The suicide bombing inside Imambargah Khadijah al-Kubra in Islamabad was among the deadliest attacks in the capital in more than a decade. Thirty-seven worshippers were killed, nearly 165 were injured, and the sanctity of a house of worship was shattered during Friday prayers. Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi confirmed that an Afghan mastermind linked to Daesh (ISKP) is in custody, along with four facilitators arrested in Peshawar and Nowshera. The attack, he stated, was planned and indoctrinated in Afghanistan.

The condemnation was swift. The grief was real. Yet one word was missing. No major political leader, religious party, or prominent cleric publicly described the bombing as blasphemy.

Under Sections 295 and 295A of Pakistan’s Penal Code, acts that damage places of worship or deliberately outrage religious feelings constitute criminal offences. By any ordinary reading, bombing an Imambargah during congregational prayers would fall within provisions dealing with desecration of sacred space and disturbance of a religious assembly. Yet when the perpetrators are militants, the vocabulary shifts. The crime becomes terrorism, not sacrilege. That distinction matters.

When accusations arise against minorities, social media users, or ordinary citizens, the term “blasphemy” appears almost instantly. A woman in Lahore nearly faced mob violence because Athe rabic script on her dress was mistaken for Qur’anic verses. Online posts, sometimes misinterpreted, sometimes fabricated, have triggered lynchings. The legal machinery moves quickly, and public outrage follows.

The disparity is not merely rhetorical; it is institutional. Senior lawyer Sarmad Ali, who has been documenting blasphemy cases since 2023 through a regular newsletter, recently reported that the Inspector General of Punjab Prisons confirmed that twenty-five women remained behind bars in Punjab on blasphemy charges as of November 2025. Despite repeated letters to the Inspector General of Prisons in other provinces, no comprehensive figures were provided.

The difficulty in obtaining accurate nationwide data reflects a broader pattern: statistics linked to blasphemy cases are often opaque, even as prosecutions continue. The framework is readily activated against ordinary citizens, yet when militant groups attack mosques and Imambargahs, often openly claiming responsibility, the legal and public discourse shifts almost exclusively to terrorism, and the blasphemy vocabulary recedes.

Meanwhile, militant organisations have repeatedly targeted mosques, Imambargahs, and Sufi shrines across Pakistan, often openly claiming responsibility. These acts are prosecuted under anti-terrorism statutes, as they should be. But they are rarely framed, legally or rhetorically, as blasphemy, despite involving the destruction of sacred spaces and the killing of worshippers at prayer.

When the accused are weak, blasphemy becomes the primary frame. When the perpetrators are armed militants, the discourse shifts to security

When the accused are weak, blasphemy becomes the primary frame. When the perpetrators are armed militants, the discourse shifts to security

The pattern was visible again after the Islamabad attack. Media coverage of condemnations, including statements by Majlis Wahdat-ul-Muslimeen (MWM) chief Raja Nasir Abbas, consistently described the bombing as a terrorist assault on a place of worship and an attack on humanity and religion. The emphasis was on security failures, sectarian violence, and solidarity with victims. Conspicuously absent was any call to invoke blasphemy laws.

At a high-level joint conference of Ulema, Mashaikh, and minority faith leaders, participants went further. They declared violent extremist factions responsible for such attacks to be outside the fold of Islam and described terrorism as a violation of Islamic teachings. It was a strong theological rebuke. Yet even there, the language stopped short of labelling the act itself as blasphemy or demanding prosecution under that category.

This hesitation is revealing. It shows that even in response to acts described as grave violations of Islamic tradition, there exists room for restraint. Religious leaders demonstrated that interpretive caution is possible. They distinguished between terrorism and theological offence. That interpretive flexibility appears elsewhere, too.

When popular singer-turned-religious figure Junaid Jamshed faced blasphemy accusations in 2014, his public apology was accepted. Religious scholars urged forgiveness. More recently, Engineer Muhammad Ali Mirza faced similar allegations; again, scholars intervened, and the matter was defused. Both were granted the benefit of the doubt. Both were allowed to claim lack of intent. Interpretive mercy exists. But its distribution is uneven.

A celebrity preacher receives understanding; a poor Christian woman may spend years in prison. A public figure is given space to apologise; a child arrested over a social media post may not receive comparable intervention. Militants who bomb a house of worship are declared terrorists, and even described as outside Islam, yet the most incendiary legal and rhetorical charge remains unused.

The contrast becomes even sharper when cultural practices are considered. The recent revival of Basant in Lahore has brought nostalgia and economic activity. Yet some voices have condemned it as blasphemous, linking it to the contested story of Haqiqat Rai. There is no established historical evidence tying the festival to that episode, but denunciations spread easily. A kite festival is branded sacrilege; a suicide bombing in a sacred space is not.

The selective application of language reveals something deeper than inconsistency. It exposes hierarchy.

When the accused are weak, blasphemy becomes the primary frame. When the perpetrators are armed militants, the discourse shifts to security. When the accused are influential or well-connected, interpretive generosity emerges. Mercy flows upward. Severity flows downward.

The issue is not whether restraint is possible. The reaction to the Imambargah bombing proves that it is. Religious scholars demonstrated caution in their language, even while condemning the perpetrators in the strongest moral terms. The question is why that same caution is rarely extended to the hundreds of ordinary citizens accused under blasphemy laws, most of them poor, uneducated, and lacking political backing, who consistently deny intent and, in many cases, publicly apologise if any act of theirs is perceived to have crossed a religious boundary unintentionally.

If desecration of holy places constitutes a profound violation of faith, then consistency demands clarity in language and law. If interpretive mercy can be exercised in some cases, it cannot remain the privilege of the powerful.

Otherwise, we must confront an uncomfortable conclusion: that in Pakistan, blasphemy is invoked less as a shield for the sacred and more as a tool for regulating the vulnerable.

Silence, in this context, is not neutral. It reveals the structure of power beneath the rhetoric of faith.

© The Friday Times