On 4 January 2011, Salman Taseer, a liberal human rights campaigner and the governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest and most powerful province, was killed by Mumtaz Qadri, his bodyguard, for insulting Prophet Muhammad. Taseer‟s „crime‟ was that he had stood up for Aasia Bibi, a poor Christian woman, sentenced to death for insulting Prophet Muhammad. Taseer‟s murder fused the educated, the less educated, and the illiterate into an Islamistnationalist unity

Zaidi, Abbas.  “Postcolonial insanity.’  Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies, 2:4, December 2011.

Abbas Zaidi’s review of the motivations involved and license taken in the January 4, 2011 murder of Salman Taseer takes a fair look at Pakistan’s “God Mob” (my term) in its pervasive national aspect.

Just one paragraph before the conclusion, Zaidi makes this point that runs slantwise to my own interest in “Facsimile Bipolar Political Sociopathy (FBPS)”, a bastard mix of the clinical descriptions of bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder lifted out of psychology proper and into political psychology and sociology:

“Based on the preceding discussion, a point may be added to the definition of postcolonial insanity: Postcolonial insanity is enchantment with grand narratives which are held to be universal in their reach, inviolability, and truthfulness.”

Bipolar indulgence in grandiose and messianic delusion and manic expression; narcissistic resistance to criticism while obsessed with one’s own powers . . . and there they are doing their thing, system-wide, soaking Pakistan in blood accompanied (outside of the body of the state) by near universal condemnation.

Mobarak Haider’s 2008 (Urdu version; English version, 2010) Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg more broadly covers the role “civilizational narcissism” has played in developing and hardening within the common constituency Pakistan’s Islamist mission.  (Post available here: “Mobarak Haider’s Diagnosis — Taliban: The Tip of a Holy Iceberg”).