I'd classify this punishment as "excessive".
A Christian barber in this Punjab Province city is still recovering from broken bones and other injuries sustained earlier this month after eight Muslims allegedly beat and sodomized him for cutting the beard of a Muslim.
Marwat Masih, 29, initially refused the request of 19-year-old Qandeel Cheema to cut his beard in Sargodha's Gulshan-e-Bashir town on April 13, knowing that area Sunni Muslims believe the Quran prohibits it. But Cheema, a high school student, told Masih that he had lived and studied in Lahore and therefore wanted a more modern look, the bed-ridden and feeble Masih told Compass."I refused to shave his beard, but he showed me his packed bags and said that he would leave the town straight after the shave, and so no one would ever know that I had shaved his beard," Masih said.Eyewitnesses told Compass that as Masih was cutting Cheema's beard, the client's older brother - local radical Muslim land owner Shakeel Cheema - was returning by tractor from his fields and, noting the family Jeep in front of the Marwat Hair Stylist shop, stopped in.
