ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - A Pakistani man accused of desecrating the Koran was shot dead Wednesday after being chased by an angry crowd.
Ashiq Nabi, in his thirties, was accused of being disrespectful to Islam’s holy book and had been in hiding since Monday, a senior police official said.
“Today, a mob spotted him and shot him dead,” said Mazahar ul Haq, police chief of Nowshera town, about 100 km (62 miles) west of the capital, Islamabad.
Blasphemy, including desecrating the Koran, is a capital offence in deeply Islamic Pakistan and carries the death sentence, but convictions have always been turned down by high courts because of a lack of evidence.
When I was a teenager I lived in the southern Philippines. One weekend we went into an especially Islamic area. A woman had recently been killed there for publicly stating that Mohammad wasn’t God’s prophet. I wasn’t saying anything volatile, but you can be sure I was awfully nervous when I was out on the streets and in public, being of the Christian faith.
In fact, on that very weekend, someone had gone into a local church, and stolen the chalice and shot some of the people, including, I think, a deacon.
Interestingly enough, I don’t recall being scared in the least while visiting the area’s exquisite Islamic community center.
I think you may have misunderstood the Muslim Hudud crime of apostasy, which means turning one’s back on the faith and applies only Muslims. As a Christian you couldn’t comit the crime. In order to convict for apostasy (which carries a mandatory death sentence), the testimony of four respectable Muslim men is required.
The place wasn’t under Islamic civil law, as such. The woman who had been shot, or rather killed with a grenade, was an American, and not a former Muslim, either.
Well, here’s at least one case that didn’t quite get as far as getting testimony. And somehow I doubt (though the story doesn’t say) if the victim was asked what his religious beliefs were.
It sounds like he was a Muslim, and the Pakistan law wouldn’t apply to any one but Muslims. Under Islam (which means submission to God), you cannot be forced to embrace the faith (yeah, right), but once you have, you cannot turn from it: By embracing Islam you forfeit your freedom of religious choice, if you will. Run a search for “apostasy,” there’s stuff on the net.
I certainly hope people haven’t stopped saying the same thing about Christianity!
But it is silly to draw comparisons: blasphemy also got people executed in Christian theocracies as well—we just don’t have Christian theocracies in the present day for comparison.
It’s not the particular religion that gets people killed, but the mistake of enforcing religious law. You wouldn’t want to live in a country where Leviticus was enforced as law either.