Pakistan’s blasphemy law devastates scores of lives each year

TANVEER AHMED, afraid to leave the near-darkness of his home, sits on his bed fretting. He is a civil engineer; his wife was the headmistress of a private school. They enjoyed a comfortable life together. An accusation of blasphemy levelled at his wife swept all that away, and he now cowers in a dilapidated couple of rooms in a suburb of Lahore. His wife, Salma Tanveer, is on death row. He has lost his home and job and worries that a mob could kill him at any time. “My wife is a very good woman, she did not deserve this,” he says. “We are afraid, we can’t go anywhere.”

The high-profile case of Asia Bibi, a Christian farmhand sentenced to death in lower courts for blasphemy after being accused by the Muslims she worked with of insulting the Prophet Muhammad, ended in 2018 with acquittal in the Supreme Court. But such accusations still ruin scores of lives in Pakistan each year. Indeed in 2020, the most recent year for which America’s State Department has tallied figures, Pakistani courts heard 199 blasphemy cases, a record number.

Ms Tanveer was sentenced to hang in September after a judge ruled she had distributed writings denying Mohammad was the final prophet of Islam. Her husband says she was suffering from long-standing mental illness, and that the case was pursued by a local cleric seeking revenge after a quarrel...