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Pakistan: Citizens Letter / Petition Seeking Separation of Religion and State

by sacw.net, 17 July 2009

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Date: July 16, 2009 at 11:08 AM
- Subject: petition for constitutional reform- time to act for citizens

Dear Friends,

We have had enough with taliban and other religious political parties who keep supporting extremism in the face of all the killings and bombings. The establishing of Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reform on the 28th of June has opened a window of opportunity for us. the Chair Raza Rabbani has asked the civil society and all others to send in their proposals for the ammendments. I strongly feel that this is the time we should act and ask them that we want a separation between the state and religion. We dont want any party to impose their brand of religion on us.

Attached is a petition that can be submitted to PCCR on the 27th of July. if we can collect enough signatures we can make an impact on the committee. We will submit the first batch of petitions at that time and continue collecting more signatures. We can do a second submission one or two weeks later.

Those who are good with the net please set it up so that people could do it through email or through a web. Eventually all of them need to be collected in islamabad, email and mailing address given below.

My request to you is to quickly develop a mechanism to delegate and collect the copies of the petition back and then send them to the following address

mailing address. house 11, st 42, F 8/1 islamabad
- email: mehergarh (at) yahoo(dot)com

I believe that there is a majority of people in this country that does not want one party or the other to tell us how to be a good muslim and to impose their strange versions of Islam on us. We just need to make ourselves visible and state our point of view so that it gets counted.

in solidarity

Fouzia Saeed

a citizen of pakistan

TEXT OF PETITION

Petition to the Parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Reforms Citizen’s Demand for Constitutional Amendment

We do not want people like the Taliban and other opportunists to impose their versions of Islam upon us. Zia ul Haq imposed state-sanctioned religious policies that damaged the basic concept of Pakistan, opening the door for extremism and terrorism in our country. We want that damage to be reversed and real freedom of religion to be returned to Pakistan. In order to achieve this condition, it is necessary that we return to the spirit of the Federal Democratic nature of Pakistan by separating religion from the State.

No. Name Address City Signature

P.S.

From: South Asia Citizens Wire | July 15-17, 2009 | Dispatch No. 2645