On May 18, 2026, the Federal Shariat Court struck down Pakistan's 2022 Criminal Laws Amendment Act, which had removed Section 325 from the Pakistan Penal Code. Anyone who survives a suicide attempt can once again face prosecution, a fine, or imprisonment. We write as a psychiatrist and a gender justice advocate — not against Islamic values, and not to contest the court's authority. We write because the ruling rests on a conflation that Islamic jurisprudence itself has never made: between the moral gravity of an act, and the culpability of a person whose illness drove them to it.
Section 325 was not derived from Islamic jurisprudence. It was copied, intact, from the British Indian Penal Code of 1860 — legislation drafted under colonial administration and written into law because Victorian England criminalised suicidal behaviour.
Pakistan inherited it at independence and kept it for over six decades without scrutiny, as did India and Malaysia. Both have since removed it. The United Kingdom — the law's author — abolished it in 1961, over sixty years ago. The campaign to restore Section 325 frames itself as a defence of Islamic values. The law it defends was written in London.
Before debating the law, we must understand who it will punish. Research consistently identifies five leading drivers of suicidal behaviour in Pakistan: domestic conflict and abuse, which disproportionately affects women and young adults; untreated mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and trauma; poverty and financial distress, particularly among primary earners; relationship crises, including forced marriage, especially among youth; and academic pressure and the crushing weight of familial expectation on adolescents. These causes share a common thread — profound, often invisible suffering, in a society where mental illness is deeply stigmatised and help-seeking is suppressed by shame.
The person Section 325 will prosecute is not a calculating wrongdoer. They are, in most cases, a young woman fleeing domestic violence, a man destroyed by economic despair, or a young person — girl, boy, or transgender — whose ache was invisible until it became a crisis.
Clinically, suicidal behaviour is a symptom of severe psychiatric illness — major depression, bipolar disorder, psychosis, and acute trauma. At the moment of crisis, the capacity for rational judgement has been overwhelmed by suffering. This is not a moral position. It is an established medical fact.
Classical Islamic jurisprudence generally recognises the distinction between intention and capacity. Sound intellect (aql) constitutes the foundation of taklif — legal responsibility — yet Islamic jurisprudence recognises circumstances in which responsibility may be diminished or removed, in accordance with the principles of raf' al-haraj and maqasid al-shariah. Because taklif presupposes the presence of sound intellect, junun — the classical concept of insanity — directly affects legal responsibility by suspending or substantially modifying an individual's standing as a mukallaf.
The person who survives a suicide attempt in Pakistan today is not a criminal. They are gravely ill. They reached the darkest point a human being can reach — and they are still here
Muslim jurists across the classical tradition held that those suffering from severe mental illness lack the cognitive standing necessary for full legal accountability. In Iran's own criminal policy, shaped by Islamic jurisprudence, suicide has not been criminalised precisely because the act is not treated as a matter of criminal culpability.
The question is not whether Islam prohibits suicide. It does, plainly and classically. The question is whether the state should prosecute a person whose illness — not their character, not their faith — brought them to that point. These are different questions. They demand different answers.
Before the 2022 legal reforms, suicide attempts in Pakistan were registered as medico-legal cases requiring police involvement before hospital treatment could proceed. Families — frightened of First Information Reports and public record — delayed bringing survivors to emergency departments. Some arrived too late.
A landmark 2022 study in BMC Psychiatry found no consistent evidence that criminalising suicide produces lower suicide rates — but substantial evidence that it suppresses help-seeking and delays intervention. The law does not protect life. It places additional weight on people who are already drowning.
Stigma deepens under criminalisation. In a society where izzat governs every family decision, a suicide attempt becoming a registered criminal case is experienced as catastrophic. Families conceal, isolate, and deny the survivor the very support that recovery requires.
Women face disproportionate exposure to every condition that drives suicidal crisis in Pakistan — domestic violence, forced marriage, economic dependence, and the demand that suffering be endured in silence. For many, a suicide attempt is the last expression of a life with no visible exit.
As both of us, authors of this piece, noted in discussion drawing on Dr Yousafzai’s mixed-method study (published in 2022 in the International Journal of Social Psychiatry on suicidal behaviour) in rural Pakistan’s Malakand Division, suicide attempts increased significantly between 2013 and 2018, with women accounting for about 63.7% (approximately 68%) of the reported cases.
The study also found depression, domestic violence, poverty, and interpersonal stress as key contributing factors, and identified pesticide poisoning as the most common method used.
Under re-criminalisation, such a woman may be arrested upon surviving. Her family may pressure her to recant and return — without treatment or support — to the environment that produced the crisis. Section 325, as restored, will fall hardest on women.
Many Muslim-Majority Countries Have Taken a Different Approach
The Federal Shariat Court ruled that decriminalisation is repugnant to the Qur’an and Sunnah. That claim cannot be reconciled with legal reality across the Muslim world.
| Country / Region | Legal Status |
| Indonesia (≈240 million Muslims — world's largest Muslim nation) | Not a criminal offence |
| Turkey, Iraq, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya | Not a criminal offence |
| Iran | Not prosecuted as a standalone criminal offence. Iran's legal framework is more nuanced: attempted suicide itself is not prosecuted as a standalone criminal offence, but assisting or abetting suicide carries penalties under the Computer Crimes Law (2011) |
| Central Asian Republics (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan) | Not a criminal offence |
| United Arab Emirates | Diverted to mandatory psychiatric treatment |
| Malaysia | Fully decriminalised, September 2023 |
| United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia (home to millions of Muslim citizens) | Decriminalised — applies to all, including Muslims |
| Pakistan (post-May 2026) | Recriminalised — Section 325 restored |
Most countries in this table are not secular states in retreat from Islam. They are Muslim-majority governments that examined the same question and reached a different answer. Pakistan now diverges from a growing trend — including among its closest neighbours and co-religionists.
Empathy is not sentiment. It is a clinical necessity and moral obligation. A society that greets its most desperate members with handcuffs signals to everyone watching — every family concealing a loved one's mental illness, every person quietly struggling — that the cost of being seen is too high.
Behind every statistic is a person. A young man ruined by debt. A woman enduring years of abuse. A teenager whose suffering went unseen until it became a crisis. What each of them needed, in that moment, was not a constable. They needed a system that said: your pain is real, and it matters.
Parliament can act, and tested models exist from countries that share Pakistan’s legal heritage and its faith. India, which inherited the identical colonial law, passed its Mental Healthcare Act in 2017, establishing that a person who attempts suicide shall be presumed to be under severe stress and shall not be tried or punished — the state’s obligation becomes care, not prosecution.
Malaysia replaced criminal penalties with mental health pathways in 2023.
The United Arab Emirates, under Islamic governance, mandates psychiatric evaluation in place of prosecution.
Each of these models acknowledges the gravity of the act while redirecting the state’s response from punishment towards healing. For Pakistan, the path is clear: replace prosecution with mandatory psychiatric evaluation and care. This is not a concession to secularism. It is the fulfilment of hifz al-nafs — the preservation of life — one of the five foundational objectives of Islamic law, the maqasid al-shariah.
The person who survives a suicide attempt in Pakistan today is not a criminal. They are gravely ill. They reached the darkest point a human being can reach — and they are still here. What they need from the state, from medicine, and from their faith is mercy.
The Qur’an states: “And do not kill yourselves (or one another). Indeed, Allah is to you Ever Merciful” (Surah An-Nisa 4:29).
Mercy is not the footnote. It is the point.
مجرم نہیں، مریض۔ Not a criminal. A patient.