By
Pamela Constable March 16 at 5:00 AM
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staging a three-week protest outside the capital, Islamabad, in November. The group filed the original complaint against Massih and was treated deferentially by the police. Now leaders of the area’s minority Christians are beginning to fear they are no longer safe.
“Our life is over,” said Massih’s father Inderias, sitting despondently in a legal rights office in Lahore on Sunday. Even if he is found innocent and released, his father said, “we will always be afraid someone will attack us. No one accused of blasphemy is ever safe.”
‘This was never our war’
The Movement in Service to the Sanctity of the Prophet,
formed several years ago, has caught fire across Pakistan, its emerald banners rippling from rooftops and taxis. Rather than advocating extreme ideology or terrorist tactics, it calls on ordinary Muslims to “defend” deeply held principles, especially reverence for the prophet Muhammad.
Government officials, almost all Muslim, have struggled to curb religious rabble-rousing without being seen as insufficiently devout. Many privately sympathize with the anti-blasphemy cause; some who try to mend fences have been humiliated. On Sunday, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif spoke at a Sunni seminary in Lahore, but two people from the audience threw shoes at him. One shouted exultantly, “We are here, oh prophet!”
[Religious groups protest guilty verdicts in slaying of Pakistani student]
Lahore, the capital of Pakistan’s most populous and wealthy province, is also the home of Sharif’s ruling party and half a dozen Islamist groups. In October, the anti-blasphemy group and a second religious party ran test
candidates in a legislative race there, and observers say it could become a key battleground in their bid to influence the national elections later this year.
The region is also home to the country’s largest concentration of Christians, who constitute about 10 percent of the populace. Until now the anti-blasphemy forces have focused on condemning Ahmedis, another minority religious group, but Christians have
come under attack before, and activists said the number of blasphemy accusations against them is growing.
“This was never our war. We have much in common with Muslims, and when problems arose we have always tried to settle things informally,” said Mary Gill, a Christian member of the Punjab provincial legislature. “We are not against the blasphemy law. We just want to prevent its misuse.”
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But the family and their lawyer told a different story. They described a complex conspiracy that involved Muslim youths who fought with Massih at a cricket match, a mobile-phone shop owner who belonged to the anti-blasphemy group and a local landowner who wanted to drive out low-income Christian squatters.
“There are conspiracies through the whole story,” said the lawyer, Aneeqa Anthony. “This is a very emotional issue, and people in mobs don’t pay attention to facts; they just know they have been told that blasphemy has occurred, and they want someone to be hanged for it.”
Anthony said officers of the Federal Investigative Agency falsely accused Massih of sharing the offensive image on Jan. 16, a date when his cellphone was at the repair shop. She also said he could not read or write but put his thumbprint on a written confession after being beaten in custody.
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