BANGLADESH Believing Bangladeshis could not bear that the man began insulting their Prophet Muhammad. They decided to take justice into their own hands for this “sin” and lynched him to death in a very brutal way. They hung him naked and beaten from a tree and set him on fire.
Muslims’ sensitivity to insults against the Prophet Muhammad has a deep religious reason. The Prophet Muhammad is, in their view, a model of perfect behavior and the person through whom God delivered the Quran to people. Any attack on him is, for Muslims, an insult to their very faith.
The Quran on one hand forbids insulting the prophet or God, but it does not command believers to punish anyone for it. Punishments for blasphemy appear only in later Islamic legal tradition (sharia), not in the Quran itself. In most of the Muslim world, physical punishments are not the norm but stem from radical ideologies.
