“Even when nothing happens, my body stays alert,” the mental toll of being a journalist in a country where blasphemy is a crime

By Fizza Abbas

As cities grow vertically, more and more children are growing up with fewer spaces to play outdoors. Lack of group play severely impacts their social skills, increasing their screen time. 

Karachi, Pakistan’s financial capital, sits on the Arabian Sea and cools down only a little even during December. A nippy breeze here, a slight chill there.

But the night of 28 December 2023 was cold enough for me to grab a shawl on my way out as my husband, Waqas Rabbani, hopped on our motorbike. We were to ride 20 kilometres from our house to reach Hasan Square and shop for books.

Just as we turned a corner at Rashid Minhas Road, two men on a bike began chasing us. They were shouting at me, visibly angry. My husband kept riding; he didn’t want any trouble. After chasing us for four kilometres, through traffic signals, residential neighbourhoods, and main streets, they caught up with us. We stopped the bike. One of the men approached our bike, grabbed my shawl, and yanked it out. “Had you not stopped the bike, I’d have run you over,” he shouted.

I was flummoxed. My husband, thankfully, remained calm.

The men were angry because my shawl had Alif-Bay-Pay words written in Urdu, which looked like verses from the Quran to my aggressors. In Pakistan, where blasphemy is a crime, my shawl was considered disrespect shown to God or Islam. Believe it or not, it is punishable by law. But in recent years, people have not waited for the law to take its course.

My husband and I were in real danger of being lynched like Mashal Khan, a student who was lynched for allegedly posting blasphemous content online or the Sri Lankan national Priyantha Kumara, who was lynched for doing his job, which involved taking down stickers with religious verses on them, for a factory inspection.

Within no time that night I had almost become the news. The switch in roles was hard to make sense of. I was no longer the cold, objective journalist who wrote about gender, religion and human rights from a distance. I had come dangerously close to becoming the next morning’s headline.

 

 

When I started working as a journalist, I mostly worried about deadlines, accuracy, and access to sources. I reviewed plays, commented on impressionable TV dramas, and reported on gender based violence in a country that allegedly places a woman’s honour above everything else.

Today, while I continue to write about gender, I find it hard to not become a part of the story. Because a story doesn’t end at publication. It follows me home through online harassment, threats, and constant scrutiny. Reporting now comes with a quiet, ongoing risk, for my safety and mental health, particularly if the topic is blasphemy.

As is the wont of every journalist, as soon as we were safe, the first thing I did was to write about what happened with the bikers chasing me. My Facebook post on the incident caused a stir. Hundreds of people from across the country supported me, expressing their dismay and concern over the safety and security of people in the country. However, a few blamed me for wearing the shawl in the first place, or accused me of making up the incident. I was called a “liar,” a “fame monger,” and a “foreign agent.”

I felt judged, bullied for something I had no fault in, like a bird whose wings have been cut, but instead of sympathizing with it, people were blaming it for being wingless.

Some even looked at my older pictures and commented on my choice of clothing, criticising me for not covering myself up with a dupatta in most of my pictures.

Aged a century in a decade

Pakistan passed laws criminalising blasphemy in the mid-1980s under President Zia ul-Haq, during whose regime, conservative Wahhabi form of Islam got a boost. The country has seen more than 2,000 blasphemy cases since 1987.

By the time I became a journalist, Asia Bibi, a poor Christian woman, was already fighting a blasphemy case in the state of Punjab. Two senior politicians who supported her release and a repeal of the blasphemy laws had already been assassinated. I knew that the rot of religious extremism had strongly taken root in the country.

I shuddered when I read that many people sided with the assassins. I repeatedly thought of the families of the slain.

Merely two months after my brush with the men who accused me of blasphemy, another woman was caught in an equally scary situation in Punjab’s Lahore. In her case, it was far worse because she was wearing a shirt which had Arabic letters, which read “halwa” on it. The mob, which mistook it for a religious verse, asked her to remove her shirt. Social media was flooded with videos of the woman crouched in the far corner of a restaurant, while a mob was baying for her blood. A few police personnel were trying to protect her.

I felt as if somebody had replayed scenes from my incident. I remember trembling, biting my fingers until they bled while watching the news. I recall the horror on her face when the mob gathered around her. “Oh God…Ya Allah kher ho” were the two prayers on my lips. Seeing me in such a pitiful state, my husband suggested that I start a campaign on Facebook. The next day, both of us changed our profile pictures to a photo of the text, “Halwa is not blasphemy” and encouraged others to be a part of this journey. I even messaged the owner of a popular Pakistani clothing brand, Manto, known for making dupattas, kurtis and shawls of the kind that woman and I were wearing at the time of our respective incidents. He was very supportive on the phone. But, within hours, his brand put out a statement, which said, “if our products are putting you in harm’s way, don’t wear them—we care for your safety.”

While I was shocked, I realised this is the reality of our country. Blasphemy is not something you mess with.

Being a woman journalist in Pakistan

In the last few years, I have realised that just one wrong word or misunderstood sentence can put my life in danger. For many journalists in Pakistan, especially women, danger is not something you write about. It is something you learn to live with. The risks are layered. Online harassment, threats of sexual violence, doxxing attempts, and attacks on credibility have become routine.

Sleep becomes difficult. Some nights I lie awake, scrolling through my phone, checking if my social media account is still there, if an email has arrived, or if reporting on an incident has escalated. Other nights, I wake up from dreams filled with shouting crowds or women crying mid-sentence.

During the day, the fear follows me quietly. I walk faster when I’m alone. I rush through places that feel even slightly unsafe. I’m always alert, always scanning, and trying to get past situations where I might feel vulnerable. Sometimes I avoid looking people in the eye because I feel like they might sense the fear sitting inside me.

A 2023 survey by Media Matters for Democracy found that nearly 68 percent of women journalists in Pakistan had faced harassment or threats linked to their work, with an overwhelming majority exercising self-censorship due to fear of online abuse and real-world consequences.

Nadia Mirza, a well-known TV anchor, has spoken publicly about being targeted by online trolls who attack her appearance, question her competence, and issue threats meant to intimidate her into silence.

For women in the media like myself, such abuse is not an exception. It is part of the job. The message is always the same: be prepared to pay a price if you speak up. What rarely gets talked about is what this constant pressure does to your mind once the noise fades and you are left alone with it. The fear does not end when the incident ends: it stays.

Despite everything, I am aware that I have privilege. I work in the English language, have access to international publications, and have a supportive husband by my side. The women whose stories I tell are often much less privileged. I often carry the guilt of not being able to tell many of their stories or of not being able to protect the people who trust me with their stories.

Guilt when a source calls again, not for another interview, but because she has no one else to talk to. Guilt when I have to step back from a story because my own safety feels compromised.

I have nightmares and multiple episodes of sleep paralysis where I see women I’ve spoken to lying injured, abused, or raped by men whose faces I can’t remember. I wake up shaken, my heart racing, and my body tense with the knowledge that my words could create visibility but not safety…that sometimes journalism opens doors without being able to guard what comes after.

Over time, this kind of exposure changes you. I notice it in small, almost embarrassing ways. I lower my voice in public without realizing it. I pause mid-sentence, weighing words that used to come easily, even when I’m talking to friends. Before posting anything online, I reread it again and again, wondering how it might be twisted.

In rooms, my eyes move before my mind does. I clock exits. I read faces. I sense when someone is looking at me for too long. I assume tones in text messages.

Even when nothing happens, my body stays alert.