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.”
For Pakistan’s Christians, who make up some 3 million of the country’s 165 million population, such words will have a depressingly familiar ring: the blasphemy laws, it is widely acknowledged, have long been used as against them – not as a system of organised persecution, but simply as a way of settling petty personal disputes. However, in a land where a weak government is battling against an ever-stronger current of Islamic militancy, reforming them so that they are not abused is far from easy.” . . .
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True Discernment 
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