However, as citizens continue to get lynched or sentenced to death under pretexts that get flimsier by the day, we’re gradually losing the vocabulary with which to state our case.



In Raza’s case, the national media too has remained suspiciously quiet. It is not clear whether this silence signifies apathy, fear, or fatigue. Perhaps the media too has run out of words that are safe to use.

The solution isn’t as simple as to ‘not blaspheme’, because there is no objective line between criticism and sacrilege. What one may consider benign, may be regarded as ‘blasphemous’ by another; often posing grave risk to activists or writers like myself.

And once you have been accused, like Mashal Khan was, there’s no guarantee that one would even live to see the inside of a courtroom.

In April this year, Mashal, a 23-year old student, was seized by a mob and killed for blasphemy. Moderate Muslims unanimously condemned this act. The general opinion at the average dinner table around Pakistan was that those accused of blasphemy must not be killed — extrajudicially.

By saying nothing more, a majority of moderate Pakistanis – including our dependable liberal figureheads – implicitly supported a dangerous message: that killing someone for offending someone else’s religious sentiment isn’t inherently problematic; that Mashal’s death was regrettable collateral damage in an otherwise worthy war against blasphemy.

This time there is no mob of reactive brutes for us to blame, or a lone fanatic for us to admonish. A man is to die in the name of religion, not at the hands of an impulsive radical, but by the long, calm, and cold contemplation of the court.

The defense attorney continues to maintain that his client is innocent, and activists like Jibran Nasir have highlighted significant legal problems with the handling of the case. But the problem lies precisely in our reliance on the technicalities of the law.

After Taseer’s assassination, moderate Muslims made the tactical decision to condemn the nature of the killing, rather than killing itself; resting their hopes on loopholes in the social and legal order to rescue specific individuals caught in the trap.

“Blasphemers must be killed, of course,” the message went out. “But not Mashal. Not Taimoor. Not Taseer. Not Aasia Bibi. Those particular ones were innocent and wrongly accused.”

Taimoor Raza’s death sentence rubbishes the common notion that religious extremism is firmly contained within a fringe minority. Although some institutions are more blameworthy than others, when a democratic state executes a person, it is the people who must answer for their beliefs and values. Suddenly culpable, at least in part, is your aunt, and my friend, and the shopkeeper down the road and the woman who cooks my food, all of whom believe that blasphemers must be punished. Somehow, I’m part of a lynch mob now.



To reach into one’s moral core, and admit that killing someone for insulting religion is wrong regardless of the circumstance, is to invite an accusation of blasphemy upon oneself.