Blasphemy is a crime in Pakistan. Gangs deliver the verdicts.
At the end of last month, hundreds of people protested in major Pakistani cities against a blasphemy ruling by a top judge, who also faced online backlash and threats. Two days later, a police officer in Punjab province saved a woman from an attack by people who mistook the Arabic script on her dress for Quranic verses.
Later that week, a group in Karachi demolished the minarets of a house of worship used by the Ahmadi sect, a long-persecuted minority declared heretical under Pakistan’s constitution, amid accusations that their faith offends Islam.
These are just the latest of many such episodes in Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country where the faith has enormous influence. Blasphemy is taken seriously in the country and a conviction can mean death.
But so does an accusation: mobs sometimes take matters into their own hands and lynch people before their cases can even get to court. A political climate that has provided cover for extremism and a police force that is sometimes unable or unwilling to intervene have helped make such violence possible.
Last Sunday, police in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s most populous province, received a call from a shopkeeper at a local market: a crowd had gathered around a woman and accused her of blasphemy.
The woman, whose identity was withheld by police for her safety, wore a dress with the word “Halwa” in Arabic script, meaning “sweet” or “beautiful.” Bystanders, who did not know the meaning in Arabic, mistook the writing for Koranic verses.
A video circulating on social media showed a woman taking refuge in a store as a large crowd surrounded her, singing. Among the cacophony of voices in one of the videos you can hear: “The punishment for the blasphemer is beheading.”
Syeda Shehrbano Naqvi, a police officer who arrived on the scene, escorted the woman to a safe location and then began negotiating with the crowd. “Through dialogue, we were able to obtain a written apology from them,” Officer Naqvi said in a telephone interview. “They acknowledged that the dress did not contain any Quranic verses and admitted their mistake and expressed regret for their actions.”
Her actions received widespread praise, including from Syed Asim Munir, the army chief, who praised her “selfless devotion to duty and professionalism in diffusing a volatile situation.”
But the fact that Officer Naqvi’s action was even necessary underlines the disturbing situation in Pakistan.
The country inherited 19th-century British laws that established penalties for blasphemy-related crimes. In the 1980s, the government updated these laws and added harsh penalties, even the death penalty, for those who insult Islam.
Last year, the nation a law passed to increase the penalty for derogatory comments against respected personalities – including the family, wives and companions of the Prophet Mohammed, and the four caliphs – from three years to at least 10 years in prison. Last year, at least 330 people, mostly Muslims, were charged in 180 blasphemy cases.
Although Pakistan has never executed anyone for blasphemy, extrajudicial killings are another matter.
According to the Center for Social Justice, a Lahore-based minority rights group, eight people accused of blasphemy died this way last year, largely killed by gangs, without sufficient intervention from police and other authorities.
During the past years gangs have stormed police stations to reach people accused of blasphemy, or imprisoned the stations on fire after officers refused to hand over the suspect.
When confronting such violence, police face several challenges. They may be outnumbered or lack the resources to control a large, angry group. They may fear that protecting someone accused of blasphemy will lead to being accused themselves. Or they may be complicit, says Zoha Waseem, an expert on Pakistani policing at the University of Warwick in Britain: “Some police officers may support the blasphemy law and refuse to intervene based on their religious beliefs.”
Last August, a mob attacked several churches and houses in a Christian neighborhood in Jaranwala, a city about 70 miles from Lahore, after two Christians were accused of desecrating the Quran.
In May, a local cleric in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s Mardan district was lynched by a mob after making an allegedly blasphemous reference during a political rally. And in April, police in the Kohistan district of the same province rescued a Chinese engineer accused of blasphemy before a mob reached him.
In February, a man accused of blasphemy was snatched from police custody and lynched in Nankana Sahib, Punjab province.
Experts and activists link the increase in such violence to the rise of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, an Islamist party initially formed to secure the release of Mumtaz Qadri, a police guard who in 2011 killed Salman Taseer, a governor of Punjab which was seeking to revise the blasphemy laws.
Although the attempt failed – Mr Qadri was sentenced to death and hanged in 2016 – the group later transformed into a political party, contesting elections and unsettling governments.
In April 2021, the party organized violent nationwide protests to demand the expulsion of the French ambassador after President Emmanuel Macron of France praised a teacher who was killed for showing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in a French classroom.
Although the TLP failed to win a single parliamentary seat in February’s national elections, it emerged as the fourth largest party, with 2.8 million of the 59.2 million votes cast. recent Gallup report.
“The dangerous consequences of glorifying extremist groups and ignoring the abuse of blasphemy laws have created a crisis,” said Peter Jacob, head of the Center for Social Justice in Lahore, “escalating the threat of religious violence to alarming levels .”