TANVEER AHMED, afraid to depart the near-darkness of his dwelling, sits on his mattress fretting. He's a civil engineer; his spouse was the headmistress of a personal faculty. They loved a snug life collectively. An accusation of blasphemy levelled at his spouse swept all that away, and he now cowers in a dilapidated couple of rooms in a suburb of Lahore. His spouse, Salma Tanveer, is on demise row. He has misplaced his dwelling and job and worries that a mob may kill him at any time. “My spouse is an excellent lady, she didn't deserve this,” he says. “We're afraid, we are able to’t go wherever.”
The high-profile case of Asia Bibi, a Christian farmhand sentenced to demise in decrease courts for blasphemy after being accused by the Muslims she labored with of insulting the Prophet Muhammad, resulted in 2018 with acquittal within the Supreme Court docket. However such accusations nonetheless break scores of lives in Pakistan annually. Certainly in 2020, the latest 12 months for which America’s State Division has tallied figures, Pakistani courts heard 199 blasphemy instances, a report quantity.
Ms Tanveer was sentenced to hold in September after a decide dominated she had distributed writings denying Mohammad was the ultimate prophet of Islam. Her husband says she was affected by long-standing psychological sickness, and that the case was pursued by a neighborhood cleric in search of revenge after a quarrel with the couple. (Ms Asia’s case additionally adopted a row, with different farmhands.) Medical testimony on Ms Tanveer’s mental-health issues delayed her trial for years. Her demise sentence has nonetheless to be confirmed. In reality, no demise sentence for blasphemy has ever been carried out in Pakistan. However acquittals generate a lot public anger that judges desire to cross instances to appeals courts. Ms Tanveer is more likely to spend years extra languishing behind bars as her case crawls by means of the system to the Supreme Court docket.
In line with the State Division’s survey, of the folks going through blasphemy accusations in 2020, 35 had been sentenced to demise. Of the accused, 70% had been Shia Muslims, 20% from the persecuted Ahmadi sect (who're thought-about non-Muslims below Pakistani regulation), 5% Sunnis and the remainder Hindus or Christians.
Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), an extremist get together, has amassed monumental political clout, partially by resisting makes an attempt to reform the blasphemy legal guidelines. It has been emboldened by confrontations with the federal government of Imran Khan, the prime minister, all of which have ended with the federal government’s climbing down.
The Centre for Analysis and Safety Research, a think-tank in Islamabad, has counted practically 1,300 accusations of blasphemy made between 2011 and 2021. Campaigners attempting to assist these accused say the success of the TLP has meant that making a blasphemy accusation and whipping up ill-educated followers generally is a shrewd profession transfer for an bold cleric.
The stream of accusations exhibits no signal of drying up. On January nineteenth a 26-year-old lady was sentenced to hold for allegedly sending blasphemous messages over WhatsApp and Fb. The caricatures Aneeqa Ateeq forwarded had been judged to be a deliberate insult to Islam. Ms Ateeq, who's Muslim herself, says she had been lured into dialog with the complainant, who made advances to her after which needed revenge after she spurned them. Within the days after her conviction, competing Twitter hashtags lobbied to avoid wasting her and to hold her.
Earlier this month a mob in rural Punjab lynched a mentally ailing man after accusing him of burning pages of the Koran. A Sri Lankan manufacturing unit supervisor within the industrial metropolis of Sialkot was murdered in December after employees accused him of tearing down posters bearing holy verses.
Salma Tanveer is being represented by Saif ul-Malook, the lawyer who additionally defended Ms Asia. That earlier case introduced him worldwide acclaim and even funding. He predicts he'll obtain no such assist for this one. He says: “If the accusation is in opposition to a Christian, the entire Christian world is able to stand, to fund a lawyer, to lift a media marketing campaign and make diplomatic efforts with the federal government. However on the subject of a Muslim, they aren't .” ■
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