Lynchpin of Muslim coercion.

Islam would be a minor jerkwater cult but for its wildly successful tools for exacting obeisance – its contemptible apostasy and blasphemy laws. All its stupidities and cruelties survive because of the legal right of any Toad Holler mufti to issue a death fatwa for supposed violation of them, which any taxi driver, night soil collector, or Danish welfare recipient can carry out.

Here's how the blasphemy laws operate in East Dogpatch:

Yet the enduring outrage of Pakistan's blasphemy laws must be confronted. Introduced by the dictator Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s, the laws offer no precise definition of the crime and require no proof of intent or standards of evidence. The mere accusation of saying or writing something deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad or the Koran is enough to be arrested and imprisoned. Indeed, even injuring the "religious feelings" of individual citizens is prohibited. Since 1986, at least 892 persons have been accused of blasphemy--and in virtually every instance the charges were completely fabricated.

The false witness aspect is particularly delicious. Islam and integrity. "Integrity" is the word that you automatically associate with Islam, isn't it?

Without apostasy and blasphemy laws as tools of crowd control, Muslims would drift away and convert to superior faiths as have many of the rest of the world. Even with the threat of death and apostasy, plenty of Muslims drift away. The true believers are frantic about it, as they always have been.

Not only do the Muslims intimidate their own, they -- ever and eternally insecure as they are -- also work hard at punishing any outsider who attempts to assist any Muslim in learning about alternatives to Islam. E.g., Algeria.

I wonder . . . is "death fatwa" a redundancy?

"Blasphemy in Pakistan. The law that breeds terror." By Benedict Rogers & Joseph Loconte, The Daily Standard, 4/22/08 (emphasis added).