugees.
But there was a big complication. There was no way the family could be resettled from Vietnam. They would have to move to another country to seek refugee status with the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency.
They decided on Sri Lanka where there would be more English speakers. And through their web of connections the Gills were able to stay for eight months in a house owned by the World Evangelical Alliance, paying only for their first month. The Barnabas Fund also pitched in to help support them for a year.
To be certified as refugees by the UNHCR they needed to prove the family had no choice but to flee Pakistan and they would face persecution if they returned. Farrukh in Sri Lanka and Rob Shropshire in Canada went to work on the application.
The process is long and often tedious, full of seemingly endless forms. Both the refugee and sponsor’s paperwork must be submitted together to a Citizenship and Immigration Canada office. Both of these applications can be returned if they are found to contain errors or omissions. The refugees’ stories should be backed up whenever possible with newspaper clippings and other supporting documentation, all submitted in quadruplicate. While the church’s national offices were closed for the Christmas holidays, Shropshire spent a lot of time hunched over a photocopier.
He and Farrukh worked as a team, Shropshire said. As a well-educated and fluent English speaker, Farrukh had a distinct advantage as he learned to navigate the twisting avenues of governments and refugee agencies.
“Not everyone has bureaucratic literacy,” Shropshire noted. And if refugees lack printed documentation to confirm their identities and back up their story, gaining refugee status is even harder.
It wasn’t an issue for the Gills, however. Their story had been plastered across newspapers and websites in Pakistan, and Farrukh had hung on to every letter and piece of paper he thought could prove useful down the line—including a personal letter from someone at the Canadian High Commission.
In Canada, Shropshire had to find a church willing to sponsor them. It would require a significant financial commitment to support a family of eight for a year (about $40,000), and in addition there would need to be logistical and social support. The Gills would need a home, furniture, rides to appointments and shopping, help getting their paperwork submitted to various government departments, registering the kids for school and finding work for the adults. There are a thousand little and not-so-little things to do.
But when he found out the Gills had an uncle at Grace, West Hill, in Scarborough, Shropshire said it didn’t take long for the missions committee to get on board.
The church has two congregations—one English-speaking and one Urdu-speaking. Rev. Joseph Gray who heads the English congregation said when their uncle, Alvin James, got together with Rev. Emmanuel Shaker, a retired Anglican priest and founder of the Urdu-speaking congregation, and Rev. Sampson Javaid, the friend the Gills met again on the plane to Vietnam, “it seemed like a no-brainer.”
Just as things finally seemed to be falling into place, however, unease settled over the Gill family again. Sri Lanka began cracking down on asylum seekers—especially those from Pakistan. Many people were detained and some were deported.
‘The fact that they [the Gills] already had their sponsorship filed was very important,” Rob said. He began writing letters to places like the Canadian High Commission and to the UNHCR’s offices in Geneva, pleading for the Gills’ refugee sponsorship case to be expedited lest they get caught up in the Sri Lankan police sweeps.
“We are here first because of God’s grace and secondly because of the efforts of Mr. Rob Shropshire,” Farrukh said. “He did whatever he could to save us. And thank God we were saved and nobody ever harmed us and nobody ever came to our door.”
When they finally had their refugee interview with the UNHCR and found out it was successful, “I cannot tell you the emotions of the family at that time,” Farrukh said. “We were crying, weeping, in joy. Because we had gone through a lot and it was probably the first time we know we are going to go to a place and call it our home.”
They arrived in Canada on February 25 of this year—more than four years since their troubles began.
Mushtaq insists miracles punctuated their long journey. When he reads the Old Testament, he thinks of his family’s four years of trials and the Israelites’ 40 years of wandering in the desert. The stories of difficult journeys speak to him.
“God told to Abraham wherever you will go I will bless you,” he said. “Not only you, the people who live there. I will bless the peoples also. I have seen the blessing in my own eyes when we went to a country.”
Farrukh said wherever they went, whatever happened, people have come out of nowhere to help them. And they have shared their testimony often.
Joseph Gray said he was among many who wept hearing Mushtaq’s testimony with the Urdu congregation, though he couldn’t understand a word. “It was like a foretaste of the day when every tribe, every tongue, every nation will worship together.”
But the story isn’t over. Although they have finally reached a country where they can feel safe, where they have the support of friends and family, the Gills are all too keenly aware that many Christians just like them are in hiding or seeking status as refugees. And they know just how difficult that can be.
“I’ve got to say, churches here are sleeping,” Farrukh said. “People should first see how God works in our lives. Plus people should wake up now. Terrible things are happening over there. If we have resources over here or in other countries, if we have any chance to help these families we will definitely help them.”
It’s too easy for Canadians to keep an emotional distance. Gray said when he thinks of our perceptions in Canada, he thinks of “those verses in Deuteronomy where God is about to take the people of Israel into a land flowing with milk and honey and He says, ‘Now be careful. I’m about to take you into a land where you’ll have beautiful houses. Houses you didn’t build and wells you didn’t dig and vineyards you didn’t plant. Now be really careful because when you go into this beautiful land, when your bellies are full, you’ll forget the Lord your God.’ It’s such a great warning. When you meet people like this you’re reminded that we’re largely sleepwalking in Canada.”
[doptg id =”19″]
