Canada to be New Home for Asia Bibi, Pakistani Christian Acquitted of Blasphemy

Asia Bibi—the Pakistani Christian who was acquitted of blasphemy—is coming to Canada.

The date of her arrival is unknown. But when she arrives she and her husband, Ashiq Masih, will be reunited with their two daughters already in the country.

It will bring to an end a case going back to 2009, when the young Catholic woman was accused by her Muslim neighbours of insulting the prophet Muhammad.

Laws against offences related to religion go back to the colonial period in Pakistan, but were expanded in the 1980s to include desecration of the Quran and blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad—with a recommended penalty of death.

According to critics, the laws often are used to settle personal scores against members of minority religious groups—as happened to Bibi.

She maintained her innocence, but was sentenced to death in 2010.

Bibi languished in prison for eight years until fall, last year, when Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned the conviction.

Following her acquittal, Bibi was set free. But death threats from radical religious hardliners forced her and her family into hiding.

In December, her daughters, ages 18 and 19, quietly slipped out of Pakistan and made their way to Canada.

In January Pakistan’s Supreme Court re-affirmed their decision to acquit her, clearing the way Bibi to leave.

According to family friend Nadeem Bhatti, a Canadian who is helping Bibi’s daughters adjust to a new life in this country, the girls are “excited” to see their mother again.

“They are trusting God she will be released soon,” says Bhatti, a Christian from Pakistan who fled that country 12 years ago to escape persecution.

The girls’ location is being kept secret out of concern for their safety, he says, noting that outside of a small group of supporters “nobody knows where they are.”

A Roman Catholic Church bishop emphasized that point in an interview with the Catholic Register, the oldest English Catholic publication in Canada.

According to the bishop, who wants to be anonymous so would-be assassins can’t find Bibi's family in his diocese, “it's real life and death stuff.”

Richard Walker, a spokesperson for Global Affairs, declined to make any comments on the case, but confirmed the Canadian government is working with other groups to bring Bibi to Canada.

For Bhatti, the challenges facing Bibi and her family are personal.

He is related to Shahbaz Bhatti, a Pakistani Christian politician and member of Pakistan’s National Assembly who was assassinated in 2011 by an extremist because of his support for persecuted Christians in that country.

Bibi’s family is not the first he has helped leave that country; Bhatti has helped several other Christian families escape Pakistan for a new life in Canada.

When he thinks about Bibi, he is filled with admiration and is glad her ordeal is almost over. “She is a very brave woman,” he states.

He also hopes her case will be a wake-up call for North American Christians about the plight of other persecuted Christians in Pakistan.

Until Bibi, “nobody talked about the persecution in the media,” he says of challenges facing Christians who are just 1.5% of the population in the Muslim-majority country.

Canadians, he says, “take for granted the liberty of free speech and the freedom of worship.

These types of freedoms “are not protected and enshrined in other countries,” he adds.

Bhatti is grateful that Bibi and her family will find refuge in this country.

At the same time, he is very concerned about the plight of thousands of other Pakistani Christians languishing in Thailand.

 “They are begging for help to get out,” Bhatti says of Christians who fled to that country in hopes of being resettled in the west.  

But proving religious persecution is hard when it is episodic and personal, not state-sponsored; they are having trouble getting their cases heard.

Now, Bhatti says, they are in limbo, unable to work in Thailand and afraid to go home, their only hope laying in intervention by western countries.

Bhatti hopes the Canadian government will help, that it will have the same “soft heart” for them that it had for Syrian refugees—and that it has for Asia Bibi and her family.

From the Feb. 16, 2019 Winnipeg Free Press. Photo from the Associated Press, via the Free Press..