On Jan. 4, 2011, Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was shot and killed by his own bodyguard, Mumtaz Qadri. Qadri shouted “God is Great” before discharging 27 rounds at the governor in broad daylight in Islamabad. His stated motive was Taseer’s public criticism of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and his support for Asia Bibi, a Christian farmhand then on death row for alleged blasphemy.
Qadri was seen as a hero and celebrated for the murder. His brother described the killing as an act of religious duty, saying, “We are just grateful that God chose a member of our family to protect the reputation of the Prophet.” After a legal case was filed against him, lawyers offered him free representation, crowds showered him with rose petals during court appearances. After his 2016 execution, thousands of supporters attended his funeral and later built a shrine in his honor.
That same year, Pakistan’s Supreme Court upheld the acquittal of five of the six men convicted of gang-raping Mukhtaran Mai in 2002 on the orders of a tribal council. Of the fourteen men she had named, thirteen ultimately walked free. Only one remained convicted. Mai said the court had overlooked extensive evidence.
“The entire area knows that I was raped. Around 50 to 100 people were gathered there,” she said. “Even one of the elders confessed to hearing me cry and shout for them to stop.” Long before the acquittal, Mai’s case had been publicly discredited by then-President Pervez Musharraf, who said that rape had “become a money-making concern,” suggesting that Pakistani women fabricated assault claims to obtain a Canadian visa, citizenship or money.
These were fundamentally different crimes, yet the stark contrast in their political, judicial, and public responses reveals a hierarchy of honor. Mukhtaran Mai’s case ended with near-total collapse of accountability, while blasphemy allegations have repeatedly triggered mass protests, mob violence, and killings. Since Pakistan’s independence, successive governments have negotiated the tension between Pakistan’s Islamic identity and its constitutional framework, while religious movements have gained political influence by presenting themselves as defenders of Islam. In this environment, challenges to religious authority can carry far greater political costs than failures to address violence against women and children, making religious honor a powerful basis for public and institutional mobilization.
The logic of collective honor
In Pakistan’s dominant religious and political culture, a blasphemy allegation is framed not as a private dispute but as an assault on the collective honor of Islam and its adherents. The accusation itself can therefore trigger a public response: religious leaders, political actors, crowds, and state institutions may mobilize before the allegation has been tested in court. What matters most is the perceived need to demonstrate that religious honor has been defended.
In comparison, sexual violence against a woman or child is processed through a different logic. It is treated primarily as an injury to the honor of male relatives, not as a violation of her own rights. Family honor is understood to be protected through concealment rather than disclosure. The survivor’s right to justice is thus structurally subordinated to her family’s interest in reputational management.
That hierarchy is embedded in Pakistan’s laws and institutions. The record repeatedly reveals a duality of honor in which religious honor receives far greater legal and political protection than the rights of women and children subjected to violence.
Historical origins: Two parallel legal inheritances
Pakistan’s blasphemy laws trace their origins to the penal code of British India in 1860, a colonial provision criminalizing the destruction or defiling of religious property with intent to insult a religious community. In 1927, a Muslim man named Ilm-ud-Din murdered the Hindu publisher of a pamphlet titled “Rangila Rasul,” or The Colorful Prophet, which mocked the Prophet Muhammad’s life, particularly his multiple marriages to women of varying ages.
In response, the British added Section 295-A, extending liability to insults conveyed through words or images. Ilm-ud-Din’s appeal was argued by a prominent lawyer named Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The appeal failed, and Ilm-ud-Din was hanged and celebrated by many as a martyr. Jinnah would go on to found Pakistan two decades later.
These laws passed into independent Pakistan largely unchanged. A significant expansion came under General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization program as a tool of political consolidation. It introduced Section 295-B, criminalizing the desecration of the Quran as punishable by life imprisonment, and Section 295-C, making blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad punishable by death or life imprisonment.
That Islamization program also transformed the legal treatment of rape. The Hudood Ordinance of 1979 required four adult male Muslim witnesses to the act of penetration for a rape conviction. A woman who filed a complaint without them risked prosecution for zina, the offense of extramarital sex and faced flogging or imprisonment. The ordinance governed rape prosecutions for 27 years, shaping the practices of an entire generation of police officers, prosecutors and judges.
Its four-witness standard was repealed only by the Protection of Women Act of 2006. The reform was met with nationwide protests from religious parties calling it an un-Islamic measure, and a “license for spreading obscenity and vulgarity.“
Law, enforcement & public response
This disparity is visible in three interconnected areas: the severity of the law itself, the extent to which it is enforced and the public pressure and extrajudicial responses that shape how these laws operate in practice.
Statutory severity
Section 295-C mandates the death penalty for blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad, with no sentencing discretion available to the court. A 1991 Federal Shariat Court ruling closed off life imprisonment as an alternative, making death the only legally available sentence upon conviction. Under Pakistan’s Penal Code, the crime of rape carries the same maximum penalty as blasphemy. Section 376 punishes rape with death, life imprisonment or a fixed term of 10 to 25 years, at the discretion of the sentencing judge.
For gang rape, that discretion narrows: every man convicted must receive either death or life imprisonment, with no lesser sentence available. Since 2010, parliament has separately enacted a series of laws criminalizing violence against women, covering workplace harassment, acid attacks and rape investigation procedure. Several of the most consequential of these laws can be traced not to routine legislative process, but to sustained advocacy from women’s rights organizations, international treaty obligations and individual cases that drew international media attention and public outrage.
In comparison, the 2022 Quran Publication Amendment Bill was unanimously passed by the Senate and became law in 2024. It set detailed rules for handling and disposing of damaged Quranic material and created a Quran Board specifically to oversee its error-free publication, recording, and disposal.
Legal enforcement
The contrast becomes most apparent in enforcement, where the statistics reveal markedly different outcomes for the two offenses. Between 1987 and 2024, at least 2,793 people were accused of blasphemy, including 344 new accusations in 2024 alone. Although religious minorities make up less than 4% of Pakistan’s population, they accounted for roughly 44% of recorded accusations.
Punjab Province saw the highest concentration, accounting for 71% of recorded accusations. According to Punjab Prisons data, 587 prisoners were held under blasphemy laws in 2024, 515 of them awaiting trial. By early 2025, that number had risen to 680, including 603 awaiting trial.
For women facing violence, legal protections have expanded over time, but the record of implementation and prosecution remains weak. Over the years, research has found that nearly 93% of Pakistani women have experienced workplace harassment, yet the Federal Ombudsperson’s 2024–25 annual report recorded just 711 official complaints from women nationwide.
According to the 2024–25 Labour Force Survey, 17.8 million girls and women are employed across Pakistan. Those complaints represent approximately 0.004% of the total, or roughly one complaint for every 25,000 female employees. A similar pattern appears in other forms of violence. A separate study documented 9,340 acid-attack victims between 1994 and 2018, while convictions for the offense fell by nearly half between 2016 and 2018 despite penalties of up to life imprisonment. In Sindh, roughly 10,000 girls are estimated to have been subjected to forced marriage to the Quran, a practice in which a girl is ceremonially married to the Quran and prohibited from marrying anyone else or withdrawing from the arrangement. The practice is primarily intended to prevent women from inheriting property or transferring it to outsiders through marriage.
The law criminalizing it and similar practices has produced conviction rates of only 1% to 2.5%. In 2024 alone, Pakistan formally recorded 32,617 cases of gender-based violence, including 5,339 rapes, 24,439 kidnappings and abductions, 2,238 cases of domestic violence, and 547 “honor” killings. Yet these figures represent only a fraction of the violence occurring: Pakistani senator Sherry Rehman stated 70% of GBV cases go unreported. In rural areas, estimates suggest that as many as 90% of women experience domestic violence.
Among the cases that are reported, conviction rates remained just 0.5% for rape and honour killings, 0.1% for kidnapping and abduction and 1.3% for domestic violence. Taken together, the data reveal how rarely these cases result in convictions or meaningful punishment.
Rape provides the clearest illustration of that divide. In 2023, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan recorded 6,624 rape cases nationwide, meaning a woman was raped roughly every 45 minutes. Yet even as rape remains widespread, legal protections have struggled to translate into effective enforcement. The Anti-Rape Act of 2021 introduced special courts and prohibited the discredited two-finger virginity test, yet it went unenforced for three years until a 2024 court order compelled implementation.
This act emerged from a case that exposed failures at multiple levels. In September 2020, a woman traveling on the Sialkot Motorway was gang raped in front of her children after her car ran out of fuel. She had called Motorway Police for help beforehand but was told the location fell outside their jurisdiction. Lahore’s police chief commented that the victim had shown poor judgment by traveling on a less populated road, adding, “She should have checked her fuel tank because there were no petrol pumps on that route.” Investigators also found one attacker had a prior rape charge and was wanted in roughly 10 other cases.
These failures prompted citizens to take to the streets across Pakistan, demanding legal action and helping push anti-rape legislation onto the national agenda. The accused were arrested within days, convicted in March 2021, and sentenced to death, while the incident helped spur the Anti-Rape Act later that year. The case shows that the problem extends beyond the absence of legal protections to their failure to be enforced, with public outrage often driving demands for legal intervention.
Public response
Noor Mukadam’s case was one such example of public and media pressure. In July 2021, 27-year-old Mukadam, daughter of former diplomat Shaukat Mukadam, was held captive, tortured, raped and beheaded by Zahir Jaffer, the son of a wealthy Pakistani-American businessman, at his Islamabad residence. CCTV footage showed her attempting to escape, while household staff prevented her from leaving.
The prominence of both families brought extraordinary national attention. A #JusticeForNoor campaign trended across the country, celebrities and public figures repeatedly demanded justice and vigils and protests drew widespread participation. Jaffer was convicted of murder and rape within seven months, and the Supreme Court later upheld his death sentence for murder while reducing his rape sentence to life imprisonment.
The proceedings moved unusually quickly by Pakistani standards, from investigation to appeal, in a country where most sexual-violence cases do not reach comparable outcomes.
Noor Mukadam’s case shows what public pressure and family status can achieve. Kasur shows what happens without them. In 2015, an organized child sexual abuse and pornography ring was exposed in the district, involving an estimated 280–300 children. The perpetrators filmed the abuse and used the recordings to extort families and silence them, with roughly 400 videos reportedly surfacing.
Despite the scale of the abuse and the evidence collected, the case attracted far less sustained national attention and failed to produce lasting convictions. A senior provincial minister publicly denied that child abuse had occurred and subsequent appeals overturned convictions.
Three years later, in the same district, the case of seven-year-old Zainab Ansari drew a dramatically different public response. Zainab was abducted, raped and murdered in January 2018. Her murder was followed by nationwide protests, a citywide shutdown, clashes with police and demands for immediate justice. DNA evidence linked her killer, Muhammad Imran Ali, to 10 other rapes of girls from the same neighborhood. He was arrested after a 14-day search, convicted and hanged within nine months.
The public response to Zainab’s case also contributed to the passage of the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act in 2020, which established a system for reporting, locating and recovering missing or abducted children.
In blasphemy cases, however, mass mobilization has often produced a far more punitive response. Allegations can trigger demands for immediate punishment, with mobs sometimes acting before courts have determined whether the accused is guilty. At least 104 people accused of blasphemy have been killed extrajudicially over the past three decades. These attacks are not always spontaneous; in several cases, mobs have been organized through religious and political networks.
In Lahore’s Joseph Colony in 2013, a single blasphemy accusation against a Christian man drew a mob of roughly 3,000 people, which burned some 150 homes, 75 shops and two churches. All 115 people eventually tried for the attack were acquitted for lack of evidence. Ten years later, in Jaranwala, a similar accusation against two Christian men produced a mob that burned at least 26 churches and over 80 homes.
Investigators found the attack had been planned in advance, with local clerics and scholars affiliated with Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan using mosque loudspeakers to summon the crowd. Of more than 5,000 people reportedly involved, only 381 were arrested, most of whom were later released on bail or had the charges dropped. By mid-2026, only one person had been convicted in connection with the destruction.
A similar pattern unfolded in Kasur in 2014. Shahzad Masih and his pregnant wife, Shama Bibi, were killed by a mob after Shama was falsely accused of burning Quranic pages. A co-worker’s accusation, reinforced by a cleric’s fatwa and mosque announcements, mobilized hundreds within hours, while their employer at the brick kiln prevented the couple from escaping. When the mob arrived, they beat the couple and threw them into the kiln.
Killers of people accused of blasphemy are rarely brought to justice. One case, however, stands apart and points to the same factor seen in responses to sexual violence: not necessarily the severity of the offense, but the presence of external pressure compelling institutional action. In December 2021, a mob in Sialkot beat to death and burned the body of Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan factory manager falsely accused of blasphemy over the removal of posters as part of his job. Because Kumara was a foreign national, his killing prompted immediate diplomatic intervention by Sri Lanka and widespread international condemnation.
The prosecution was completed within months, an unusually rapid pace by Pakistani standards, resulting in six death sentences, nine life sentences and 72 additional convictions at trial. The outcome of subsequent appeals has not been publicly reported. The case illustrates how quickly institutional urgency can rise when a killing becomes a matter of national reputation and international scrutiny.
Honor as the organizing principle
The differences in law, enforcement and public response point to an underlying dynamic connecting all three: the politics of honor. It is the governing logic that helps explain why certain harms acquire extraordinary social and political urgency while others struggle to command the same attention. The effects become clearest when honor is converted from an idea into a demand for action. The response depends on whose honor is perceived to be at stake and whether its defense or restoration is treated as a social and legal priority.
Mukhtaran Mai’s case demonstrates the logic in its most literal form. In 2002, her 12-year-old brother was accused of having a relationship with a girl from the Mastoi clan. The tribal council treated the alleged relationship as an affront to the honor of the Mastoi clan and ordered Mai’s gang rape in retaliation. The logic was explicitly reciprocal: because Mai’s brother was believed to have dishonored the Mastoi clan, the council sought to dishonor his family in return by sexually violating his sister. Mai’s body thus became the means through which the council attempted to restore the honor it believed had been lost. The accusation was later found to have concealed the boy’s own sexual assault by Mastoi men.
Asia Bibi’s case reveals the same logic on a national religious scale. After the Supreme Court acquitted her in 2018, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan mobilized supporters across the country, blocking roads, burning vehicles and paralyzing public life while demanding her execution.
The party justified the protests by declaring, “The Prophet Muhammad is our respected leader, and upholding his honor and dignity is integral to our faith.” An allegation against one Christian farmhand was thus transformed into a collective injury to Islam, with religious leaders and demonstrators presenting its defense as a personal and communal obligation.
The consequences extended far beyond Bibi herself: judges faced threats, political leaders were pressured and Punjab’s governor was assassinated for supporting her, followed later by the assassination of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s first Christian federal minister and the only Christian at that time to hold a position in the federal cabinet.
The two cases operate at different levels, but the underlying mechanism is the same. In honor-based societies, reputation extends beyond the individual, shaping relationships, social standing and access to resources. Protecting honor therefore becomes a social necessity, not merely a matter of pride. Honor can belong to a family, tribe, religious community or nation, so an insult to a person or their beliefs can be seen as an injury to the whole group. Retaliation can then appear justified as an act of defending the group.
Once honor becomes a shared expectation, failing to defend it can bring immense shame and be seen as cowardice. Thus, even a perceived threat to honor can become a demand for immediate and extreme action. Once defending honor becomes a higher-order obligation, human rights and the life of the individual can become secondary.
In blasphemy cases, honor can demand extreme punishment; in cases of sexual violence, it can demand concealment. Justice has been possible when the individual is placed above the honor perceived to have been violated, as shown by the law named after Zainab Ansari and the conviction secured for Noor Mukadam.
Honor killing: the same logic turned inward
Honor killing sits at the intersection of both patterns: it is gender-based violence carried out in the name of family honor. In 2023, roughly 1,000 women were estimated to be murdered in Pakistan each year under the pretext of “honor,” though most researchers believe the real number is higher. Following Islamic law, the Qisas and Diyat Ordinance of 1990 made murder compoundable, allowing a victim’s legal heirs to pardon the killer. Because honor killings are often committed by family members, this allowed relatives to pardon the perpetrators.
Qandeel Baloch’s 2016 murder by her brother prompted the 2016 Anti-Honor Killing Act, which made honor killing an offense against the state to close this pardon loophole. Her brother later retracted his honor motive, claiming it was an ordinary murder, and was pardoned by his family anyway — the very outcome the 2016 reform had been designed to prevent.
The weakness of legal protection is also evident in the broader record of enforcement. In 2024, Punjab recorded 225 honor killing cases and secured two convictions. Sindh recorded 134 and secured none. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa recorded 134 and secured two. Balochistan recorded 32 and secured one. That amounts to five convictions across more than 500 reported cases, while the national conviction rate was approximately 0.5%.
Institutional actors
The patterns described above do not arise from any single institution or social force. Society, public institutions, the media and religious networks each shape how blasphemy and sexual violence are perceived and addressed, together producing the outcomes reflected in the record.
The police
The disparity begins with the police. In sexual violence cases, police frequently delay or refuse to register complaints. Victims are often advised to go home, with warnings that pursuing a case could damage their reputation. Such responses prevent many cases from ever entering the criminal justice system. Such delays are particularly damaging in rape cases, as they can postpone medico-legal examinations and the collection of forensic evidence, significantly weakening the prospect of conviction.
Human Rights Watch described the police role in such cases as “outright abusive.” Police have used harassment, intimidation and physical abuse against complainants and their families. This can occur even when the officers have no personal connection to either the victim or the accused, reflecting a broader social notion that sexual violence should be concealed to protect the community’s honor. Officers sometimes pressure complainants to drop charges after taking bribes and refuse to register formal complaints to prevent rising crime figures from attracting criticism from superiors. On the other hand, blasphemy allegations have often triggered immediate police action.
Yet when mobs mobilize over such allegations, police have repeatedly failed to prevent violence. These attacks are rarely spontaneous; crowds of thousands have been mobilized through mosque loudspeakers, public announcements and local networks.
In Jaranwala, police even warned residents that a mob was approaching, yet later claimed they could not stop the attack. In Joseph Colony, police reportedly delayed the entry of fire brigades until the evening, by which point much of the houses had already been destroyed.
Judiciary and legal system
The judicial process reveals a similar disparity. Both types of cases face severe delays and lengthy proceedings. In blasphemy cases, repeated bail denials and prolonged pre-trial detention are common. A TrialWatch project tracking 24 blasphemy cases in Lahore in 2022 found 217 of 252 hearings were adjourned over six months, with 17 cases showing no progress during that period.
Junaid Hafeez, a former university lecturer, has spent more than 13 years in prison, including over 12 years in solitary confinement. Judges and lawyers themselves have faced threats and violence in such cases: the lawyer who defended Asia Bibi had to leave Pakistan under security protection, while human rights lawyer Rashid Rehman was killed for defending Hafeez. Rehman was openly threatened during a hearing in the presence of the presiding judge, who took no action; police protection requested for Rehman was never provided. He was shot dead in his office weeks later.
Afterward, pamphlets distributed among the public described Rehman’s killing as his “rightful end,” adding, “We warn all lawyers to be afraid of God and think twice before engaging in such acts.”
In sexual violence cases, religious honor can be invoked to shape responses in support of accused rapists rather than victims. In 13-year-old Kainat Soomro’s gang rape case, the four accused were defended by prominent lawyer Waqar Shah, who was also representing Pakistan’s president in a separate case at the time. After securing their release, Shah led courtroom supporters in chanting “Nara-e-Takbir, Allahu Akbar” (“God is the greatest, Allahu Akbar”).
In an interview after the verdict, he said, “I salute our court, which upheld justice today. After three years, my clients finally got justice as described by God and His Prophet in the Quran.”
The public celebration of their release through religious prayers and slogans shows how religious honor is used to shape responses to sexual violence, in contrast to the hostility faced by those defending blasphemy accusations. But courts do not operate in isolation. Religious institutions actively shape the political and social pressure surrounding a case long before it reaches the courtroom.
Religious institutions
Pakistan’s religious establishment, from mosque and madrassa networks to the Council of Islamic Ideology, has consistently mobilized around blasphemy allegations, using sermons, fatwas and clerics’ statements to amplify accusations and legitimize extrajudicial action. Because these institutions often frame themselves as guardians of religious identity, protecting religious honor becomes central to their role.
The Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), a hardline Islamist group built around the defence of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, has been one of the most prominent forces mobilizing around blasphemy allegations. Its co-founder called for the killing of the judges who acquitted Asia Bibi, saying: “They all three deserve to be killed … Whoever has any access to them, kill them before the evening.”
In 2012, Federal Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour offered a $100,000 reward for the killing of the maker of Innocence of Muslims, going as far as calling on Taliban and Al-Qaeda members to carry out the assassination. Yet this urgency is rarely seen when sexual abuse occurs within religious institutions. Madrassas have also faced allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse by teachers entrusted with religious education.
In 2004, more than 500 allegations of sexual abuse against boys in madrasas were disclosed by an official, who said: “There are thousands of incidences of sexual abuse in the madressahs … This thing is very common … I am not sure what it will take to expose the extent of it. It’s very dangerous to even try.”
Individual scholars have condemned sexual violence, but nothing has matched the scale or consistency of mobilization around blasphemy.
Financial incentives
Blasphemy allegations have often served purposes beyond religious grievance. Many minority communities live in informal settlements without formal land titles, so a single accusation can displace an entire neighborhood and leave its property vulnerable to seizure. Minority-owned businesses face a similar pattern, with rivals using blasphemy allegations to eliminate competitors.
The abuse now extends into digital spaces. A confidential January 2024 Lahore Special Branch report, “The Blasphemy Business,” found a criminal network, including people linked to the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), posted blasphemous content on young men’s social media accounts and then filed complaints against them to extort money. The report linked several core members to Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and estimated the network accounted for roughly 90% of blasphemy cases registered by the FIA since 2021. The cases involved fabricated accusations against more than 450 people nationwide.
The media
The role of the media becomes particularly important when accusations can be fabricated or manipulated for gain. Coverage of sexual violence and blasphemy cases in Pakistan follow very different standards. News reports on blasphemy cases tend to use cautious or deferential language. Even when allegations involve threats, violence or intimidation, reporters carefully avoid language that could itself be seen as offending religious honor.
Rape coverage, by contrast, has exposed survivors to intrusive questions and victim-blaming, shifting attention from the harm inflicted on them to their behavior, clothing, character and sexual history. In the case of 17-year-old gang rape survivor Uzma Ayub, an ARY News team followed her to the hospital, where she gave birth to a daughter conceived during the rape. The team interviewed her on camera and broadcast the interview live on national television. Reporter Shazia Nasir asked whether Uzma was sure the baby belonged to her and whether she was happy about the birth.
Nasir later admitted that it was unethical to ask such questions, but said, “There is too much pressure on reporters to get the story.” The result is a media environment where accusations against religious honor demand caution, while victims of sexual violence often face exposure, judgment and blame.
What is the solution to injustice in Pakistan?
Pakistan’s unequal response to blasphemy and sexual violence is not simply a question of legal weakness or institutional failure. It reflects a deeper hierarchy of honor in which the urgency of justice depends not on the severity of the harm or the truth of the allegation, but on whose identity and values are perceived to be under threat.
In Pakistan, honor is not an abstract value but a justification for specific forms of control and violence. It is frequently invoked to silence rape survivors, justify violence against women and minorities, extort money, seize property and even murder. In the name of honor, people have been beaten to death, gang raped, burned alive, held in solitary confinement for years, driven from their homes, forced into exile and stripped of their property and livelihoods.
Across Pakistani society and its institutions, honor has become a pretext through which power is exercised. A blasphemy allegation, even when demonstrably fabricated, can command rapid public mobilization, legislative attention and severe legal consequences without procedural safeguards against false accusations.
By contrast, just 0.5% of recorded rape cases resulted in convictions in 2024. The record shows harm alone does not produce urgency; what matters is whether that harm is understood to threaten something society and powerful institutions feel compelled to defend. The cases that have produced justice show honor is not an insurmountable barrier; when individual rights take precedence over its demands, institutions can act.
Until sexual violence carries the social and political urgency attached to violations of religious honor, legislative reform alone is unlikely to produce meaningful structural change. Laws may be enacted, institutions established and commissions announced, but without sustained political will and public pressure, the gap between legal promise and practical enforcement will remain.
Featured image: Photo by Burhan Ahmad on Unsplash
Edited by James Sutton
Editor’s note: This article has been edited since its original publication.
