Pakistan: Death or Life for Christian “Blasphemer”?

On October 9, Pakistan’s Supreme Court heard the final appeal of a Christian woman who has been on death row for nearly a decade on the accusation that she insulted Islam’s prophet Muhammad. The woman’s fate is now sealed: “They [judges] have come to a decision, but it has been reserved,” reported Mehwish Bhatti, an officer with the British-Pakistani Christian Association, from the courthouse.

Aasiya Noreen -- better known as “Asia Bibi” -- is a 47-year-old married mother of five children who was charged with violating Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy law nearly a decade ago.

According to her autobiography, Blasphemy: A Memoir: Sentenced to Death Over a Cup of Water, on June 14, 2009, Bibi went to work picking berries in a field. Although she was accustomed to being ostracized by the other female pickers on account of her Christian faith, things came to a head when, on a sweltering summer day, she drank water from a common well.

“Don’t drink that water, it’s haram [forbidden]!” shouted a woman nearby.

She then turned to the other women working in the field workers and said, “Listen, all of you, this Christian has dirtied the water in the well by drinking from our cup and dipping it back several times. Now the water is unclean and we can’t drink it! Because of her!” (Such beliefs are not uncommon in the Muslim world. In one video, an Egyptian cleric expresses his great disgust at Christians, and how he could not drink from a cup that was merely touched by a Christian.)

The argument spiraled, and the women began calling on Bibi to convert to Islam in order to save herself. “What did your Prophet Mohammed ever do to save mankind?,” Asia Bibi shot back.

A report summarizes what happened next:

Despite inconsistent witness testimonies, a Punjabi court sentenced her to death by hanging before cheering crowds in late 2010. Since then, “I’ve been locked up, handcuffed and chained, banished from the world and waiting to die,” says Bibi in her smuggled memoirs. “I don’t know how long I’ve got left to live. Every time my cell door opens my heart beats faster. My life is in God’s hands and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. It’s a brutal, cruel existence.” There has also been the suffering of her husband, Ashiq Masih, and five children: “I really love her and miss her presence. I cannot sleep at night as I miss her,” Masih, a brick laborer, once explained: All of this for asking a rhetorical question -- “What did your Prophet Mohammed ever do to save mankind?” -- variants of which non-Muslims have been asking for centuries. In the late 1390s, for instance, Roman Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos responded to a group of Muslim scholars bent on converting him to Islam by saying: Over 600 years later, in 2006, when Pope Benedict passingly quoted this assertion, anti-Christian riots erupted around the Muslim world, churches were burned, and an Italian nun who had devoted her life to serving the sick and needy of Somalia was murdered there. In Pakistan, however, such “vigilante justice” is just one way of avenging the honor of Muhammad. According to Section 295-C of Pakistan’s penal code: Because non-Muslims -- particularly Christians, who by definition are known to reject Muhammad’s prophecy -- are more likely to be suspected of blasphemy, and because the word of a Christian is not valid against the word of a Muslim, blasphemy accusations by Muslims against Christians are common and routinely result in the imprisonment, beating and even killing of Christians (as when 1,200 Muslims deliberately burned a young Christian couple to death in 2014 for allegedly insulting Islam). In other words, Asia Bibi’s story is the notorious tip of a large but hidden iceberg. Seemingly not a month -- sometimes not even a week -- goes by in Pakistan without some Muslims accusing some Christians of insulting Muhammad, often just to settle a personal score (here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) or to seize land (here, here, here, and here). These are followed by the usual riots, home- and church-burnings, beatings and expulsion of Christians, and, finally, arrest and imprisonment of the supposed “blasphemer.”

Although Bibi’s case has sparked outrage throughout the international community, all calls for her release have for nearly a decade fallen on deaf ears. This dismissal is not so much because the nation’s authorities are determined to execute her -- one infidel is surely not worth the world’s criticism and contempt -- but because excusing her in order to save face with the world would instantly make them lose face with many of their own. That consideration is why, whenever there is any serious talk that Bibi might be spared, protests and riotsoften ensue. As Bibi’s husband, Ashuq Masih, once explained, “The Maulvis [clerics] want her dead. They have announced a [monetary] prize ... for anyone who kills Asia. They have even declared that if the court acquits her they will ensure the death sentence stands.”

Authorities sympathetic to or siding with such “blasphemers” are also targeted. Two of Asia Bibi’s prominent advocates, for instance, Governor Salmaan Taseer and Minority Affairs Minister Shabaz Bhatti, were both assassinated in 2011. Taseer was shot 27 times by Mumtaz Qadri, his own bodyguard. After the murder, more than 500 Muslim clerics voiced support for Qadri, and showered him with rose petals.

This is arguably why Pakistani authorities continue to delay issuing a final verdict -- to give Bibi time to die “naturally” in prison as other Christians have, under “mysterious” circumstances. Instead of placating the world but angering Islamists by releasing her, or placating Islamists but horrifying the world by executing her, the Pakistani judicial system abandoned Bibi to a deathtrap of a prison cell for a decade, where wretched conditions, severe maltreatment, unattended illnesses, psychological abuse and beatings should have killed her, as they did many others before her.

Much to their vexation, however, “She is psychologically, physically and spiritually strong,” Bibi’s husband announced a few days ago. “Having a very strong faith, she is ready and willing to die for Christ. She will never convert to Islam.”

In her memoirs, Bibi wonders “whether being a Christian in Pakistan today is not just a failing, or a mark against you, but actually a crime.” Her question is finally about to be answered by Pakistan’s supreme court.

“All around Pakistan and even many parts of the world, the sense of anticipation... regarding Asia Bibi’s final appeal hearing are now at fever pitch,” said Leighton Medley of the British-Pakistani Christian Association concerning Bibi’s recent and final hearing. “There is a sense here in Pakistan that once again, battle lines are being drawn: the battle between those who support hatred and intolerance and those who fight for peace and justice.”

Accordingly, in the last few days, Christians around the world prayed and fasted, even as extremist Muslims on social media called for riots should the “blasphemer” escape death. Either way, “There will be protests on both sides and you can bet there will be trouble ahead,” Medley continued.

“It truly is D-Day for Asia, this is the final countdown and we will soon know whether the extremists win or lose. And whether there will be peace and justice in Pakistan or just more hatred, prejudice and intolerance which sadly has come to typify Pakistan today.”

Raymond Ibrahim, author of the new book, Sword and Scimitar, Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and a Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.