THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The death sentence on Asia Bibi, a Christian woman in Pakistan, for blasphemy has set off a storm of debate about her fate.
It started as nothing more than a petty squabble: a group of Muslim women refused to sup from a bucket of water fetched by a Christian co-worker as they picked berries on a farm.
But within days the spat had escalated into a deadly storm, as imams whipped up an angry crowd accusing Aasia Bibi of badmouthing the Prophet Muhammad.
Today the mother-of-five is on death row, the first woman in Pakistan to be sentenced to hang for blasphemy.
Her tiny, stinking cell is now the centre of a political storm as liberals face off with conservative clerics over the country's barbaric blasphemy laws, which cuts to the heart of Pakistan's uneasy relationship between religion and democracy.Hard-line Muslims have taken to the streets, warning the government not to cave in to foreign pressure to pardon her, and issuing death threats to her supporters, alarming the country's embattled Christian minority.
Meanwhile, from the prison where she is being held, Mrs Bibi, 45, has made one brief statement to proclaim her innocence. "The allegation against me is baseless," she insisted, speaking from behind a veil worn not as a concession to Islamic sensibilities, but simply to hide her identity. "We had some differences and this was their way of taking revenge." >>> Rob Crilly in Lahore | Saturday, November 27, 2010
This ideology is a curse on the civilised world, and nobody is prepared to do anything about it. It will lead us into a New Dark Age. – Mark
