On Mar 29, in Dera Ismail Khan, a city in northwestern Pakistan, a gruesome murder took place in an all-female religious school named Jamia Islamia Falahul Binaat. A teacher, Safoora Bibi, was ambushed by another teacher and two students, who grabbed her at the main gate, and slit her throat with a knife. Their reason was that Safoora Bibi had committed “blasphemy’ against Prophet Muhammad.

In fact, the killers had not heard any blasphemous words from their victim herself. As the police said to reporters, they had only heard one of their relatives see the blasphemy in her own dream!

It sounds insane, as it really is. For worse, Safoora Bibi is only the latest victim to the blasphemy obsession in Pakistan, which destroys a new life almost every month. In February, a mentally ill man was lynched to death by an enraged mob, who believed that he burnt the pages of the Holy Qur’an. In January, a 26-year-old woman was taken to court for sharing cartoons of prophets on a private chat on her phone — only to be sentenced to death. And last December, a Sri Lankan factory manager just pulled down some posters that he didn’t understand — and which happened to have verses from the Qur’an — only to be burnt alive by another enraged mob.

The total number of such victims is grim, as recently reported by human rights lawyer Akmal Bhatti. In the past four decades, more than 1865 people have been charged for blasphemy, most of them to be jailed for years. Among them was the Christian farmworker Asia Bibi, mother of four, who spent eight years on death row, in solitary confinement, until being acquitted in 2018. Meanwhile, more than 130 people have been killed by mobs, whose victims are often minorities — Christians, Ahmadis, Shiites — targeted with often false charges.

As this dark picture shows, there are two interrelated troubles in Pakistan. One is the blasphemy law (Penal Code, Section 295) which had colonial roots, but was made much more draconian in the 1980’s, in a wave of “Islamization” under military dictatorship. It decrees the death penalty, or imprisonment for life, for anyone who “directly or indirectly, defiles the sacred name of the Holy Prophet.” The other trouble is that there are militant Islamists who take the law in their hands, proudly and fiercely, to kill blasphemers on sight. A whole political party called Tehreek-e-Labbaik is devoted to the cause, glorifying the murderers and mobilizing the masses.

As a Muslim myself who also has a deep respect for the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), the Qur’an, and other sacralities of Islam, I have been watching all this with grief. Because, like most Muslims around the world, I believe that killing or tormenting innocent people in name of my religion doesn’t bring any honor to it. It only brings dishonor.

To their credit, Pakistani authorities also have been making the same point. Among them is cleric Tahir Ashrafi, Prime Minister Imran Khan’s “special representative for religious harmony,” who condemned a recent incident of lynching, adding: “This is not the religion of my Prophet, to kill people under your own interpretation of religion.”

While such calls for law-and-order are welcome, they only tackle the most extreme side of the trouble: vigilante violence, which is also a big problem in India, where radical Hindutva mobs have terrorized Muslim and Christian minorities. This lynch culture must be confronted on both sides of the Radcliffe Line.

Yet Pakistan — and other Muslim-majority states with severe blasphemy laws, from Saudi Arabia to Iran — need a deeper discussion: Do Muslims need to criminalize blasphemy at all?

For many conservatives, let alone militants, the question itself can be blasphemous. “How dare we allow anyone offend our Scripture and our Prophet,” they can react. The answer lies in looking into both the Scripture and the Prophet more carefully.

First, the Quran, the primary source of Islam, has in fact no basis for any earthly punishment for blasphemy — or apostasy, too, which is another burning matter. Quite the contrary, the Qur’an commands Muslims to counter blasphemous talk only with a civilized disengagement. “If you hear people denying and ridiculing God’s revelation,” verse 4:140 reads, “do not sit with them unless they start to talk of other things.” It doesn’t say kill them, imprison them, or even silence them. It says just walk away.

The second source of Islam, the Sunna (example) of the Prophet, is admittedly more complicated. Here, in sources written more than a century after the fact, we have stories of certain “poets” executed by the first Muslims during their war of survival with hostile polytheists. Medieval jurists took these reports as the basis of blasphemy laws, but a careful reading suggests that those poets were executed not for mere verbal offence, but also active enmity such as incitement to war or physical violence. No wonder there are other reports showing that the Prophet responded to mere insults with leniency, even mercy. 

With such arguments, I recently claimed in my book, Reopening Muslim Minds, that all blasphemy laws must be abolished, as they are nothing but medieval baggage in Islam — just like slavery, which was a part of Islamic law for centuries, but is luckily history now. Another recent book, Freedom of Expression in Islam: Challenging Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws, an edited volume by prominent Muslim scholars, offers similar perspectives.

Pakistan’s public space needs to open up to such fresh views, for it is too dominated by fanatics who think that ishq-e-Rasul, or “love of the Prophet,” requires killing people in his name. No, love of the Prophet requires showing love, mercy, and gentleness in his name. And it is such ethical maturity, not ruthless zealotry, that will bring societal peace to Pakistan, and universal respect to Islam.