THE FOUR MEN who shuffled into an antiterrorism court in Islamabad, Pakistan, on a mid-October morning were shackled together, a chain leash extending from each of their handcuffs into the hands of a supervising police officer. One was a college professor, one a self-proclaimed religious revivalist, another a small business owner, one an employee in an oil company. They said they did not know one another—or, rather, had not known one another until they found themselves standing trial in a case that had by then dragged on for 18 months. This was the other, more tenuous link between them: They had all been accused of committing blasphemy on the internet.
It was a slow court day in the Pakistani capital. The lawyer for two of the defendants, the revivalist and the businessman, had not shown up. The judge was exasperated. He scolded them, warning that he might make the two defendants cross-examine witnesses themselves, then adjourned the hearing, to the annoyance of the other two. “I don’t even know them,” protested the professor, his manner imperious despite the shackles. “Why are we being tried together?”
The professor was accused of blaspheming during his classroom lectures; someone had made a recording of him speaking. The revivalist—more precisely a religious reformer, who in this case believed he was divinely ordained—was accused of espousing sacrilegious views on a Facebook page.
But the longest litany of accusations were against Muhammad Ali (a pseudonym), the small business owner: According to the charge sheet, he had used a “cyber codename”—an alias, ostensibly—to run a Facebook page that posted anti-Islamic material and promoted atheism. He was also accused of running a website called Realistic Approach for the same purpose, and he was charged with translating and uploading a banned book called Rangeela Rasul, which translates to “colorful prophet.” The fourth defendant was alleged to have helped him.
Ali categorically denied these charges. He ran a small computer store in the southern city of Karachi, dealing in desktops and used processors. Business had withered in recent years—everyone owned a smartphone these days and had increasingly little use for his clunky machines. Forty-seven years old and the father of three, he had been toying with the idea of emigrating to the United Arab Emirates in search of work, but in the months before his arrest in March 2017 he’d fallen out with his travel agent. In the ensuing weeks, as he was taken into remand, he wondered: Who had framed him, and why?
Blasphemy cases in Pakistan begin as local disputes even when they morph into national flash points, and in many instances a bit of digging reveals motivations other than religious offense: a bruised ego, a land dispute, a quarrel in a fruit orchard. In almost all cases, according to multiple lawyers who work on them, the accuser is known to the accused. But Ali said he had no idea who had painstakingly downloaded the contentious material, taken screenshots of offensive social media posts, tracked down his identification details, and prepared a CD that was then dropped off at the nearest cybercrime center, nearly 1,000 miles away from where Ali lived and worked.
RANGEELA RASUL, THE book Ali was accused of translating from Hindi to Urdu and uploading to the internet, was first published in 1924 by a man named Mahashe Rajpal; the book immediately became a flashpoint between Hindu and Muslim communities in British-governed India. Rajpal had already escaped two attempts on his life when, on an April afternoon five years later, a 19-year-old carpenter’s son called Ilm-ud-din stabbed him eight times inside his bookshop in Lahore, retreating as bystanders began flinging books at him.
Rajpal died immediately; Ilm-ud-din was executed six months later. Around this time, the British introduced clause 295-A to the Indian Penal Code, prohibiting insults to religion or religious beliefs. In the 1980s, in what had then become Pakistan, a number of clauses specific to Islam were added; a few years later, the death penalty was implemented for certain crimes pertaining to defiling the prophet Muhammad’s name. Nearly 1,400 people have been accused under the blasphemy laws between 1987 and 2014. While no one has been executed by the state under these laws, at least 62 men and women were murdered on mere suspicion of blasphemy in roughly the same time period.
That the internet would complicate the regulation of sacrilege became apparent early on, even before Pakistan had a coherent cybercrime policy. YouTube was first banned in 2008—the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority objected to an anti-Islamic clip from a Dutch film. For a couple of hours, the PTA managed to disrupt YouTube access throughout the world; the ban within Pakistan lasted two days.
The following years saw more temporary bans—including of Wikipedia, Flickr, and Facebook—but the most significant clampdown came in 2012, after the release of Innocence of Muslims, a 14-minute segment from a film that originated in the United States and was perceived as denigrating Islam. Protesters burned down cinemas in Peshwar, even though the film was only available online. YouTube was indefinitely banned.
In August 2016, the Pakistani government passed the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act, known as PECA. Around the same time, there was an apparent shift in policy from merely restricting access to blasphemous online content toward prosecuting individuals accused of dissemination. (The policy was not officially announced, but prosecutions began to follow that pattern.) Digital rights activists had been warning this was the next logical step: A defense lawyer reasoned that there were financial incentives for lawyers to encourage such cases—no attorneys’ fees were paid in cases involving merely blocking content—and, in conservative circles, litigating such cases added glory and professional respect.
In early 2017, five bloggers known for being critical of the state went missing. When civil activists raised the alarm about the disappearances, authorities revealed that blasphemy cases had been filed against the bloggers, accusing them of supporting or associating with anti-Islamic pages on Facebook. Rights activists objected: The state, they said, was using the tinderbox issue of blasphemy as a means of quashing all sorts of dissent. In late January, an Islamabad-based man, Hafiz Ehtisham Ahmed, petitioned the high court to rid the internet of all blasphemous content. The judge hearing this case threatened to ban all social media unless it was purged of blasphemous content.
In mid-March 2017, a student from the small town of Chakwal, studying in Islamabad, submitted an official complaint to Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency (known as the FIA) against Ali, who was arrested in Karachi on March 22 (or March 23, according to an official conviction slip). In court documents, it is Ahmed who appears as the primary complainant against Ali. Ali said he did not know either the student or Ahmed and suspected someone of framing him.
Meanwhile, in April, in another town, another student—Mashal Khan—was accused of blaspheming on Facebook and lynched by his classmates. In a Facebook post some months before his death, he had warned of a fake account maligning him. As his brutal death made national and international news, panicked Pakistanis shared the post in droves, terrified that they might be framed in the same manner. Official inquiries, conducted by the FIA, later determined that the accusations had been fabricated, both in the case of the student and the bloggers, but it was too late—Mashal was dead and two of the bloggers had sought safety abroad.
In May that year, cell phone users in Pakistan began receiving unsolicited text messages from the PTA. “Uploading & sharing of blasphemous content on Internet is a punishable offense under the law,” the message read. “Such content should be reported … for legal action.” By that time, according to the authority, more than 3,000 complaints had already poured in. (As of October 2018, nearly 35,000 sites and pages have been blocked for hosting blasphemous content.) Then in June 2017, a local court delivered the first verdict in a case pertaining to blasphemy on social media. Thirty-year-old Taimour Reza was sentenced to death, reportedly the first person in the world to be sent to the gallows for a Facebook post.
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