Asia Bibi acquitted by Pakistan Supreme Court
The BBC news report of this judgment on its news website begins as follows:
A Pakistani court has overturned the death sentence of a Christian woman convicted of blasphemy, a case that has polarised the nation.
Asia Bibi was convicted in 2010 after being accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad in a row with her neighbours.
She always maintained her innocence, but has spent most of the past eight years in solitary confinement.
The landmark ruling has already set off violent protests by hardliners who support strong blasphemy laws.
See this link for the full BBC news report.
Link to the pdf file of the judgment of the Supreme Court.
In the first line of the Judgment and on p. 2 under point number 2, the word Kalimah is spelt as Qalimah!
From Abdul Momin:
Appeasing the Intolerant. It is heartening to see some of Jinnah's quotes regarding Ahmadies-that I read a long time back-repeated in a recent article in the newspaper Dawn. That article can be accessed at the following link:
http://www.dawn.com/news/1444756/smokers-corner-politics-of-appeasement?preview
Some excerpts:
According to Jamiluddin Ahmad’s book Speeches and Writings of Mr Jinnah, on May 23, 1944, when some supporters of Jinnah’s All-India Muslim League asked Jinnah to address the “Ahmadiyya question”, Mr Jinnah replied: “Who am I to declare someone a non-Muslim, if he professes to be a Muslim?” In his book Jinnah Reinterpreted, Pakistan’s former ambassador Saad Khairi writes that, soon after Pakistan’s creation in 1947, during a party session chaired by Jinnah, a man, unhappy by the manner in which Jinnah had explained Islam, stood up and said: “But Jinnah Sahib, we have been promising people, ‘Pakistan ka matlab kya, la ilaha illallah …!” “Sit down!” roared Jinnah. “Neither I nor the working committee of the Muslim League have ever passed any such resolution. You might have done so to catch a few votes.”
It just boggles the mind that a country could so far deviate from the principles of its founder that it would let itself and the religion it professes to follow be completely hijacked by obscurantists, many of whom had opposed the very creation of that country. Combining religion and politics is a very dangerous and combustible mix, especially when the purpose is to use religion as a tool to achieve political ends. Western countries found this out a long time ago, but in Pakistan people do not want to learn from history; hence they are unfortunately condemned to repeat it. The Qadiani jamaat, whose members have suffered a great deal in Pakistan at the hands of anti-Ahmadiyya bigots, should also ponder about the cost to Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad's mission because of the induction of politics in the Ahmadiyya jamaat, soon after his death. History might well have taken a very different course if the jamaat of HMGA had not been split into two because of self-serving individuals who introduced divisive politics in the jamaat.
From Zahid Aziz:
For original references to the May 23, 1944 statement of Mr Jinnah, please see this link, and follow the two further links within it (which are: Link 1 and Link 2).