Anwar Masih, 32, from Lahore (Punjab) was arrested for blasphemy offences on November 28, 2003. He was charged under section 295 and 295-A of Pakistan’s Penal Code. On December 17, 2004, Lahore’s Judicial Magistrate Court in Lahore acquitted him on all counts.
Things should have ended there; however, Mr Masih had to go into hiding, keeping well clear of his family, threatened by fanatics and extremists from Markaz-e-Tayyabba Islamic Seminary.
Section 295 of the Penal, which Code covers offences or profanation of places of worship, punishes “[w]hoever destroys, damages or defiles any place of worship, or any object held sacred by any class of persons with the intention of thereby insulting the religion of any class of persons or with the knowledge that any class of persons is likely to consider such destruction, damage or defilement as an insult to their religion . . .”
Anwar Masih’s lawyer, Justin Gill, of the Centre for Legal Aid and Assistance Settlement (CLASS) in Lahore, told Asia News, that his client was accused of blasphemy for insulting the prophet and disrespecting the beard of the plaintiff, Naseer Ahmad, a Christian who converted to Islam.
However, for many the case stems from an old enmity between the two men. When Mr Ahmad was still a Christian, he was accused of beating up a neighbor so badly that the latter went into coma and to this day remains paralyzed and under constant medical care. Mr Anwar had supported the victim in registering a complaint against Mr Ahmad.
Pakistani authorities had acknowledged that the Blasphemy Law was very often used to settle personal scores or carry out vendettas. Numbers attested to the abnormal situation between 1927 and 1986 there had seven recorded cases; after 1986, about 4,000.
So far Mr Anwar had been lucky, not so others. In 2004 at least three Christians were murdered for their faith. Nasir Masih and Samuel Masih were known to have been tortured to death in police custody; Javed Anjum was tortured and killed by students and teachers at a madrassa, a Muslim school. Faced with mounting criticism, and the Pakistani government amended the Blasphemy Law in 2004, the changes were approved by parliament on October 26, 2004.
Human rights groups and Christian leaders, both Catholic and Protestant, had called the changes simple window-dressing, tinkering with procedures and not with the substance of the matter, namely the law itself.
Humanity Around the Glob
