Date: 25/12/2015
Grim Life for Christians in Muslim Pakistan
by Raymond Ibrahim • December 25, 2015 at 5:00 am
"Often in these cases the police take no action or, worse, side with the rapists. Christian families or witnesses are pressured to withdraw complaints." — Sardar Mushtaq Gill, Pakistani lawyer and human rights activist.
Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five, has been on death row since 2010 because a Muslim woman, apparently with a personal vendetta against Bibi, accused her of speaking blasphemy against the prophet of Islam, Muhammad. "She could be killed by any inmate or even a prison guard," said an official. "She was vomiting blood last month and was having difficulty walking."
Saddique Azam, a Catholic teacher and headmaster at a primary school in a small village, was beaten and tortured by a group of Muslim teachers who resented being under the authority of an "infidel."
Nabila Bibi, a Christian woman who was engaged to a Christian man, was abducted, forcibly converted to Islam, and forcibly married to a Muslim man.
Asia Bibi and two of her five children, pictured prior to her imprisonment on death row in 2010 for "blasphemy."
The U.S. State Department lists only nine nations as "Countries of Particular Concern" (CPC) -- a designation for those nations considered to be the worst violators of religious freedom. These include governments that "engage in or tolerate" systematic, ongoing, and unspeakable violations of religious freedom.
According to many human rights activists, this list is far from complete: "the State Department has seemed unwilling to recognize the grave unspeakable abuses of religious freedom in a number of Muslim-dominated countries that the USCIRF [U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom] considers CPCs: Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria and Tajikistan."
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