An old woman is burned - for heresy, say the villagers - but Jason Burke uncovers motives more powerful than religion

A year after arriving in Pakistan to work as a freelance journalist, I came across a single-paragraph news story in a local paper describing the killing of a "witch" in a remote part of the Punjab. It described, with scant detail, how she had been murdered in Chak 100P, a village which, like thousands in the Punjab, was still known by the number it had been given by the British administrators 80 years previously. How Muradam Mai died was simple. Why she died was less straightforward.

From the small plane that flew me down to the nearby town of Rahim Yar Khan, I could see thousands of villages, sitting like brick islands in a sea of wheat, cotton and sugar cane. The rains had come at last and the plane, an old Fokker turbopropped 18-seater, dipped and shook as we flew under the thick, dark clouds. I found Muradam Mai's family easily enough, living in a small wood-and-brick house a mile or so from the village where she died, and I sat outside on a rough bench with chickens and small children scrabbling in the mud around my feet.

In my basic Urdu, I spoke to her son, a landless labourer who told me, supplementing language with gestures, that his mother's troubles had begun when, two years earlier, she had started behaving "stupidly". Her moods swung rapidly from ranting anger to utter passivity, and she began disappearing for weeks at a time. He brought me a file of documents. A local doctor had apparently diagnosed "paranoid schizophrenia" and referred his mother to a hospital in Lahore, 300 miles north. The family could not even afford the bus fare, let alone medication, and her wanderings worsened.

At 8am one morning, Muradam Mai was found sitting in Chak 100P's village shrine surrounded by burnt paper, which the villagers said were pages from the shrine's Koran. A group of men dragged her to the village square, where they cut off her fingers, gouged out her eyes, poured petrol over her and lit it. Other villagers stoked the flames with wood and by dropping tyres filled with kerosene on her. By the time the police arrived, at around noon, Muradam Mai was dead and 70 gloating men were standing around her corpse.

"She burned the Koran, so we burned her," they told the officers.

The rain had lifted by the time I got to the village itself. Chak 100P was a collection of mud and brick huts surrounded by green fields, muddy pools full of fat, shiny-skinned cattle and recently purchased tractors. There was a new concrete mosque in the centre of the village. The elders agreed that the case was straightforward.

Chak 100P's headman, Ishfaq, said the woman had died because the villagers "love Islam". "It was the younger ones who did it mainly," Ishfaq said. "Their religion is angrier than ours was at that age. But to burn the Koran is a terrible thing. I'm not saying what happened was good, but such anger is difficult to contain."

I spent several days in Chak 100P and spoke to scores of people connected with the case. As I worked, a different picture of the death of Muradam Mai began to emerge. As well as being old and mentally ill and from among the poorest, most marginalised elements of the village, she was also from the Seriaki ethnic minority. Besides, Muradam Mai, when ill, had shouted incomprehensible words that many villagers believed were curses. Worse still, Muradam Mai was a woman, breaking all the rules of convention by walking alone and unchaperoned in a conservative, male-dominated world.

Eventually I found a teacher in a local town who had driven out to the village when he heard what had happened and picked up some of the paper that Muradam Mai had burned in the shrine. It was not from the Koran at all, he told me, but was the charred remains of paper charms given to her by a "living saint" whom she had approached to cure her mental illness.

I wondered what role religion had played in the murder. Muradam Mai was hated, with the visceral loathing of the weakest and the oddest that all communities, no matter how developed, can summon. But clearly, for that hate to be acted on required something more. By accusing Muradam Mai of burning the Koran, though they no doubt knew it was not true, the villagers, or at least those who took part in the lynching, could convince themselves and their peers that it was their duty to kill her. Religion had not been the cause of the violence, but had certainly provided an excuse for it. It had legitimised what would otherwise have been an illegitimate act.

One evening in Chak 100P, a crowd gathered to watch and listen as I spoke to the headman. I asked the villagers a few questions, and asked if they had anything to ask me. There was a pause, and then one man stood up. "Why does the west hate Islam?" he said. I said that I did not think it did. There was a murmur of disagreement from the crowd. "Why are Muslims oppressed in Kashmir by the Hindus who are the allies of the west?" asked a second man. "Why does the west want to humiliate Islam?"

Soon dozens of questions were being fired at me. I did my best to answer them reasonably, and the villagers courteously listened to what I had to say. The situation was surreal. We were having an animated and apparently reasonable discussion about a hundred metres away from a dark stain on the red soil that marked where Muradam Mai had been burned. After an hour, all I could see of my interlocutors was a series of pale shapes in the darkness. Eventually it started to rain again. The villagers went back to their homes and I drove away.

Jason Burke's new book, "On the Road to Kandahar: travels through conflict in the Islamic world", is published by Allen Lane, the Penguin Press (£20)

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