Itan Wali, Pakistan (CNN) -- In this village in Pakistan's Punjab province a tearful 12-year-old girl ponders if the Pakistani government will soon hang her mother.
"Whenever I see her picture I cry," Isham Masih told CNN. "I want my mother back. That's what I'm praying for."
This month a Pakistani court sentenced Isham's mother, 45-year-old Asia Bibi, to death, not because she killed, injured or stole, but simply because she said something.
Prosecutors say Bibi, who is a Christian, broke Pakistan's strict blasphemy law by insulting Islam and the prophet Muhammad, a crime punishable by death or life imprisonment according to Pakistan's penal code.
Prosecutor defends blasphemy law
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The alleged incident happened in June 2009 when Bibi, a field worker, was picking fruit in a village two hours west of Lahore. Prosecutors say when Bibi dipped her cup into a bucket of drinking water during a lunch break, her co-workers complained the water had been contaminated by a non-Muslim.
Court records show the women got into a heated argument.
Mafia Satar said she was there and heard Bibi's insults.
"She said your Muhammad had worms in his mouth before he died," Satar told CNN, a crude way of saying Muhammad was no prophet.
The town cleric, Qari Muhammad Salim, reported the incident to police who arrested Bibi. After nearly 15 months in prison came her conviction and the death sentence.
"When I heard the decision my heart ached," Bibi's husband Ashiq Masih told CNN.
Masih denies his wife ever insulted Muhammad. He said death threats forced him and his daughters, one of them disabled, to flee their village.
Neither the Koran nor the prophet Muhammad's teachings in the Hadith call for the execution of blasphemers, but Islamic scholars and jurists from generations past included the death sentence when drafting Islamic law.
Human rights groups have long blamed Pakistan's blasphemy laws for persecution and violence against religious minorities like last year's attack on a Christian village in Punjab Province and recent bombings of minority Muslim mosques.
Activists say the government has refused to amend the law for fear of backlash from Islamist groups and their followers who deem scrapping the law as un-Islamic.
At the time this report was filed, Pakistan's law minister had not responded to CNN's request for an interview.
Bibi has appealed her death sentence and asked for bail, the chief prosecutor of Punjab province told CNN.
The prosecutor, Chaudhry Muhammad Jahangir, said the appeal will be heard by the Lahore High court and a decision could be months away.
Pakistan has never executed someone convicted of blasphemy but in Bibi's village public opinion was unanimous.
"Yes, she should be hanged," a group of villagers cried out.
The town cleric, who made the initial complaint against Bibi, called her death sentence one of the happiest moments of his life.
"Tears of joy poured from my eyes," Qari Salim told CNN.
The clerics tears are in stark contrast to those shed by Bibi's daughter Isham, who wants her mother to live.

I am sure American Liberals have a better understanding of Islam then those who practice it, there for this entire country of muslims is in error, and extremists who have bastardized their religion. Now sleep comfortably as it is a tiny minority of extremists and not a country with a nuclear arsenal.

Perhaps now you understand why our forefathers believed that freedom of speech was so important that it rated being the first amendment to the Constitution.

Perhaps now you understand why the separation of Church and State is important.

If we did not have those two things as tenets in our laws, this type of horror would still be happening here. If you think it wouldn't, that we are more civilized than that, in my humble opinion, you are dangerously naive and very wrong.

We would not have the Constitution unless people supported it. If we got rid of the Constitution today, I don't think things would change much.

I am sure American Liberals have a better understanding of Islam then those who practice it, there for this entire country of muslims is in error, and extremists who have bastardized their religion. Now sleep comfortably as it is a tiny minority of extremists and not a country with a nuclear arsenal.

Well I'm certainly sure that I have a better understanding of Islam than you do if you're going to lump all people who follow it in this group. It's like saying that all Christians have exactly the same beliefs.

That said, it is nothing short of horrifying to me that in this day and age, there is still this kind of mindless brutality going on.

When you lump enough Muslims together, you get a country that infringes on human rights (by Western standards, perhaps not by Medieval standards).

"The last man to be sent to prison for blasphemy was John William Gott. In 1922 he was sentenced to nine months hard labour for comparing Jesus with a circus clown. In Scotland, there has not been a public prosecution since 1843"3. The 1843 prosecution was when bookseller Thomas Paterson was sentenced at Edinburgh High Court to 15 months in prison for selling blasphemous books4.

The legal system of England was once ruled by the Christian Church; much of "ecclesiastical law" influenced common law. "The offence of blasphemy was originally part of ecclesiastical law. In the seventeenth century, blasphemy was declared a common law offence by the Court of the King's Bench[...]. From the 16th century to the mid 19th century, blasphemy against the Christian religion was held as an offence against common law. [It was used to] to persecute atheists, Unitarians, and others"4. It used to cover all Christian denominations but in an 1838 case it was restricted to protect the "tenets and beliefs of the Church of England"3. This is because the Church of England became the established denomination of the English government, and they tolerated no other forms of Christianity and did not want to protect them.

It was used to persecute the publication of anything that questioned Christian beliefs or the Christian religion. It was an offence to question the Holy Trinity or to question that the Christian Bible was the word of God. Strict and fundamentalist Muslim countries in the present day have the same attitude towards blasphemy of their prophet Muhammad as Christians once did in Europe.

Meh who cares what happens there? Let the UN not deal with it. Then they can just Darfur it all up while not dealing with it.

You know, a lot of these countries were better off as European-controlled territories. It's not right for these people to set up their own governments, because of all the shitty laws they make.

You know, a lot of these countries were better off as European-controlled territories. It's not right for these people to set up their own governments, because of all the shitty laws they make.

Official: Pakistani Christian woman falsely accused of blasphemy
From Reza Sayah, CNN November 22, 2010 3:50 p.m. EST

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- A preliminary investigation shows that a Pakistani Christian woman has been falsely accused of insulting the Prophet Mohammed, a government official said Monday.

"The president asked me to investigate her case and my preliminary findings show she is innocent and the charges against her are baseless," Pakistani Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti told CNN.