Pakistan: Death or Life for Christian "Blasphemer"?

Pakistan: Death or Life for Christian "Blasphemer"?
Ruling Expected on the Fate of Asia Bibi

by Raymond Ibrahim  •  October 10, 2018 at 5:00 am

       

• In her memoirs, Asia 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.
• 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 murder of Christians -- as when 1,200 Muslims deliberately burned a young Christian couple to death in 2014 for allegedly insulting Islam.
• "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." — Asia Bibi's husband, Ashiq Masih.
• 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 has 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 have many others before her.

Asia Bibi and two of her five children, pictured prior to her imprisonment on death row in 2010 for "blasphemy."

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.

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