About 30 of the some 50 countries that currently outlaw blasphemy, according to a 2014 Pew Research Center report, are majority Muslim.
Source/Credit: Foreign Policy | Pulitzer Center
By Krithika Varagur | June 21, 2017
JAKARTA, Indonesia — This month, Jakarta’s embattled former governor, Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, was sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy against Islam, based on his flip quotation of a Quran verse that addresses whether Muslims can elect non-Muslim leaders. The presiding judge declared that Ahok did not express enough remorse for his indiscretion.
The verdict shocked liberal Indonesians but probably more than it should have. Blasphemy charges have steadily risen in the last decade in Indonesia and have a near 100 percent conviction rate. Meanwhile, across the Muslim world, there has been an uptick in blasphemy charges and prosecutions in recent years. Blasphemy has been spiritedly revived in Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted in 2011. In 2001, there was only one blasphemy trial in Pakistan, but now there are dozens each year. There has been a steady drip of attacks and murders of bloggers and writers in Bangladesh in the last five years, along with a deadly mass protest in 2013 demanding the death penalty for blasphemy.
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