Of course, in this story there are righteous Muslims to be proud of as well. They include the Supreme Court judges, whose prudent decision that saved Ms. Bibi noted the Prophet Muhammad’s tolerance for Christians. They include Punjabi politician Salman Taser, who stood up for Ms. Bibi in 2011, only to be assassinated for that by his own bodyguard. They include three British imams, who recently joined the campaign to grant asylum to Ms. Bibi in Britain.

In other words, the militant Islamists who want to kill all blasphemers, real or perceived, do not define Islam. But they do define a fanatic, ferocious, dangerous strain within Islam.

This strain has led to various attacks on freedom of expression, the bedrock of civilization, over the past three decades. The first one was the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s infamous 1989 “death fatwa” calling for the execution of the author Salman Rushdie for his irreverent novel, “The Satanic Verses.” Then came the violent reactions to cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. Terrorist attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo followed. And among nations like Pakistan, Iran, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, Ms. Bibi is only one of the many victims of blasphemy laws.

Muslims who support such violent or oppressive responses to blasphemy are missing two important points. One is that it is them, not the blasphemers, who are defaming Islam, by presenting it as an immature tradition that has little room for civilized discourse. The second point is that their zealotry is not as religiously grounded as they think.

To see this, one must look at the Quran — the most fundamental and only undisputed source of Islam. Most notably, throughout all of its 6,236 verses, it never tells Muslims to silence blasphemy with force. It tells them only to respond with dignity.