Murder for 'blasphemy'  Dr. Zafarul-Islam Khan writes Editorial in the Milli Gazette, 'A Fortnightly Newspaper for Muslims' India  

The thoughtless act of sending a Pakistani doctor to the gallows for 'blasphemy' will be used as another stick to beat Islam and Muslims with.  The most important part of this episode, according to media reports, is that the accused, Dr Younus Shaikh denies the charges and hence there is no case against him. Even in normal circumstances there is no place for such penalties in healthy and confident Muslim societies. When and if the accused denies the charges there is no case against him because the Shari'ah allows repentance, rather it orders the authorities to give a violator a chance to repent (istitabah) even before a trial. There is a lot of confusion about the suitability of this 'law' which was seldom invoked by Muslims all these fifteen centuries since the advent of Islam. Jews in Egypt, Morocco and Muslim Spain used to publicly abuse the Holy Prophet (pbuh), like Ibn Al-Najrilah whose outpourings were addressed by the great Andalusian scholar Ibn Hazm in his Risalah ibn al-Najrilah, but no action was ever taken against such persons because Muslims were confident that such abuses reflected only one's mental derangement. Philosopher Ibn Al-Rawandi of Baghdad (died 910 CE) was a great detractor of Islam used to publicly abusing the Holy Prophet, pbuh, but he was never tried by any court or touched by any person... Even the Prophet, pbuh, did not kill such persons in his life-time and there were many in Makkah and Madinah. Then why this insistence to give Islam a bad name by people who pay only lip service to Islam? We urge Pakistani authorities to spare this hapless man and abolish this 'law' altogether which goes against the nature of the religion of mercy.