Pakistan’s blasphemy law devastates scores of lives each year

TANVEER AHMED, afraid to leave the near-darkness of his home, sits on his bed fretting. He is a civil engineer; his wife was the headmistress of a private school. They enjoyed a comfortable life together. An accusation of blasphemy levelled at his wife swept all that away, and he now cowers in a dilapidated couple of rooms in a suburb of Lahore. His wife, Salma Tanveer, is on death row. He has lost his home and job and worries that a mob could kill him at any time. “My wife is a very good woman, she did not deserve this,” he says. “We are afraid, we can’t go anywhere.”