Author: Editorial
Publication: The New York Times
Date: August 30, 2001
Pakistani criminal court has sentenced
Dr. Younus Shaikh to be hanged for stating obvious facts about the life
of Muhammad before he became the founder of Islam. That verdict and the
blasphemy law that underlies it are an embarrassment to Pakistan and a
threat to the basic liberties of its citizens. Other countries can and
do honor the beliefs of Islam without offending basic precepts of justice
and intellectual honesty.
Dr. Shaikh is a medical school lecturer
whose crime was to say that before receiving God's words at the age of
40, Muhammad and his family were not Muslims and did not follow Muslim
practices. These remarks were reported to the local offices of a fundamentalist
group that then filed a criminal complaint under the blasphemy law. Earlier
this month a local court upheld the charges and imposed the mandatory death
penalty the law requires. Dr. Shaikh, who considers himself a devout Muslim,
has filed an appeal.
Hundreds of other Pakistanis have
been condemned under the blasphemy law since its introduction 15 years
go, most of them Christians or members of other religious minorities. In
the past, higher courts have generally truck down their death sentences.
But there is no guarantee that they will do so in the future.
Last year the country's military
ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, proposed that all blasphemy charges be reviewed
by local officials before being brought before a court. But General Musharraf
later dropped that proposal to avoid offending fundamentalist groups. A
better solution would be to eliminate the law altogether.
