A Muslim man visiting the popular tourist destination of Madyan was once again falsely accused of having burned pages of the Quran.
by Massimo Introvigne
After the case of Christian Nazir Gil Masih, lynched in Sargodha on May 25 after he was falsely accused of having burned pages of the Quran, another similar horrific crime was perpetrated in Pakistan in the night between June 20 and 21.
A Muslim tourist from Punjab, Mohammad Ismail, was visiting the market of the popular tourist city of Madyan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, when somebody screamed that he had been seeing burning pages of the Quran. He was surrounded by a threatening crowd that started beating him.
Police managed to take him to the Madyan police station but had to succumb to hundreds of people that set fire to a police vehicle and started burning the police station itself as well. Mohammed Ismail was taken out of the police station by the mob, lynched, and burned.
Local authorities failed to understand how the false accusation of having burned pages of the Quran was generated but the charge has become so common in Pakistan that simply looking “foreigner” or “suspicious” may easily lead to fake accusations, lynching, and death.
Provincial authorities and the police are trying to identify and arrest the mob leaders but rarely are these arrests in Pakistan followed by prosecution and punishment. The moral panic about blasphemers keeps being entertained by the authorities themselves, despite hundreds of violent incidents arising from the poisonous climate created around the false claim that blasphemy is a national problem in Pakistan.
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.
