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.
"In the future, all crime will take place only on the internet,” declared Shahida (who introduced herself only by her first name), one of two women staffing the help desk at the cybercrime wing of the Federal Investigation Agency. The future may still be a while away: Only 22 percent of Pakistanis have access to the internet, although this number is increasing rapidly—it jumped by 27 percent between 2017 and 2018. Eighteen percent of the population—35 million Pakistans—actively uses social media; Facebook is the dominant platform.
Still, given the sheer number of complaints that land on her desk—some 400 daily by email alone, she said, each a glimpse of the dregs of the internet—it seemed to Shahida that all human interaction was shifting online: “Even mothers- and daughters-in-law will fight exclusively on WhatsApp,” she said with a wry smile. Riffling through papers, she pulled out a recent complaint by a man; a photo of his aged mother had been circulating on WhatsApp groups with the caption: “Check out the dick on mother.” We stared at the image, heads tilted, confused: an innocuous picture of an old village woman, sitting back on her heels. Why would someone do this?
The other woman in the room, Tayyaba (who also provided only her first name), sat across from Shahida, murmuring into a phone. When people call, distraught, she walks them through the steps to file a complaint. For those not quite at ease in the digital world, this can be a struggle. Aankh ka nishaan, she says to them, the one that looks like an eye. This is her way of explaining the @ sign.
Sometimes the callers start off with stories of burned feet and boiler explosions; the helpline for gas complaints is confusingly similar to the helpline for cybercrime. But most often the callers are terrified young women being blackmailed by jilted lovers wielding intimate photos. When they visit the cybercrime wing to register a complaint in person, often accompanied by a stern family member, Tayyaba is often distracted by their faces: puffy from crying or bruised. Shahida, mother to a young daughter, said she would never give her a cell phone.
“I’ll marry her off as soon as she is of age,” she said, half joking.
The cybercrime wing—also known as the National Response Centre for Cyber Crime—has seen an uptick in complaints since the promulgation of PECA in 2016. The number of cases and subsequent arrests have increased more rapidly as the capacity of the department has expanded: There were 49 arrests in 2016 and, as of September 30, 209 in 2018.
Still, for an organization catering to more than 200 million people, the cybercrime wing has surprisingly limited staffing: As of late 2018, the total staff was 114 people, a figure that included investigators, forensic experts, database engineers, and administrators. Between 1,200 and 1,500 complaints poured in every month, the director general told me. The cybercrime wing did not provide data on how many of these were complaints pertain to blasphemy.
According to Usama Khilji, director of Bolo Bhi—a civil society group that advocates for internet access, digital security, and privacy—there are three types of blasphemy cases relating to the internet. One involves people saying things about their own religion that could be construed as blasphemous by others; many members of sectarian and minority religions get charged this way. Another is people framed through fake accounts, as with the cases of Mashal Khan and the five bloggers. And lastly, the very nature of the internet has led to new forms of blasphemy. In one instance, someone was accused of sacrilege for merely liking a post; in another, the accused was the administrator of a Facebook group where another user had posted something offensive.
Next to the room where Shahida and Tayyaba sat, half a dozen computers whirred busily amid a snarl of wires—this was the cybercrime wing’s forensics lab. A word document was open on one of the computers: A report was being prepared on official letterhead. A technician watched another monitor as the system extracted data from a seized cell phone. At one point, he got up, spread a prayer mat in the center of the room, offered his evening prayers, and went back to work.
“The beauty of digital,” a senior investigator told me, “is that the evidence is either there or it is not.” It is true that interactions on the internet have a permanence that real life lacks; from an investigative perspective, there are no unreliable witnesses, no he said, she said. According to the forensic analysis report put forth by the FIA in Ali’s case, the seized devices—six laptops, four hard drives, and two mobile phones—were scanned for incriminating evidence. A list of 111 keywords—which included various Twitter handles, Facebook pages, email addresses, phone numbers, words and phrases in English and Urdu—was used to search the devices; these keywords, the FIA said, was based on the initial complaint against Ali.
But defense lawyers were skeptical of this approach: At least one lawyer was of the opinion that encryption technologies have become so advanced that it’s now difficult for the FIA, despite possessing state-of-the-art equipment, to obtain incontrovertible evidence that blasphemy was committed and by whom. Social media platforms were also unlikely to cooperate, invoking privacy and free speech laws when it comes to blasphemy cases. (Although, worryingly, Twitter has reportedly begun sending warnings to users that their tweets could be in violation of Pakistani law.)
The best-case scenario for an investigator is seizing a physical device—one lawyer told me that he advises his clients to immediately destroy their phones or laptops after being accused, especially because Pakistani courts privilege physical evidence and a lack of it could help undermine a case. But even if there were a device containing incriminating content, could you necessarily determine who had transmitted or downloaded the material?
Perhaps this difficulty in securing evidence is why FIA interrogators have been accused of resorting to illegal means and torture to extract information and confessions. Last year, for instance, a Christian man summoned to the FIA office in Lahore jumped off the fourth floor—he alleged he had been forced by his interrogators to perform sexual acts on his cousin, who had been arrested for sharing a blasphemous image on a Facebook messenger group. (The FIA denied the allegations.)
The senior investigator bristled when I asked him about this. Journalists highlighted cases of abuse by authorities but didn’t investigate instances where people deliberately blasphemed as a way to claim asylum in another country, he protested. When I broached this fairly common argument with Ali, he said, quietly: “It is not so easy to get asylum.”
Standing next to him in the holding cell of the antiterrorism court, the revivalist nodded: He had escaped to Sri Lanka when he began receiving threats for his proselytizing, but after three years of living there his asylum petition had been rejected. It was after his deportation to Pakistan that he was arrested for running a Facebook page (under his own name) that had offended the sensibilities of mainstream religious groups. Now he faced—at best—a lifetime in jail.
On the afternoon of March 22, 2017, Muhammad Ali’s wife, Asma (a pseudonym), was chopping vegetables for dinner, listening to a religious orator on her laptop. Asma was fond of the orator: He’d been a pop icon before becoming an Islamic televangelist. As it happened, he too had been accused of blasphemy a few years earlier; he’d said something casually misogynistic about one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, but the matter had—unusually, fortuitously—blown over. His voice echoing in her ears, Asma didn’t hear the ruckus in her house until she went searching for a sharper knife.
Even then, the nature of the ruckus did not quite register. Ten or so strange men crowded the courtyard of the family residence; relatives had emerged from their rooms on the upper levels and were looking at the scene below. Perhaps the men—all in plainclothes—were census workers? Or perhaps they were the polio workers who went door to door administering drops to children? The vaccinators had come in the morning too, and had said they would return. But wait—why were these men armed? And why were things strewn about as if a hurricane had rumbled through the house?
Then Asma saw the handcuffs on her husband.
The next few days—then weeks, then months—were a blur. The family received no news of Ali. It was not until a local newspaper, Ummat, began publishing articles about the case that Asma first understood her husband had been accused of blasphemy.
Still, she had no idea where he was. A popular television anchor began condemning Ali by name on his program; the next day, a mob assembled outside the family-owned milk store. Asma took her son, Ahmed (a pseudonym), and two daughters and escaped to a relative’s house, hoping to lie low for a while. Things only became worse: Pamphlets appeared outside their mosque, calling for Ahmed’s head to be chopped off as punishment for his father’s alleged blasphemy. So they fled the city.
“They say blood ties trump everything,” Asma said, “but in my experience, religion is thicker than blood.” A blasphemy accusation was like a stain that spread, making not just the accused a target but also those connected to him or her. Asma says Ali’s own family told her they would support her and the children if she cut off all ties with her husband. “But he is the father of my children,” she said.
Asma had been told by their lawyer to brace for an unfavorable verdict. Lower courts are known to be harsh with those accused of blasphemy, despite inconsistencies in the prosecution’s narrative. In this case, it still remained unclear why the FIA—understaffed and overburdened as it was—had moved so swiftly. It also remained unclear how the student from Chakwal had linked the blasphemous material—the website, the Facebook page, the translated book—to Ali.
In his complaint to the FIA, the student included information that was not publicly available, such as Ali’s address and national identification number. This highlighted another vulnerability faced by the accused in Pakistan, noted Khilji from Bolo Bhi: the dearth of data protection laws in the country. But Ali’s lawyer wondered whether the student could have been fed the information by the authorities. After all, he suggested, the FIA does not have regulatory authority; it can only investigate once a complaint has been lodged. Before Ali could be prosecuted, someone—anyone—needed to complain against him.
Social media was still a long way from being cleansed of sacrilege, despite the wishes of the high court judge, but the FIA could claim at least one victory: A single instance of blasphemy had been removed. The website Ali was accused of operating has been taken down; the domain is available for purchase. An associated Twitter account has been dormant since February 2017. Was the website taken down by authorities? Did the domain expire on its own? Did it ever even exist? Only this last question can be answered definitively: Yes, because portions of it are still available via the Internet Archive. For better or worse, and despite the best efforts of authorities and institutions and private individuals, the internet never really forgets.
If there is a profile of an archetypal blasphemer, Ali does not fit it. As a child raised in an especially religious family, he studied at a Karachi madrassa known for its jihadist alumni and links to certain virulent strains of militancy. As an adult, he taught there for more than 10 years. Yet, Asma said, slightly bitterly, when news broke that he had been accused of promoting atheism on the internet, people did not say: How could these charges be true? Instead they asked her, accusingly: Why didn’t you say anything?
But she had nothing to say, no alarm to sound. In any case, Ali is not really the sort who held forth on religion or politics, Asma said. He is bookish, but what he reads she could not say—she does not pay attention. Their son, Ahmed, now a skinny 18-year-old with shoulder-length hair and a perpetual look of wide-eyed wonder, said that the only time his father discussed such things with him was a few years ago when his adolescent angst found a familiar hook: militant religion.
The imam at the neighborhood mosque would speak of US ravages in Iraq, and as Ahmed listened, his anger simmered, then seethed. He began speaking of jihad, frequently and fervently. On days the school bus was late, he would rush to the mosque on foot, eager to offer his prayers next to the imam, even though the designated row for children was farther down the hall. He began to complain about his school uniform, wishing he could offer prayers in shalwar kameez—traditional garb—instead of trousers. He turned his aggression on his sisters: Step outside without covering your head, he warned, and I’ll smash your skull.
This was the one time Ali intervened, coaxing his son away from violence, providing a glimpse of his own views—surprisingly progressive, given his upbringing. He eschewed sectarianism, telling Ahmed that a Muslim was a Muslim, regardless of the school of thought they subscribed to. In fact, he told his son, you could think of the various fiqhs as items on a menu: All were acceptable, and you could pick and choose and mix as you wished. He talked about how to reconcile religion and modernity. For instance, Ahmed recalled his father saying, drawings of humans were said to be forbidden by the Quran, but currency notes now had faces on them, and everyone used money, even religious people, so perhaps there ought to be a middle ground?
Slowly, Ahmed’s aggression softened into something closer to intellectual curiosity. In the rigid middle-class milieu in which he was raised, opportunities to wonder aloud weren’t many. Father and son discussed other things too, such as the universe: Ahmed was curious about “how it came into existence, how it is evolving with time.” He would watch videos on YouTube, then discuss them with his father: Cosmology in particular interested him, he said. But, with Ali’s imprisonment, Ahmed began spending less time on the internet and asked fewer questions. You never know how a question or a contrarian view will be received, he said, so it is better to simply nod and agree.
Ahmed is not alone in his reticence. Rights activists in Pakistan are nearly unanimous in noting the chilling effect blasphemy has had on debate, both online and offline. Just how dangerous it is to speak of religion became apparent a decade ago, with the imprisonment of Aasia Bibi, a Christian berry-picker accused by her fellow (Muslim) farmhands of insulting the prophet. Freed by the courts last year, she is still unable to leave the country or move freely within it, due to widespread protests by right-wing groups.
A year and a half ago, Shaan Taseer, the son of the governor assassinated after speaking up in her defense, created a Facebook page called Letters to Aasia. The page has a modest following: 1,500 likes, maybe three dozen posts. Many are photos of handwritten notes in Urdu script; some, in distinctly childish scrawl, are addressed to “Aasia Aunty.” Some have names attached to them, but the page managers have changed most of them. The page was intended as a way of keeping alive the memory of Aasia, Taseer said—a digital memorial for someone still living but always haunted by the specter of violent death, in jail and out.
The internet afforded a degree of anonymity that, Taseer hoped, might allow a discussion that had otherwise become impossible. In one post, a teacher wrote about his efforts to discuss the blasphemy law with his journalism students. “Under their spirited talk, I could also sense their fear. While they remember your story, the image of Mashal Khan remains fresh in their mind.” In another post, a non-Muslim who did not specify her religion—or was it a he?—said her parents discouraged her from bringing up her faith in class. “We are not ashamed of our religion; we are scared it will harm us, like it has you,” she wrote. “But I am ashamed I cannot do anything for you.”
She continued: “Sometimes I think I will study law and fight for those wrongly accused of blasphemy. I don’t want to give my name yet in case my family reads this and discourages me from this dream.” For the moment at least, it remained possible for her to release this aspiration into the ether of the internet, free of consequence. For four others, Muhammad Ali included, it would be a long time before they would be able to venture online or out into the world. In February, the prosecution wrapped up its presentation of evidence, a small step forward in what would almost certainly be an excruciatingly long process, inching from the local court to the high court and then the supreme court, unless the accused gave up and accepted their fate. Nearly two years had already passed.
Alizeh Kohari (alizehkohari.com) is a journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan.
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