This country has no hope.
British doctor in Pakistan arrested for reading from a Koran - Telegraph
A British doctor is languishing in a Pakistani prison accused of “posing as a Muslim” after being videoed reading aloud from the Koran.
Masood Ahmad, 72, is a member of the minority Ahmadi sect, who are declared non-Muslims under the terms of the country’s constitution and subject to widespread discrimination, violence and abuse.
They can face up to three years in prison if convicted of posing as a Muslim, a symptom of Pakistan’s intolerance towards religious minorities.
Dr Ahmad was arrested in the eastern city of Lahore last month after two men secretly filmed him reading a translation of a verse from the Koran.
They had posed as patients at a clinic run by Dr Ahmad and after receiving medications stayed to ask religious questions.
His family said he had returned to Pakistan in 1982 to open a pharmacy after working in London to pay his children’s school fees.
Now they fear the country’s strict blasphemy laws are being used to persecute the widower and strip him of his pharmacy.
“I feel so angry because I can’t do anything from here,” one of his seven children, Abbas Ahmad, a 39-year-old cab driver in Glasgow told Reuters.
“It’s awful to know that people were plotting against someone you love.”
The case has already aroused strong feelings and judges are under intense pressure to convict anyone accused of blasphemy Dr Ahmad was arrested when a mob, including local clerics, gathered outside a police station demanding that the doctor face charges.
Bail hearings have attracted mullahs chanting anti-Ahmadi slogans and the ageing doctor remains in prison.
Ahmadi groups say 21 were murdered for the faith in 2012. At the same time, some 20 blasphemy cases were registered against Ahmadis for using Muslim greetings or texts.
Persecution centres on the fact the sect considers its founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad to be a prophet, contravening the generally accepted view that Mohammed was the last prophet. As a result Pakistan’s half a million Ahmadis are considered heretics.
Religious hardliners claim there is a place in heaven waiting for anyone who murders a member of the sect.
And in 2010, almost 90 people died when two Ahmadi mosques were attacked by the Pakistan Taliban during Friday prayers.