The intolerance and fanaticism associated with Islam was recently very clearly demonstrated in connection with the sentencing to death of a fourteen year old Pakistani boy and his uncle, both of whom had been charged with blasphemy. The boy, thought to be illiterate at the time of the offence, was accused of having written on the wall of a mosque certain words which were regarded as blasphemous by Islamic fundamentalists. The boy is reputed to be a Christian. After the conviction the boy’s lawyer stated that the blasphemy laws had now reached “their ultimate conclusion, by unleashing religious terrorism, allowing people to take the law into their own hands and undermining the legal system by scaring off judges.” On appeal to a higher court the sentence was revoked but this was to be attributed more to the adverse publicity and world-wide condemnation which the case had stirred up than to any real change of heart on the part of those responsible for passing it. Even Pakistan’s Prime Minister refused to intervene to save the boy’s life and she flatly refused to initiate any move towards changing the country’s blasphemy laws. Last year, we are told, the militant Muslims put a high price on the head of the law minister when he proposed minor amendments to the blasphemy legislation and the Government were forced to retreat. When this present case was heard in the Court of Appeal Muslim fanatics demonstrated outside threatening to kill the two accused if they were freed and several thousand demonstrators were on the streets of Lahore and other cities in the Punjab demanding that they be put to death. These events indicate what would happen if Islam ever gained the ascendancy in our nation and the fact that so many mosques are springing up all over the country should move us to pray all the more earnestly that the Lord would hasten the time when the kingdoms of this world — Pakistan included — will have become “the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.”