Salman Taseer was murdered on 4th January, shot 36 times by one of his bodyguards the Islamic militant Malik Mumtaz Qadri

The journalist reflects on the murder of Salman Taseer, the governor of the Pakistani province of Punjab who advocated the repeal of the blasphemy law and called for the release of Asia Bibi.

According to Valentina Colombo the murder "should lead us to reflect and maybe broaden the definition of Righteous among the nations to include all those people who risk their lives to help others regardless of their religious creed.

Wise and courageous are the words of Ejaz Ahmad, the director of ‘Azad’, a magazine in Urdu language published in Italy, who says that " the Pakistani government could also heed this call of the Pope, but the real problem lays elsewhere: Without the votes of the Islamic parties it will never have the Parliamentary majority needed to scrap the blasphemy law".

Ahmad raised a sore point. Nowadays every government in the Muslim world must compromise with religious fundamentalism thus making it impossible to pass any reform - of the Constitution or of anything else - aimed at limiting the interference of Islam in the public domain.

Ejaz Ahmad reaffirms a sad truth, which doesn’t only apply to Pakistan: “Unfortunately this law is used to arrest all dissident voices, from Christians to left-wing intellectuals. The real problem is that fundamentalism advances more and more in the Country and this imperils the future of Pakistan and makes it impossible to repeal this law”.

Read the whole article by Valentina Colombo