Blasphemy law

Bowing to pressure from protests from Muslim groups, a British cinema chain has pulled all screenings of a film over “safety concerns”.

Muslim countries should unite and form a transnational trade boycott to force the West to pass blasphemy laws that would protect Muhammad from perceived insults, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan proposed Monday.

Local Islamic leaders in West Yorkshire will send a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson demanding that Britain show “respect” to Islam or face becoming “like France” following controversy over a teacher showing students a picture of Mohammed.

Comedian Ricky Gervais has joined the chorus of condemnation against the suspension of a British teacher for showing a caricature of the Islamic prophet Mohammed, questioning whether people will be “punished for insulting unicorns” next.

Indian diplomats condemned the government of Pakistan on Tuesday for what they called the “institutionalized violation of human rights” in that country before the United Nations, where Pakistan sits on the Human Rights Council.

Indonesian police arrested a man on Monday over an allegedly blasphemous TikTok video, in which he claimed that a mosque in the West Java province was blaring music.

A lawyer for a Pakistani Christian man sentenced to death two weeks ago in Lahore for blasphemy told Fox News on Monday that his client did not insult the Islamic prophet, Muhammad, as alleged, but merely refused to convert to Islam.

A judge has sentenced a musician in northern Nigeria’s majority-Muslim Kano state to death by hanging for blasphemy against Islam’s Muhammad, Nigeria’s Premium Times reported this week.

Radical Muslims in Pakistan are praising a teenage boy who allegedly gunned down a U.S. citizen accused of blasphemy in court last month, hailing him as a “holy warrior” for the killing, Reuters reported on Sunday.

An American Muslim man on trial for blasphemy in northwestern Pakistan was shot dead in a courtroom Wednesday.

A Hindu doctor working in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province was arrested on charges of blasphemy on Monday after a local cleric filed a police complaint against him. 

Voters in Pakistan may not have their ballots by election day, July 25, because over 100 candidates have pending legal cases that keep them off the ballot, preventing election officials from printing the ballots in time.

The looming July 25 general elections in Pakistan have seen hundreds of candidates enter the political mainstream with backing from Islamic terrorist organizations and ardent supporters of the country’s blasphemy law, the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) revealed this week.

China’s National People’s Congress passed a law, going into effect on Tuesday, prohibiting any speech or behavior that desecrates “the deeds and spirit of the heroes and martyrs” of the Communist Party.

A Muslim extremist man executed in Pakistan for killing a governor after he urged the country to reform its controversial blasphemy law in support of a Christian woman has reportedly galvanized the head a new Islamist party to adopt the rallying cry of “death to blasphemers.”

Jakarta governor Basuki (Ahok) Tjahaja Purnama has won the first round of gubernatorial elections, the first step in securing re-election before a run-off vote in April.

The government of Pakistan has reportedly blocked a satirical news site inspired by Jon Stewart and The Onion, the same day the site published a joke article mocking the nation’s harsh blasphemy laws.

Members of a radical Islamic advocacy group in Pakistan attacked a peaceful rally calling for police to solve the disappearance of a number of secular activists, who disappeared recently and were later accused of “blasphemy.”

Pakistani police have arrested a Christian man — described by some as a “pastor,” others an “evangelist” — for allegedly desecrating a Quran by writing his name on it. Friends and family say the charge is impossible, however, because Shahbaz Babu is illiterate.