Noman Masih is accused of having shared caricatures of Prophet Muhammad via WhatsApp. He claims to be innocent.
by Massimo Introvigne
On June 1, Noman Masih, a young Anglican Christian whose age is given by different sources as 19 or 22 (a frequent problem in Pakistan), has been sentenced to death by hanging for blasphemy by the Court of Bahawalpur, in the Punjab province of Pakistan.
Noman has been convicted of keeping blasphemous images of Prophet Muhammad in his cell phone and sharing them with others via WhatsApp. According to his relatives and lawyer, the prosecutor’s story is, however, contradictory.
The story starts on June 29, 2019, when Sunny Waqas, who happens to be Noman’ cousin, was arrested in Bahawalnagar, more than 170 kilometers from Noman’s home, and accused of carrying in his bag printed caricatures of Prophet Muhammad with the intention of showing them to other people. The police had received a tip from an undisclosed source.
Waqas, who is being separately prosecuted, told the police that he had received the images from his cousin Noman via WhatsApp and had printed them. This made Noman a co-defendant in the Bahawalnagar case, where a decision has not been rendered yet.
On July 1, 2019, the police of Bahawalpur received another confidential tip that they would find Noman in a public park at 3:30 in the morning showing the blasphemous images to other people from its phone. The FIR (First Information Report) filed against Noman states that he was indeed arrested in a park at 3:30 am, while his family and neighbors testified that he was arrested on that night in his home, where he was quietly sleeping.
The prosecution could not find witnesses ready to state that Noman had shared blasphemous images with them (as mentioned earlier, his cousin Waqas claims he did, but the case concerning Waqas is being tried separately).
The decision is based on a forensic expertise, which concluded that Noman’s images were in his cell phone and were shared via WhatsApp. Noman’s lawyer, however, observes that the cell phone has been in the possession of the police for almost three years and can easily have been tampered with.
The decision should be confirmed by the High Court of Lahore, where the lawyer plans to show the prosecutor’s contradictions. In the meantime, Noman remains in jail. He can receive a second death sentence in the Bahawalnagar case, where he will be tried together with the cousin who accused him in the first place.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
