Within a period of two weeks, two district courts in Punjab province separately awarded death sentence to two aged Muslims, one more than sixty-years old – a small-scale tailor in a town in Attock, and the other an old woman and a former school principal in Lahore for “making derogatory remarks against the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him)”.

For the aged tailor, Muhammad Islam alias Tooti, 62, the sentence was not less than a nightmare as he repeatedly denied charges.

“It is in the evidence of complaint that I used to be a better and much more professional tailor than him [the complainant]. The complaint and witness dishonestly deposed against me just to settle some past scores,” stated Islam alias Tooti before the court. A district court awarded him death penalty under the Section 295C on September 13. The court also awarded 10 years of rigorous imprisonment to Islam under the Section 295A of blasphemy law.

A tailor in the shop lodged the complaint against Islam alias Tooti after a heated debate on some religious issues, according to some locals. The complainant, some relatives of the convicted say, has sympathies for the Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a radical religio-political faction that has taken up the blasphemy issue quite actively in a bid to garner public support.

Some days later, on September 27, a district judge in Lahore announced capital punishment to Salma Tanveer, a school principal in her 50s, for “claiming prophethood and distributing derogatory pamphlets in her area”. A local mosque prayer leader lodged the case against Tanveer in September 2013, which has now concluded after a period of eight years.

“My client is a true Muslim and has been denying the allegation since day one,” Sarmad Ali, counsel of the accused, tells The News on Sunday (TNS).

“My client was also denied fair trial opportunity and the case was contested in jail premises amid security pressure and an approach that appears to be partisan towards some people involved in the case [belonging] to the police and the court,” he adds.

The law requires the conversation between the accused and the counsel to be confidential but this right was not respected during the proceedings, he complains. Also, he says, there have been continuous attempts from the complainant to delay the case proceedings for as long as possible. Similarly, he points out while talking about the police case against Islam alias Tooti, that it was lodged with a delay of 24 hours after deliberations with local clerics.

In Lahore, the convicted school principal was running a private school in the Green Town area and her counsel argued that the suspect was of unsound mind at the time of occurrence. The judge noted that a report of a medical board of the Punjab Institute of Mental Health (PIMH) termed the suspect “fit to stand trial”. The judgement read that it was evident that the suspect was “not free of abnormality, otherwise, she would not have written and distributed such derogatory material”. The judge, however, wrote that ‘mental abnormality’ “cannot be considered as a mitigating ground for the serious offence”.

Hence, while it was conceded that the woman was ‘suffering from mental abnormality’ at the time of writing and distributing the blasphemous material, it was also held that her condition could not be recognised as ‘legal insanity’. Tanveer, however, said before the court that she believed in the finality of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) and before performing Hajj in 2003 she had “lost her mental balance and did not know what happened”. She also said that due to her mental illness, she “did something wrong unintentionally and she was ashamed of it”.

“My wife is a Muslim and performed Hajj twice and Umrah seven times,” Tanveer Ahmad, her husband tells TNS.

“She was running a private school successfully and I was a civil engineer and also earning good money. The complainant in the case against her was teaching the Quran to our children and his own kids were getting free education from her school. A year before the occurrence, she lost her mental balance and started writing strange things. She was losing her memory and due to this many parents were pulling their children from the school. At the same time, I had a severe accident and became disabled. Difficult times were upon us and it was during this that the complainant managed to get her writings on request and one day we came to know about this case”, he bemoans.

Today, living in a dismal condition and without any resources, the family is trying to survive and is still seeking help to save Tanveer.

“Sometimes I feel that in blasphemy cases, the biggest victims are the Muslims themselves. They hardly get support from the West as compared to the sympathies towards blasphemy-accused people belonging to other faiths; and while living in the same society the accused and their families also face severe discrimination due to the accusations,” says Muhammad Amanullah, a human rights defender who has helped a number of people accused of blasphemy. He remembers how he helped Tanveer with her bail application but it was rejected by the Lahore High Court.

Amanullah urges the international community to “understand the plight of Muslims convicted wrongfully in blasphemy cases” and to help them as well.

The author is a staff reporter. He can be reached at vaqargillani@gmail.com      Twitter: @waqargillani