Pakistan’s blasphemy laws evolved from colonial order-keeping to a political tool, enabling clerical pressure, false accusations and weakening justice
Maham Fazal
Blasphemy laws in Pakistan are not theology on paper. They are a system for managing crowds, settling disputes and rewarding those with the loudest voices and the biggest microphones. The language is pious. The mechanics are political. Once you see the logic, the history stops looking like a series of accidents and starts reading like a manual.
The legal seed was colonial. The British drafted section 295 of the Indian Penal Code to protect places of worship and public order. They later added section 295A to punish deliberate and malicious insults intended to outrage religious feelings. The aim was not to defend doctrine. It was to keep the streets calm in a combustible province by criminalising provocation. At independence, Pakistan inherited this template of public order dressed as piety.
What changed under General Zia ul Haq was scale and purpose. Between 1982 and 1986 the state added 295B for defiling the Quran and 295C for derogatory remarks about the Prophet, while Ordinance XX created 298B and 298C that targeted Qadianis/Ahmedis even for using Islamic terms. In 1990 to 1991, the Federal Shariat Court ruled that death is the only punishment under 295C, removing life imprisonment as an alternative. These decisions did not merely tighten a law. They changed the incentives around accusation. They also created a new political economy in which religious entrepreneurs could marshal street power and present it to the state as a veto. Zia built that market and used it to discipline opponents, isolate minorities and secure legitimacy during the Afghan jihad era. The textbooks followed. The sermon and the civics lesson began to speak the same language. Once that happened, the line between faith and political leverage blurred.
Official prison tallies show blasphemy incarcerations rising from 11 in 2020 to 64 in 2022 and 213 in 2023, with 767 people behind bars on such charges by 25 July 2024, the majority in Punjab
From there, the pattern hardened. A video clip circulates. Delegations of clerics visit the district administration. A crowd gathers. The police reach first for public order powers under the Maintenance of Public Order law to detain the accused. An FIR under 295C or related sections follows, often with cybercrime add-ons if the trigger was online. Claims of insult are treated as a security incident before they are treated as a question of evidence. The state frames this as prudence. In reality, it is an outsourcing authority. Rival Sunni schools that argue over doctrine close ranks on the honour of the Prophet. That convergence turns a single allegation into a citywide problem before a magistrate can read a file. One hard number tells the story’s scale. Official prison tallies show blasphemy incarcerations rising from 11 in 2020 to 64 in 2022 and 213 in 2023, with 767 people behind bars on such charges by 25 July 2024, the majority in Punjab.
Late August 2025 in Jhelum fit the same script and adds the identifiers. Engineer Muhammad Ali Mirza, widely known as Mirza Jhelumi, was detained for 30 days on 26 August under section 3 of the Maintenance of Public Order after a clip went viral. Ulema delegations from various parties pressed the district administration and his Quran O Sunnat Research Academy was sealed, followed on 27 August by a blasphemy FIR at City Police Station Jhelum under section 295C with relevant PECA provisions on the complaint of Humair Ali Qadri of Aalmi Tanzeem Ahl e Sunnat. There are deep theological quarrels between Barelvi, Deobandi, Ahl e Hadith and Ahl e Sunnat networks, yet on this issue, they acted in concert and the administration treated the risk of unrest as determinative. Whether one agrees with Mirza or not is beside the point. The operational lesson is that accusation plus organised pressure now reliably produces detention and a case file. That is a system, not a coincidence.
The story of our blasphemy laws is the story of how a colonial public order clause became a post-Zia instrument of political control and then matured into a crowd-powered business model
Religious political groups learned to pressure the state the way traders learn a price floor. Each successful blockade or crowd threat created a new minimum response the bureaucracy would pay to buy quiet. The contradiction is structural. Parties and clerics who cannot agree on prayer timings discover unity on the one lever that brings the state to the table. The bargaining chip is sacred language. The payout is administrative compliance, airtime and sometimes funds. When this becomes routine, it teaches citizens a darker lesson. Accusation is power. Evidence is for the powerless.
The social impact is corrosive. First, it normalises collective punishment. A rumour can empty a neighbourhood, close factories and shut schools. Police and judges make decisions with a crowd at their shoulder. Second, it creates a market for false accusations. Property disputes, professional rivalries and personal grudges are laundered as piety. Families sell assets to pay for safety or legal defence. Third, it chills inquiry. Teachers, journalists and publishers learn the rules of silence. Fourth, it hurts the economy. Investors read the pattern as institutional weakness and price it into their decisions. A society cannot be open for business and closed to argument at the same time.
Parliament has often chosen severity over process. In 2023, it increased the maximum punishment under section 298A to ten years with a heavy fine. The intention may have been deterrence. The effect has been to strengthen the hand of those who thrive on accusation. The lesson of three decades is clear. When you inflate penalties in a system that does not protect the investigation and the trial from street pressure, you reward vigilantism and make justice look optional.
The point of saying all this is not to disparage faith. It is to protect it from being used as a weapon. Pakistan already has the constitutional tools to draw the right lines. Protect people from threats and incitement. Protect officers, judges and defence lawyers so that a trial can be a trial, not a theatre. Punish false accusations with the same energy the state spends on the accused. Rebuild police investigation with mandatory forensics and senior oversight in the gravest cases. These laws are deeply entrenched and politically hard to unwind, and the state has repeatedly stood weak before the clerics and shown little will to act; but at the very least, move blasphemy out of the crowd’s hands and back into the court’s hands. None of this makes Pakistan less Islamic. It makes the Republic more just and therefore more stable.
The story of our blasphemy laws is the story of how a colonial public order clause became a post-Zia instrument of political control and then matured into a crowd-powered business model. It explains why clerical rivals can unite in a heartbeat against a convenient enemy and why bureaucrats reach for detention before evidence. It also explains why we feel a slow leak in our civic character. Reversing that leak is not about harsher slogans. It is about the quiet courage of process. A state that refuses to be blackmailed is not anti-religion. It is pro-law. Protecting process protects faith from misuse, and the state and establishment must finally rein in the clerics they once nurtured — or in this fraught geopolitical moment, they risk dragging Pakistan’s hard-won international image back to zero just as the country is trying to find its feet.
Courtesy: This is an article of the Friday Times Pakistan, dated 1st September 2025.
