Aljazeera: ISLAMABAD — Saif-ul-Malook lives his life in fear these days, never knowing which direction a bullet might come from.
“I was threatened many times. I used to spend two or three days every week in the hospital, due to [heart trouble],” said the 58-year-old lawyer in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. “Now I have police guards with me. But when I see them, somehow I feel more afraid.”
“You have no idea who might shoot at you, anywhere, at any time,” he added. “And when [religious clerics] tell them that firing on me will get them to heaven, why wouldn’t they?”
Malook’s crime in the eyes of many hardline clerics and their followers is to have taken up the case of Aasia Noreen (better known as Aasia Bibi), a Christian woman accused of having committed blasphemy by insulting the Prophet Muhammad in 2009 after she got into an argument with two Muslim women over drinking water in a rural village in Punjab province.
In October 2014, the Lahore High Court upheld a verdict that saw Noreen convicted and sentenced to death in November 2010. Her legal team plans to appeal the case before the country’s Supreme Court.
But Malook says that there were many irregularities in the trial, which garnered nationwide attention in Pakistan, and that the judge in the case was responding to public pressure on a hugely sensitive issue.
“The judge was not a judge,” he said. “He was acting as a disciple of the holy prophet, whereas he was supposed to act as a judge, listening to both party’s accounts. Now he is thinking that he has done something great for Islam.”
Categories: Ahmadis And Pakistan, Anti Islam act by Muslims, Asia, Behaviour, Bigotry, Blasphemy, Double Standard