After the attack: a victim of the Lahore attack remembers

After the attack: a victim of the Lahore attack remembers

by Sonya Rehman
A graduate from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism who works as a freelance journalist for The Express Tribune and various publications in Lahore.
Saturday, 25 September 2010

Women mourn the loss of relatives after the attack on May 28 PHOTO: REUTERS

You read stories of violence and atrocities committed on faceless Pakistanis in your local newspapers on a daily basis. You absorb the news as detached consumers. Empathy and even hints of grief might stir your heart while reading a poignant story every once in a while, but try as you might, you will never be able to relate to the victims and those directly involved – because you were never there. It didn’t happen to you or, anyone you know. And for that, you’re almost relieved. Yet guiltily so.

But what would happen, if one day, you or your loved ones were victims of a cruel, intolerant act of violence? And what if, someone you knew and loved deeply was taken away from you, within a mere few agonising hours?

What then? How would you survive the horror?

Settled abroad with her husband, Irum received a phone call from her distraught sibling. It was the 28 day of May – this year – a Friday. Back home in Pakistan, it was 2:30pm. Two Ahmadi places of worship in Lahore were under siege by terrorists, and Irum’s father was in one of them – Darul Zikar, a place that Irum for many years, used to frequent with her family on Friday for prayers, and over Eid, as a young girl.

Prior to her sibling’s phone call, “Abu” had called Irum’s mother and told his wife that he was injured. He’d been shot in his left foot. After telling his wife to remain calm, Irum’s mother heard a series of gun shots. Then, the line went dead.

Abroad, Irum watched the television in horror – live visuals of the attack were being shown on the BBC. Three hours later, after the attack was over, Irum’s father could not be found. Family members searched hospitals, but to no avail.

Hours later at 10:00pm, Irum’s father had been located. His body was found at a local hospital. “I was half expecting it since there had been no news,” Irum said, “But when my brother-in-law called me, I fell to the floor and wept. God knows how many hours I wept for.”

Irum immediately left for Pakistan. The journey home was wretched.“For many nights which followed, I had haunting nightmares that I was in there too, and that a bullet had hit my leg,” she stated, “A few times I dreamt that I was in there and that I had covered my father and the bullet had hit my back instead of his foot, and that he was safe.”

In the days, weeks and months that have followed after the incident, Irum and her family, in their grief, gain strength from the fact that along with them, eighty-five other families suffer the loss of their loved ones. It is in this grief that they have sought some resilience and patience to endure their personal tragedy.

“After my father’s death,” Irum said, “My first reaction was that I didn’t want to live here anymore. Lahore has always been my favourite place in the world. But now it has become a place where my father was brutally killed. And no one came to help. Imagine how the mother of those two brothers killed in Sialkot must be feeling about her city and her fellow citizens. That’s how I feel. No one helped; they all gathered around their TV sets and watched the show – just like the mob in Sialkot.”

After speaking with an uncle, who was in Darul Zikr at the time of the attack, Irum informed me that there were five to six terrorists in the building. “They first burned the cars outside,” she said, “Then they came inside, opening fire on anyone in sight. One guy climbed up on the minaret and remained there till the end – he would shoot anyone he saw below in the courtyard.”

In the hall where her father was, two men broke in, spraying bullets. Then, one of them went to the hall on the first floor and started throwing hand-grenades from above, into the hall below. At one point, one of the attacker’s placed a grenade at the feet of an old man. “He was sitting on a chair,” Irum said, “My uncle watched from a distance as the grenade went off.”

“This entire incident has scarred us badly,” Irum stated. “Three Ahmadis have been killed since the attack on the May 28. One in Narowal, and two in Sindh. So you can imagine how unsafe we feel.”

After the tragedy, Irum and her family have begun to follow strict safety measures. “There are many Ahmadis in Lahore who are getting threatening phone calls and their homes have been marked with red ink as targets,” she said, “Basically every Ahmadi in Pakistan is practicing his/her faith under the dark shadow of terror, at the risk of their lives…but we’re holding on.”

URL: http://blogs.tribune.com.pk/story/1813/after-the-attack...e-attack-remembers/

Hate speech

FROM THE PAPER » EDITORIAL

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Hate speech

Dawn Editorial

Monday, 21 Jun, 2010

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A strong case can be made against the JI leader for fomenting aggression and religious persecution under the country’s laws regarding hate speech and incitement to violence. — Photo on file

The street power and political clout wielded by Pakistan’s religious right have resulted in the state and society being held hostage by extremist elements. The latter stop at nothing to further their agenda of inciting hatred, divisiveness and violence. The latest example is that of the Jamaat-i-Islami chief, Syed Munawwar Hasan, who during a sermon in Lahore on Friday threatened a fresh movement against the Ahmadi community if it “did not accept their minority status” and the government kept silent about “their blasphemous and unconstitutional activities”.

Mr Hasan did not specify any particular instance substantiating his charges, leading one to read his comments as hate speech and also as an attempt to blackmail the government into further victimising an already persecuted community. Given the incendiary passions the issue arouses, any call by religious parties in this context is certain to be attended by violence. A strong case can be made against the JI leader for fomenting aggression and religious persecution under the country’s laws regarding hate speech and incitement to violence.

Even beyond this particular case, it has now become a matter of urgency that the government show an active and uncompromising stance on the issue of hate speech and incitement to violence or other sorts of criminal activity. Pakistan’s polity is already rent by religious, ethnic and sectarian divisions. Allowing irresponsible and divisive opinions to be aired publicly will deepen these fissures. Once it begins, the process of religious, ethnic and other communities being pitted against one another will prove difficult to bring under control. Spiralling violence, particularly in view of other issues being faced by the country such as militancy and terrorism, can then be expected. It is in the interests of both the state and citizenry to take a stand against inflammatory hate speech and lobby for the prosecution of those who break the law.

©2010 DAWN Media Group. All rights reserved

URL: www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-con...-speech-160-sk-04

Why Pakistan's Ahmadi community is officially detested

Page last updated at 15:01 GMT, Wednesday, 16 June 2010 16:01 UK

Why Pakistan’s Ahmadi community is officially detested

By Mohammed Hanif
BBC News, Karachi

	More than 80 Ahmadis were killed last months in two atacks in Lahore

When a Pakistani Muslim applies for a passport or national ID card, they are asked to sign an oath that no Muslim anywhere in the world is asked to sign.

The oath goes like this: “I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad an impostor prophet. And also consider his followers, whether belonging to the Lahori or Qadiani group, to be non-Muslims.”

Like millions of other Pakistanis, I have signed this oath several times without giving much thought to exactly what Mr Ahmad stands for, or what the technical difference between Lahoris or Qadianis is. I want my passport, and if I have to sign up to a fatwa to get it, so be it.

But like millions of people from my generation I also remember that when I was growing up, the minority Ahmadi sect were considered just another Muslim sect.

Non-Muslims

Like scores of others I had friends who were Ahmadis. We played cricket together, and sometimes, when our parents ordered us off to the mosque, we even prayed side by side.

	Ahmadis are despised by many Pakistanis

Last month, when more than 90 Ahmadis were massacred in two mosques in Lahore, I remembered the precise moment in 1974 when it all began to change.

There were street protests by religious parties against Ahmadis demanding that they should be declared non-Muslims.

One day I saw some bearded activists standing outside a clothes merchant’s shop in our town, chanting anti-Ahmadi slogans and turning customers away, telling them that buying clothes from Ahmadis was haram - forbidden.

At the time I was learning to memorise the Koran from a very kind, mild-mannered teacher.

I asked him what exactly was wrong with the Ahmadis.

He explained to me that they didn’t believe that the Prophet Muhammad was the last and the final messenger.

I said OK, maybe that makes them kafirs, infidels, but who says that kafirs can’t sell cloth?

My teacher’s response was a full-handed slap, so sudden, so unexpected that it rang in my ears for days to come.

That same year Pakistan’s first elected parliament declared Ahmadis non-Muslims.

Then in 1984 Pakistan’s military dictator and self-appointed guardian of the faith General Zia-ul-Haq inserted that oath in the constitution that we are all required to sign.

Because of the new laws, Ahmadis have been sent to prison simply for using the Muslim greeting Assalamu alaikum, or putting a Koranic verse in a greeting card.

Heretic

Over the last three decades the hatred against Ahmadis has become so widespread that Pakistan is now embarrassed by the only Nobel laureate it has ever produced.

	Attacks on Ahmadis are beconing increasingly commonplace

Dr Abdus Salam Khan won the Nobel Prize for physics and, as a proud Pakistani, accepted his award in national dress.

But he was an Ahmadi so there is no monument to celebrate him, no universities named after him.

The word “Muslim” on his gravestone has been erased. Even the town he is buried in has been renamed in an attempt to erase our collective memory.

This hatred was evident in the reactions to the massacre.

TV channels were more obsessed with making sure that in their broadcasts Ahmadi mosques were called “places of worship”.

When you refuse to call a place of worship by its proper name, you are implying that it’s not a mosque, it’s not a church, it’s not a synagogue, it’s a place where godless people do godless things.

And all the various Islamic political parties, whose leaders often refuse to pray together, are united on this.

When Pakistan’s main opposition leader Nawaz Sharif used the phrase “our brothers” for the murdered Ahmadis, leaders from 11 political parties came together to condemn him and threatened to issue a fatwa declaring him a heretic.

Over the last three decades the siege has been so palpable that those Ahmadis who couldn’t afford to emigrate have taken to hiding their identity.

If you want to destroy someone in public life it’s enough to drop a hint that they are Ahmadi.

In the 1980s, the former chief minister of Punjab and current federal minister didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral because there were rumours that she was an Ahmadi.

When the funerals of the massacred Ahmadis took place there were no officials, no politicians present.

Pakistan’s liberal bloggers and some English-language columnists did write along the lines that Ahmadi blood is on our hands.

Others were adamant that it was yet another Friday, yet another massacre by the Pakistani Taliban, and we should just fight this sort of terrorism and leave the sectarian debates alone.

Two incidents in the past week made me realise how pathological our response was. At a vigil to mark the massacre, where a handful of people had turned up, a passer-by asked me “Are you an Ahmadi?” My own loud and aggressive denial surprised me.

Then an Ahmadi friend whose father survived the Lahore massacre wrote to me saying: “You know we have been living like this for decades. [Did] something like this have to happen for you to speak up?”

URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8744092.stm

Clarification — 86 Ahmadis died in the Lahore attacks

12th June 2010 PRESS RELEASE

Clarification — 86 Ahmadis died in
the Lahore attacks

Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK came of his own volition

In a Press Release issued by this office on 7 June 2010 it was stated that Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK, Mr Wajid Shamsul Hasan visited the Head of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat, Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad on 2nd June 2010 to offer condolences over the Lahore terrorist attacks.

Subsequently a report was published by a particular news organisation that Hadhrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad had ‘summoned Pakistani delegates to his office in London’. For clarification purposes it is noted that the High Commissioner came of his own volition and his visit was appreciated by His Holiness.

It is also clarified that in a Press Release issued by this office on 30 May 2010 it was stated that 94 Ahmadis were killed in the Lahore terrorist attacks. It later emerged that the number of deaths were fewer and so it is now hereby confirmed that 86 Ahmadis died in the Lahore attacks. Currently there are still a few who remain injured in hospital but thankfully none are considered critical at this time.

22 Deer Park Road, London, SW19 3TL UK

Tel/Fax: 020 8544 7613 Mob: 077954 90682

Email: press at ahmadiyya.org.uk

Press Secretary AMJ International

We decide whether you’re Muslim or not

	Thursday June 10th 2010

We decide whether you’re Muslim or not

Jun 10th 2010, 8:26 by Banyan

ON MAY 28th, during Friday prayers, two squads of gunmen entered a pair of mosques belonging to the Ahmadis, a minority Islamic sect, in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore. Methodically, they emptied AK-47s into the assembled worshippers, lobbed grenades and exploded suicide vests. Their rampage has claimed 95 lives to date. Our Pakistan correspondent writes about the perpetrators, the Punjabi Taliban.

The deaths were shocking, but so was the response by officialdom, the media and the public. Yes, the attacks aroused a deal of concern in Pakistan. Lahore, after all, is the Punjabi capital and Pakistan’s cultural heart, a place of sophistication far removed from the country’s lawless frontiers, where extremism tends to have its breeding ground.

Yet the concern was palpably not for the Ahmadi victims. Politicians have shunned the bereaved. Punjab’s chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, has not shown his face at either mosque, despite living down the road from them. Admittedly, an admirable trio of women in parliament pushed through a motion abhorring the attacks, but it only just squeaked through, and that because it was hitched to another motion condemning Israel’s deadly commando raid on the Gaza aid convoy.

On television, pundits have failed to call for solidarity with the beleagured Ahmadi community, who number 4m-odd in Pakistan. At street protests called in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, meagre numbers showed up. To understand better what a fellow journalist, Declan Walsh of the Guardian, calls a conspiracy of silence, I joined the Ahmadis for their Friday prayers exactly a week after the attacks, at the Darul Zikr mosque that bore the brunt of the violence.

I had been invited by Shahid Ata-ullah, an active Ahmadi elder with the pep and twinkling energy that comes with being a retired Pakistani military man. I had met his daughter earlier that week at dinner in Islamabad. She told me how sick with worry for her father she and her family had been, as the story of the attacks unfolded live on television. But a week later Mr Ata-ullah could chuckle about it. “When I came out and checked my phone, I had 103 voice messages! Could be something of a record, eh?”

At the mosque most evidence of the carnage had been cleaned up. There remained only a few pockmarks on pillars and a pile of mangled metal in the courtyard, the remains of a door by which an attacker had detonated his vest. By the look of things, nothing much might have happened.

Most striking was the community’s outward calm. Young Ahmadis frisked the worshippers, admittedly more thoroughly than usual, as they entered the mosque. A dozen men stood silent guard about the compound, armed with submachine guns against repeat attacks; every one of the guards had lost a father, brother or son. Mr Ata-ullah embraced one young man, the son of the late leader of Lahore’s Ahmadis, Munir Ahmad Sheikh, who had been shot as he led the prayers. Just a few months ago Mr Sheikh had sat down with one of my colleagues and explained how anti-Ahmadi thuggery was on the rise. Very quickly it was clear to me that this was a community not just used to persecution, but determined to continue their faith in the face of it.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was founded by a 19th-century cleric, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who claimed divine revelation in restoring a corrupted Islam to a purer form. His revivalist teachings were an eclectic mix of Sufism and other Islamic and Christian elements. His claim to be a prophet sent by God, albeit not a “law-bearing” prophet, has enraged more orthodox Muslims. Ahmad was also convinced that Jesus survived his ordeal on the cross to die at a ripe old age–in Kashmir. This also challenges orthodox Islam, which holds that Jesus was raised alive to heaven.

Reasonable men ought to be able to differ. (I confess, so strike me God, that my early Roman Catholic catechism of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection seems no less implausible than the Kashmiri version.) But from the start, of all Islam’s many sects, Ahmadis have been singled out for persecution.

Worse, from the 1970s the Pakistani state has officially sanctioned it. In response to anti-Ahmadi riots in 1974 parliament passed a constitutional amendment to define what it was to be Muslim. Ahmadis were pointedly excluded. Then in 1984 General Zia ul Haq, Pakistan’s Sunni dictator, amended the laws again. Henceforth Ahmadis were prohibited from professing their faith, and banned from “indirectly or directly posing as a Muslim”. In other words, even saying asalaam aleikum was out of bounds, though Pakistan has no other common greeting.

Ahmadis henceforth could not call the faithful to prayer. They could not display Koranic inscriptions. They could not build new mosques, repair old ones or even refer to their “mosques” as such–they were now “places of worship”, if you please. Indeed belief in the prophethood of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad itself was blasphemous, because it defiled the name of the Prophet Muhammad–a capital crime.

Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch points out that while the government persecutes Ahmadi–some 400 Ahmadis have been charged in the past decade–it rarely brings cases against the perpetrators of anti-Ahmadi violence. In Lahore when I was there, banners flew from some of main thoroughfares proclaiming death to the “Qadianis”, a derogatory term for Ahmadis. The Punjab government of Mr Sharif refuses to pull them down, on the grounds that removing them might generate an “adverse reaction”.

Mr Ata-ullah and colleagues–gentle, cultured men–can laugh at what they call the “mischief of the law”, the multiple absurdities of their persecution. Mr Ata-ullah points to an engraving of the Kalima that the government has crudely boarded over. Anywhere else, covering up that profession of the Muslim faith would be a shocking act. The Ahmadis maintain thick volumes that keep a tally of the persecution. In one instance, the entire Ahmadi population of nearby Rabwah town, about 60,000 people, was booked for dressing up smartly and distributing sweets to children on the centenary of the community’s founding.

During the first Friday prayers after the massacre, there was no sign of anger at the perpetrators, nor of self-pity. But as the worshippers knelt with their heads to the ground, a low keening like the sound of a rushing wind ran through the mosque, and shoulders suddenly shook in grief. “In our prayers we always weep,” Mr Ata-ullah said afterwards. “The milk does not rise in the mother’s breast until the baby cries. Before Allah we must cry like babies if we want his blessing. We cry like a whole pot on the boil.”

© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010.

URL: http://economist.com/blogs/banyan/2010/06/st...e=hptextfeature

Foreign-made arms used in attacks on Ahmedis

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Foreign-made arms used in attacks on Ahmedis

*	Investigators shifting focus to imported weapons’ suppliers active in provincial capital
By Shahnawaz Khan

LAHORE: Investigators probing the terrorist attacks on the worship places of the Ahmedis have discovered that all the weapons and ammunitions used in the attacks were foreign made, sources told Daily Times on Monday.

Following the discovery, the investigators have turned their focus on imported weapons’ suppliers in the provincial metropolis, sources said, adding that the investigators were collecting information on the suppliers of AK-47s, its ammunition and hand grenades.

“Besides that, the personnel are also collecting information and questioning a large number of people who are or have at any time been involved in the business of importing weapons,” the sources said, adding that reports of forensic experts confirmed that the terrorists had used Indian-made hand grenades and Russian-made AK-47s.

“Only a few dealers, around seven, in the provincial metropolis are in the business of selling Russian-made AK-47s and its ammunition,” the sources said.

However, the sources said that it was disclosed during investigations that some people are also involved in supplying Israeli-made weapons, adding that the trade of Israeli-made weapons was actively being conducted in Lahore since the last few years.

“Now the personnel are questioning few history sheeters, who were involved in the illegal supply of imported weapons from provincial metropolis to other parts of the country,” the sources added.

It is worth noting that it was disclosed in March that a few gangs in the provincial metropolis were partaking in the illegal trade of imported weapons. This was disclosed after the arrest of a weapons’ smuggler, who supplied imported weapons from Lahore to other cities. Law enforcers nabbed the head of an inter-provincial gang, Muhammad Naeem Khan, who was exporting foreign-made weapons from Lahore to other parts of the country. During investigations, the arrested Naeem confessed that some other weapons’ dealers in Lahore were also involved in the trade.

Following such links, the law enforcers who were investigating the attacks on the Ahmedis’ worship places shifted their focus to weapons’ dealers who were involved in the business of importing weapons, especially those that were Indian and Russian made.

According to the sources, investigators had also taken into account reports – compiled by the Special Branch a few months earlier – on the illegal weapons’ trade being carried out in the city. The reports had revealed that weapons’ dealers were using Lahore as a launching pad for the distribution of illegal weapons to other parts of the country and they are using small railway stations in the city’s outskirts, Lari Addahs and Truck Addahs for smuggling weapons.

URL: www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\06\08\story_8-6-2010_pg13_2

Pakistan’s Ahmadi killings and the conscience of a nation

Pakistan: Now or Never? Perspectives on Pakistan

Pakistan’s Ahmadi killings and the conscience of a nation

Jun 7, 2010 14:23 EDT

The fierce debate about the nature of Pakistani society triggered by the killing of more than 80 Ahmadis in two mosques in Lahore last month continues to run and run.

Much of the discussion is about why the government had failed to stop the religious right from preaching hatred against the Ahmadis, who are considered non-Muslims in Pakistan because they revere their 19th century founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, breaching – according to Pakistani law – a requirement that Muslims accept the finality of the Prophet Mohammad.

While authorities had been willing to shut down Facebook over a competition to draw the Prophet, it had not dared take action to remove banners preaching hatred against the Ahamdis, fearing a backlash from the religious right, Dawn newspaper complained in an editorial.

In a chronicle of deaths foretold, Professor C.M. Naim tracks the earlier killing of an Ahmadi, a retired teacher, in January in the town of Ferozewal. In an article in India’s Outlook magazine (h/t Chapati Mystery) he notes that not only did the police fail to take adequate action against the man’s killers, but also that the media paid very little attention, barring one persistent reporter. He also reproduces a picture of a huge billboard in Ferozewal preaching hatred against the Ahmadis.

“Judging from the image, the sign must have dominated the roundabout where it was set up to exhort the 97.21 percent of Ferozewala’s population against the unfortunate 0.25. It had stayed up for weeks. Thousands, including any number of men with power and authority, saw it but chose to do nothing. Finally a retired schoolteacher victimized by the sign and fearing worse approached the police for relief. A few days later, he ended up dead,” he writes.

He adds: “The following too went unnoticed:

On January 14, an Ahmadi mosque built in1982 near Rabwah was taken away from them by court orders and handed to anti-Ahmadis, “in order to pre-empt extreme law and order disturbances”.
On January 28, a court at Vehari, Punjab, sentenced three Ahmadis to imprisonment and fines on trumped up charges of preaching their religion to “simple Muslims”.
On February 3, an Ahmadi was similarly killed at Shehdadpur, Sindh.
On April 1, three Ahmadi traders were ambushed and killed near Faisalabad.

“Then, on May 28, 2010, in well-organized attacks on two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore, just a few miles away from Ferozewala, more than 90 Ahmadis were killed and scores wounded. We can only hope it was the worst such incident, for unfortunately it was not the last. On June 1, just three days later, the Daily Times reported another killing: an Ahmadi man was stabbed to death in his home and his son seriously wounded in Narowal, Punjab. The assailant, who reportedly threatened not to leave any Ahmadi alive, escaped.”

“Here’s a question,” writes Nadeem Paracha at Dawn. “How come whenever there’s a drone attack … or a case of perceived obscenity or blasphemy surfaces, street corners are at once filled with burqa-clad women and bearded men chanting slogans like ‘Death to infidels’? But none of these fine, sensitive Muslims can be seen protesting when there’s an attack on innocent civilians —Ahmadis or others — by the extremists?”

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose brother Shahbaz Sharif is chief minister of Punjab province where the killings took place, this weekend spoke in defence of the Ahmadis, calling them ”our brethren and an asset of the country”, according to The News. The Sharif brothers in the past have been accused of sympathising with the Islamists and were criticised after newspapers published pictures of the law minister in Punjab – who is loyal to the two – campaigning in a by-election in February with leaders of the outlawed sectarian Sipah e Sahaba.

The post-mortem on the Ahmadi mosque killings is now turning into a bigger discussion of whether secular liberals have any real influence on Pakistani society as it grows more religious and conservative.

“The problem is that there aren’t nearly enough of us for this to matter,” complains the blog Five Rupees. “There are a few scattered in the blogosphere and Twitterverse, and a couple of columnists for Dawn, and the Daily Times editorial board, but that’s it. There are, functionally speaking, no liberals in Pakistan. Oh, there’s plenty of scotch-drinking social liberals (think Salman Taseer). But liberalism and progressivism is not about drinking scotch or wearing jeans. Liberalism is about equality and freedom and personal choice and rationality and the privileging of the individual, and no one believes in those things.”

“We’ve been talking about the dangers of militancy for a long, long time — well before 9/11. That no one bothers listening is not an indictment of the “failed politics of Pakistani liberals”. It’s an indictment of everyone else. If mainstream Pakistan wants to ignore us, fine, that’s their prerogative. But don’t blame us when shit goes bad.”

And in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, Mustafa Qadri notes that more and more Pakistanis are turning to prayer given the failure of the state to provide a credible, secular alternative.

“Uncertainty is an inherent part of the human experience, but in Pakistan much of what a reader in Britain might take for granted is far from certain. How long will the electricity last today? Where will the next bomb go off? And, for most who do not inhabit my privileged world, will I be able to afford the right medication if I fall ill? The profound loss of control felt by long-term illness sufferers and their loved ones has become a countrywide phenomenon in Pakistan.

”The situation has exacerbated our cultural tendency to avow causation in favour of fate and the rewards of prayer. Whether looking for a job, waiting anxiously for exam results or willing the national cricket team to victory, prayer has become a kneejerk source of solace and comfort in difficult times. Holy men, or pirs, and local soothsayers have for generations made a career out of selling their prayers to those in need.

“And why not? Doing the right thing, like expecting to get a plum job without working family contacts, rarely seems to lead to results in our country. During my travels I have met several academically bright students from middle-class backgrounds who complain they cannot get into top university courses because wealthier classmates have paid to gain entrance. The experience for the millions below the middle class, who could never dream of a university education, is even more dire.”

At the very least, the killings of the Ahmadis has prompted a real discussion about the direction Pakistan is headed in. And even, some poetry. One day, looking back, it may well be seen as a turning point.

URL: http://blogs.reuters.com/pakistan/2010/06/07/pakist...cience-of-a-nation/

Massacre at Ahmadiyya Muslim Mosque; Random act of violence or State Sanctioned Terrorism

OPINIONS, RELIGIONS

Massacre at Ahmadiyya Muslim Mosque; Random act of violence or State Sanctioned Terrorism

By iNewp Citizen Journalist
Published: June 7, 2010

The Holy Quran says; “If God did not repel some people by means of others, there would surely have been destroyed cloisters and churches and synagogues and mosques, wherein the name of Allah is oft commemorated” (22:41). In a true Islamic state, the minorities enjoy freedom to practice and preach their religion without fearing for their lives. It is the state’s responsibility to not only protect the lives and mosques of its Muslim constituents but also protect the places of worship of other faiths.

This is not the case in Pakistan, which claims to be an Islamic state and was founded 63 years ago on the basic principles of equality and freedom for all. Instead, it is a country whose name and the word “terrorism” are today often mentioned in the same sentence. Today, Pakistan has laws written in its books which prohibit a large group of Muslims from practicing their faith and they are made to endure a life full of fear and hardships due to their belief on the Messiah of the later days as prophesied by Islam’s prophet, Mohammad (May peace be with him).

In 1974, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, then President of Pakistan, proclaimed Ahmadis “non Muslims” but allowed them to practice their religion. To further satisfy the unabated appetite of fanatics in the country, in 1984, the government of General Zia ul Haq further tightened the law and with one ordinance snatched the basic human rights from Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Furthermore, they tried to break the spirits of Ahmadi Muslims by taking away their identity and barred them from using the word “Muslim” for themselves.

Ahmadis today are prohibited from calling their religion Islam, their places of worship mosques, making the call for prayer “Adhaan” or even making the most basic proclamation of faith which states that “God is One and Mohammad is His messenger”. In an arrogant gesture, the government tried to erase all Muslim words and phrases from Ahmadi lexicon which were built into the soul and daily life of Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.

General Zia ul Haq (left), a public flogging during his reign (right), Ahmadis were persecuted even more during Haq’s rule.

While I have been greeted many times in America by non-Muslims with the words “Assalamo Alaikum” (may peace be with you), as an Ahmadi Muslim one can be thrown in jail for using the same greeting in Pakistan.

There are hundreds of Ahmadi Muslims languishing in jails for the crime of sending peace to their fellow Muslims. On a daily basis Ahmadi Muslims face discrimination in jobs, schools and military for the crime of believing in the Messiah.

This state sanctioned persecution has encouraged the fanatic elements in the Pakistani society to make the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community a constant target of threats and attacks. Target killing of community leaders and attacks on Ahmadiyya mosques have become a norm and rarely attracts attention or condemnation from the government. These fanatic elements encourage and incite masses to kill Ahmadis, in plain sight on state sanctioned events and in media. Driving through the main roads of Lahore, a culturally bustling city, one can see banners and graffiti on the walls with incendiary slogans against Ahmadis.

The brutal attacks and massacre in two Ahmadiyya mosques on May 28th are a culmination of years of government policies and an insincere, half hearted effort to control the extremist elements in Pakistan. This heinous attack by Pakistani Taliban has resulted in the death of 95 Ahmadis, while more than 150 are critically injured. Ahmadiyya Muslim Community strictly follows the policy of “Love for All, Hatred for None”. Unlike other religious groups, Ahmadis will not retaliate, they will not raise arms, and they will not come out on the streets to protest or destroy public property. Their 120 year history is filled with patience, tolerance, and non violence. These brutal attacks have however, raised some questions.

How can Ahmadis trust the motives of Pakistan government with the above track record? How can any minority feel protected in a state that has seen Ahmadis literally thrown under the bus over and over again? How can any Pakistani citizen sleep soundly at night with a corrupt government in charge? And how can we Americans trust the motives and sincerity of Pakistan as an ally in this war on terrorism?

(Cover Picture: Chaudary/AP) — Op-Ed Article Contributed By: Aziza Faruqi

URL: http://inewp.com/?p=3127

ANALYSIS - Pakistan’s mosques, media and intolerance

ANALYSIS - Pakistan’s mosques, media and intolerance

Sat Jun 5, 2010 4:01pm IST

Policemen run towards gunmen attacking an Ahmadi mosque in Lahore’s Garhi Shahu neighborhood May 28, 2010. - Credit: Reuters/Hussain Abid/Files

By Zeeshan Haider

(Reuters) — Pakistan has been fighting Islamist militants for years, but tough measures are needed to overturn a system breeding religious intolerance after the long failure of authorities to confront mullahs and hardline groups.

Analysts say the notion of religious mistrust is deeply entrenched in the predominatly Muslim country – even in the school system – and it is now up to leaders to mobilise public.

Last week’s massacre in the city of Lahore of more than 80 Ahmadis - a minority religious sect deemed non-Muslim and heretical by the constitution - has generated a heated debate in Pakistan, a U.S. ally, on how to tackle the issue.

In a sign of how hatred is propagated, The News newspaper said one of the two surviving gunmen caught by security forces said he had been persuaded that Ahmadis were “blaspheming” Islam.

Identified as Abdullah, he told investigators that his mentors had him believe that Ahmadis were drawing caricatures of Prophet Mohammad during a recent online contest and “so their bloodshed was a great service to Islam”, the newspaper said.

That raised alarm bells in a country combatting militancy.

“The nagging feeling that the government has already lost the battle against extremism has now acquired the force of conviction,” Zafar Hilaly, a former ambassador, wrote in The News last week.

After joining the U.S.-led war on terrorism after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, Pakistan mounted a crackdown on militancy, outlawing several groups, arresting hundreds of suspects and warning hardline mullahs against delivering hate speeches and distributing hate literature.

ISLAMIC SEMINARIES

The government also vowed to reform tens of thousands of Islamic seminaries, known as madrassas, many of which are considered as breeding grounds for militancy.

Almost none of these measures, however, has been implemented.

Most outlawed groups have re-emerged under new names. Radical clerics still deliver fiery speeches against sects.

The U.S. Embassy acknowledged the difficulties, given the importance placed on Pakistan helping Washington battle al Qaeda and its extremist allies.

“We recognise this is a problem,” an embassy official said, adding that the embassy encouraged Pakistanis to take part in exchange programmes to see a multi-faith United States.

Analysts say Pakistani leaders dating back to the 1970s, however popular, took no action to counter radicals.

Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based political and security analyst said governments have lacked the stomach to implement reforms, particularly in school curricula.

“In textbooks used in government schools, Pakistan is equated with Muslims…They teach Pakistan is a country only for Muslims. They don’t teach that non-Muslims also live here,” he said.

Journalist and analyst Ahmed Rashid described school programmes as “the most sensitive issue. But it is an issue in which any attempt to change the curriculum would have a whole host of fundamentalist groups oppose you.”

In 1974, Pakistan’s first popularly elected Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, bowed to Islamic groups and won approval of a constitutional amendment declaring Ahmadis as non-Muslims.

He also switched the weekly day off from Sunday to Friday.

But much of the upsurge in militancy occurred in the late 1970s and 1980s during the “Islamisation drive” by late military leader General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq and Pakistan’s support for the U.S.-baked Afghan jihad or holy war against the Soviet invasion which saw a rapid growth of radical groups and madrasas.

Haq introduced several laws, such as the notorious blasphemy law, which are deemed discriminatory against non-Muslim minorities and fuelled tensions between different Muslim sects.

Subsequent governments did nothing to reverse the laws.

Military dictators, who ruled Pakistan for more than half of its existence, have also used militant groups to further policy objectives in Afghanistan and India and marginalise liberals.

“In earlier years, in order to pursue its foreign policy using the instrument of jihad, the state actively sought to create a religiously charged citizenry,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physicist and analyst.

“But, now that the Pakistani military and political establishments have become a victim of extremism, they are foundering in confusion.”

Former President Pervez Musharraf, a military ruler, though he espoused a modern and liberal version of Islam, repeatedly failed to get the laws reviewed while in office from 1999-2008.

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, a pro-West politician and a vocal opponent of the militants, was killed in December 2007 in a suicide attack blamed on militants linked to al Qaeda.

Civilian leaders are made even more cautious now in tackling radical groups by the tremendous fear of militants who have unleashed bomb and suicide attacks across the country.

“Religious intolerance is getting worse in Pakistan because the political leadership lacks the will to fight this,” said analyst Rizvi. “They don’t want to face the wrath of mullahs.”

(Additional reporting and editing by Chris Allbritton and by Ron Popeski)

URL: http://in.reuters.com/article/idINIndia-49068420100605

Hate and horror in Lahore

Columnist

Hate and horror in Lahore

   By Irfan Husain
   Saturday, 05 Jun, 2010

A Pakistani police officer bars a cyclist from entering a street near the Garhi Shahu mosque belongs to minority sect, which was targeted by gunmen last Friday killing nearly 100 worshippers and left many injured, in Lahore, Pakistan on Friday, June 4, 2010. Authorities beefed up security around the mosque to avert any terrorist attempt. — AP Photo

A day after the slaughter of nearly 100 Ahmadis in Lahore last week, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a programme on Iraq in its ‘Unreported World’ series.

The narrator described the plight of the Christians and other minorities in the north who were being regularly targeted by Sunni militias.

One ancient community that had been living there for the last 4,000 years was being especially persecuted. Out of the million Christians who lived in Iraq as equal citizens before the war began, half have now fled the country.

If such a concerted pogrom had been launched against Muslims anywhere in the world by non-Muslims, we would have been up in arms. Russia’s brutal treatment of Muslim Chechens and the Serbian ethnic cleansing of Muslim Bosnians have been widely condemned. So how is Pakistan’s treatment of its minorities any different?

I was sent a video clip of the reaction of a senior Ahmadi cleric to the Lahore massacre in which he was asked what his demand to the government was in the wake of the terrorist attacks. He replied: “We demand nothing and expect nothing but what is our due as citizens of Pakistan.” I was deeply moved by the stark simplicity of his answer.

That Ahmadis are at risk in the Islamic Republic is hardly a secret: they have been attacked, killed and harassed without any protection from the state for years. Surely the Punjab government should have posted policemen to protect their houses of prayer especially on Friday.

However, this is expecting too much from a government that did not take down hoardings on the streets of Lahore bearing the message “Friends of Ahmadis are enemies of Islam”. When its law minister Rana Sanaullah consorts openly with leaders of banned terrorist organisations, and its chief minister pleads with jihadi groups not to attack targets in Punjab — implying they are free to murder people in other provinces — little good can be expected of such a government.

Currently, instead of providing security for his beleaguered people, Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif is engaging in a war of words over the fact that a large number of extremist terrorists are now active in Punjab. He objects to the term ‘Punjabi Taliban’ as though their ethnic origin is of any concern to the victims: the fact that they are terrorists who are killing mostly fellow Muslims in the name of Islam seems to mean little to him.

For several years now, the presence and proliferation of militant groups in southern Punjab has been common knowledge. The emergence of Ajmal Kasab, the terrorist found guilty of his role in the attacks on Mumbai in 2008, from the same area is not without significance.

Two days after the Lahore massacre, a man in Narowal entered a house, stabbed an Ahmadi to death and wounded another, shouting that he would kill every Ahmadi he could find before he escaped. The fact is that the police do not bother to investigate crimes against Ahmadis seriously, and to my knowledge, hardly anyone has been prosecuted for attacks against any minority community.

This callous attitude in officialdom can be expected in a country where popular TV anchors openly profess their anti-Ahmadi bias. One of them was allegedly caught on tape urging a terrorist to ‘interrogate’ a hostage because he was supposed to be ‘an agent of the Ahmadis’, although the newsman in question later denied it. The prisoner was found executed a few days later. Another famous anchor on a religious talk show encouraged a guest to declare Ahmadis ‘wajib-ul-qatal’, or deserving of murder. A few days later, two Ahmadis were duly killed. No action or public outcry followed either event.

At the heart of this indifference to the fate of our fellow citizens is a deeply rooted intolerance. Somehow, the fact that they follow beliefs other than the majority faith makes them unworthy of full and equal citizenship. Many mullahs fulminate regularly and openly against Ahmadis from the pulpit after Friday prayers. Many have called for their expulsion from the country. One has even demanded that they be given the choice between conversion or death.

And yet these very people hold forth incessantly about the injustice Muslims supposedly face in non-Muslim countries, denouncing perceived Islamophobia in the West. Were Muslims to face even a small fraction of the prejudice in non-Muslim countries that Pakistani minorities do every day of their lives, I cannot begin to imagine the hysteria on our streets, our mosques and — most of all — our TV channels.

So why is our sympathy and our humanity reserved only for those who follow the same beliefs we do? Surely there is no contradiction between faith and compassion for all people everywhere? I can understand an ignorant young jihadi, brainwashed by cynical, cruel clerics and terrorists into turning himself into a human bomb, and blowing up whoever they designate as a target. But how to explain the hard-hearted attitude of millions of Muslims who form the majority in Pakistan, many of them educated and sensible in other matters?

Contributing to a New York Times blog, Samra Habib writes after the Lahore massacre: “In 1991, I left Pakistan with my family and moved to Canada. We feared attacks by Muslim extremists and packed our bags in the middle of the night and managed to leave. Hiding our religion from non-Ahmadis had become part of our daily lives….

“I’ve spent most of my life here in Toronto and have become accustomed to being accepted by my friends and peers and sharing my thoughts and beliefs without fear of repercussion. I often forget that years ago, things were different for me and I, too, feared identifying myself as an Ahmadi. People I love in Pakistan still don’t have the luxury to celebrate their religious differences or even publicly greet friends in a traditional Arabic greeting….”

In the West, religious differences are accepted in a way that few Muslims are capable of doing. For us, faith is the defining element in our identity. Over the years, I have met many fine people who happened to be Ahmadis. Many of them have become friends, and I value these friendships. I suppose this makes me ‘an enemy of Islam’ in the eyes of those whose hoardings were not taken down by the Punjab government.

irfanhusain@gmail.com

©2010 DAWN Media Group. All rights reserved

URL: www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-co...rror-in-lahore-560-sk-13

NA condemns killing of Ahmadis

FROM THE PAPER » FRONT PAGE

NA condemns killing of Ahmadis
   By Raja Asghar
   Friday, 04 Jun, 2010

Stating that “Islam does not permit attacks on minorities but instead seeks to protect all human life as sacred”, the resolution called for a thorough investigation and bringing militants who carried out the attacks to justice. – APP Photo

ISLAMABAD: It was after an apparent hesitation and a bold initiative by some women that the National Assembly on Thursday unanimously condemned Friday’s “barbaric massacre” of Ahmadis in Lahore.

It initially appeared that the brutal gun attacks on two places of worship, which killed about 90 people and wounded 105 others, would find no mention on the opening day of the lower house’s budget session as had happened in the Senate a bit earlier, for fear of possible ire of hardline Anti-Ahmadi religious groups.

But PPP’s former information minister Sherry Rehman would not let it go like that and called for an immediate attention to her two adjournment motions on the most deadly attack on the Ahmadi community and the Israeli commando attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla on Monday after Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Malik Amad Khan informed the house of Pakistan’s diplomatic moves against the Israeli action.

Immediate support for her move came from three more women members — ANP’s Bushra Rehman, MQM’s Khushbakht Shujaat and PPP’s Farah Naz Ispahani — while some men from both the treasury and opposition benches also jumped into the discussion before agreed resolutions on the two issues were drafted and adopted unanimously as substitutes for the adjournment motions.

One of them, moved by Ms Rehman, called the Lahore carnage “barbaric massacre” and a “coordinated act of terrorism” that it said represented a “serious challenge to the writ of the Constitution in Pakistan”.

Stating that “Islam does not permit attacks on minorities but instead seeks to protect all human life as sacred”, the resolution called for a thorough investigation and bringing militants who carried out the attacks to justice.

The other resolution, moved by PML-N’s Zahid Hamid, described the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla as “an act of aggression and state terrorism” as well as a “crime against humanity” and asked the government to seek intervention by the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Conference and the United Nations to get the Israeli blockade of Gaza lifted.

At the beginning of the proceedings, PPP’s re-elected member Jamshed Dasti came to the house in style, seemingly dismissing the shame of being found to have been elected in the first instance in February 2008 with a fake graduation degree and evoked “jiay Bhutto” slogans from supporters in a visitors’ gallery as he and another newly elected party member from Punjab, Asghar Jatt, took oath as MNAs.

Mr Dasti wore a band on his forehead inscribed in Seraiki language with “Asan qaidi takht Lahore dey” (we are prisoners of Lahore’s throne) and a black band on his left arm to protest at alleged excesses against him by the PML-N’s Punjab government.

Some other members also appeared targeting the Punjab government in their speeches about the Lahore attacks for allegedly ignoring intelligence reports about militant threats to Ahmadis.

PML-N chief whip Sheikh Aftab Ahmed dismissed the allegations, saying “terrorism is on the rise in the whole of Pakistan”, not only in Punjab, and was a national problem.

PPP’s chief whip, Labour and Manpower Minister Khurshid Ahmed Shah, said his party did not want to politicise the issue of terrorism and wanted it to be fought by all together.

But he said he had no objection to a demand by Mr Dasti for a house committee to investigate his charges of victimisation by the Punjab government and would like the PML-N to be its part.

However, PPP’s Nawab Yousuf Ali Talpur, who was chairing the proceedings, gave no ruling on the demand before adjourning the house until 10am on Friday.

The house business advisory committee decided before the sitting that the national budget for fiscal 2010-11 would be presented on Saturday and approved on June 28.

©2010 DAWN Media Group. All rights reserved

URL: www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-...condemns-killing-of-ahmadis-460

Ahmadis plead for world help after Lahore killings

FROM THE PAPER » FRONT PAGE

Ahmadis plead for world help after Lahore killings

    Friday, 04 Jun, 2010

Militants last week stormed two Ahmadi prayer halls in Lahore, killing 82 worshippers in gun and grenade attacks. — Photo by AFP

NEW YORK: A leader of the Ahmadi community pleaded Thursday for international pressure on Pakistan, warning that extremists were bent on wiping out the community after nearly 100 people were killed.

The Ahmadi community in the United States urged Pakistan to repeal laws restricting the community and to clamp down on hardline Sunni clerics, who it said have waged a campaign of incitement.

“The time is now for the world to wake up to the realisation that the goal of the extremist clerics is to execute a full-scale holocaust,” said Naseem Mahdi, the missionary-in-charge of the US Ahmadi community.

“Even today, after this massacre, on television, in the streets, on billboards, in public meetings, the hatred continues to be preached and no one in any governmental body takes steps to stop people from such incitement to murder,” he told a news conference in New York.

Militants last week stormed two Ahmadi prayer halls in Lahore, killing 82 worshippers in gun and grenade attacks. Gunmen later raided the hospital where victims were treated, killing four people in a shootout.

Mahdi, who put the death toll at 94, said urged US officials to raise religious freedom with Pakistan, which is receiving a 7.5 billion-dollar US package aimed at building its economy and democratic institutions.

“The US government must take every measure in its power to have all levels of government in Pakistan eliminate the laws and ordinances that have become the tools to facilitate and institutionalize the persecution of Ahmadi Muslims” and have been used against other minorities, he said.

Founded by Ghulam Ahmad, who was born in 1838, the Ahmadis believe that Ahmad himself was a prophet and that Jesus died aged 120 in Srinagar.

Pakistan declared them non-Muslims in 1974 and 10 years later they were barred from calling themselves Muslims.

The Ahmadis are strongly critical of violence in the name of Islam.

“The extremists have repeatedly used their power over the masses to brutally attack us in the name of the defence of Islam. They try to gain by violence what they fail to gain by argument, reason and rationality,” Mahdi said.

Religious violence in Pakistan, mostly between majority Sunni Muslims and minority Shias, has killed more than 4,000 people in the past decade.

The Ahmadi community has also encountered problems in other countries including Egypt, which earlier this year detained nine Ahmadis.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a government advisory board, called on Egypt to release them “immediately and unconditionally.”

Egypt has held the Ahmadis using a prohibition against insulting Islam along with a controversial emergency powers law.

Neither charge has “any merit whatsoever,” said Leonard Leo, the chairman of the US commission.

“Both are a blatant violation of their international right to freedom of religion or belief as well as contrary to Egypt’s own constitutional protections,” he said.

©2010 DAWN Media Group. All rights reserved

URL: www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-conte...-world-pressure-pak-qs-07

The Demonization of Ahmadis in Pakistan

RELIGIONS, WORLD

The Demonization of Ahmadis in Pakistan

By iNewp Citizen Journalist
Published: June 4, 2010

Even during the immediate aftermath of last Friday’s brutal attacks on two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore, Pakistan, even as Ahmadis around the world attempt to comprehend the savagery that has swept through their community, there are those who doubt the religious hatred which motivated these attacks. These skeptics claim that the attacks are simply the latest in a series of attacks by Islamic extremists against innocent Pakistani citizens, attacks in which militants target people indiscriminately. Therefore, they claim, these attacks should receive no special treatment or discussion.

This is disingenuous at best. The extremists who perpetrated these attacks were aided by the government, media, and people of Pakistan.

The government’s role in this tragedy began in 1974, when it declared Ahmadis to be “non-Muslim.”

As Pakistan is an Islamic state, this had wide-reaching ramifications for Ahmadis. A further injustice occurred in 1984, when it became illegal for Ahmadis to practice their faith. One of the consequences of these laws was that it became a trivial matter to accuse an Ahmadi of blasphemy, a crime in Pakistan punishable by fines and prison. Though the rule of law is tenuous at best in Pakistan, the situation is even worse for an Ahmadi.

It is commonplace for the government to ignore Ahmadis who have been threatened, harassed, or attacked.

Occasionally, this is taken to the cruelest extremes: murderers of Ahmadis, often religiously motivated, face no consequences. Local and provincial governments are no better; they often claim to be taking action while sitting idly, ignoring the plight of their citizens. This gross mistreatment of the Ahmadi community is exemplified by the fact that even today, almost a week after the attacks in Lahore, the government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari has not issued any statements condemning the attacks or offering condolences to the community.

President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan.

Alongside Pakistan’s government, the media has chosen to ignore the needs of the Ahmadi community. If an Ahmadi is murdered, it goes unreported; if an anti-Ahmadi rally takes place, the views of the Ahmadi community are not represented.

After the Lahore attacks, the Ahmadi community held a press conference which went completely ignored by Pakistan’s news outlets. That an average Pakistani citizen’s knowledge of Ahmadis comes from the community’s opponents is only a natural consequence of the lack of fair reporting.

Finally, and perhaps most dishearteningly, the people of Pakistan are complicit regarding their government’s treatment of the Ahmadi community. It has become extremely difficult for Ahmadis to advance in government careers or work for many Pakistani companies—because of their beliefs.

An Ahmadi can also expect to be ostracized or treated poorly by friends and family who don’t share their beliefs. Many Ahmadis, in order to protect themselves, do not associate with those outside of the religion or are extremely discreet about it.

In Pakistan, Ahmadis are stripped of many of their fundamental rights. They have few allies. The government has abandoned them, the media ignores them, and the Pakistani people have left them to bleed. To say that the Lahore attacks, attacks which deliberately targeted Ahmadis, are not worthy of special attention is beyond callous—it’s dead wrong. The Lahore attacks, which left more than ninety people dead, were not acts of random, extremist violence. They were premeditated attacks which could have only occurred in an atmosphere created by the widespread institutional and social bias against the Ahmadi community.

Militant Islamists protest outside an Ahmadiyya mosque; Ahmadiyya Muslims are accused of being infidels and are often victims of violence. (Meredith Davenport for The New York Times)

To correct the misperceptions about Ahmadis inculcated in the Pakistani population will take time, but the government must stop treating Ahmadis as second-class citizens.

All courses of action which will achieve these ends begin with the repulsion of the Second Amendment to the Pakistan Constitution, which declares Ahmadis to be non-Muslim. The government must also repeal the blasphemy laws which have been used to oppress countless people, not only Ahmadis.

Equality under the law is an ideal which the Pakistan government must strive for, regardless of the citizen’s religion. Only when these laws have been repealed will peace be on the horizon for not only the beleaguered Ahmadi community in Pakistan, but other minority groups like the Christians and Sikhs who all call Pakistan their home.

(Cover Picture: AFP) — Article Contributed By: Nurul Ain

URL: http://inewp.com/?p=3110

Five steps to sanity

Columnist

Five steps to sanity

    By I.A. Rehman
    Thursday, 03 Jun, 2010

The moment the custodians of state power start treating some of the people as second-class citizens they push the latter into a high-risk alley. - Photo on file

The priority demands of sanity (dictionary meaning: reasonable and rational behaviour) are determined by the challenges a society faces. Today Pakistan’s supreme need is the adoption of a rational response to the menace of extremist elements operating, without due sanction, under the banner of belief.

The horrific dimensions of last Friday’s carnage in Lahore can be judged from the fact that even those who never take notice of atrocities against the Ahmadi community as well as those who never protest against the militants’ excesses could not help feeling uneasy at the foul happening. What does sanity now demand from government and society alike?

The more than 90 Ahmadis wantonly cut down in their prayer houses were citizens of Pakistan entitled to the protection of their right to life. If they must be treated as zimmies in a supposedly Islamic state they had an additional reason to be protected by the state and the people. The assault on their prayer houses was not wholly unexpected; the authorities had been aware of the activities of the professional Ahmadi-bashers and their threats for months.

The first step towards reasonable and rational behaviour is that the state must fulfil all three of its legal obligations, namely, a thorough investigation into the obvious failure to ensure security of the prayer houses, a relentless prosecution of the culprits, especially those that are routinely described by the police and the media as ‘masterminds’, and adoption of effective strategies for the protection of communities that are vulnerable because of their belief.

It is not possible to ignore the fact that the higher authorities directly answerable for the Lahore massacre, who normally rush to hospitals or private abodes of victims of relatively less horrible incidents, could not muster the courage to console the injured Ahmadis. Whether this was due to any sympathy for the militants’ creed or to a fear of attracting their hostility, the deviation from the routine points to the roots of discrimination and prejudice against the Ahmadis.

The extirpation of the deep-rooted bias against holders of beliefs different from that of the majority’s orthodoxy is the second essential step towards sanity. The moment the custodians of state power start treating some of the people as second-class citizens they push the latter into a high-risk alley.

The official explanation for not taking action against hate-preachers, some of whom are allowed privileges as rewards for spewing calls to murder and worse, is the fear of breach of peace. The same excuse is touted to explain failure to remove banners and posters that explicitly call for violence against the Ahmadis or other vulnerable groups.

A shopkeeper in a town near Lahore is free to present each of his customers an anti-Ahmadi poster. Tolerance of criminal mischief so as to avoid breach of peace has been formalised into a theory that is used to justify the Ahmadi-specific provisions of the penal code arbitrarily inserted into it by Gen Zia. The denial of Ahmadis’ right to hold meetings, especially their annual congregation, also is premised on this theory.

A critical review of this excuse has long been overdue. No such effort has been made because the victims, Ahmadis especially, are not considered entitled to enjoy their basic rights. But the consequences of overlooking mischief by some elements out of fear for their potential to cause disorder are now evident even to the purblind. Will no action be taken against gangsters who establish a state within the state because they might disrupt peace?

Most criminal acts fall within the definition of breach of peace. Must they go unchallenged? A state loses its title to wield authority if it blinks at criminal acts out of fear of repercussions of its intervention. The demolition of the theory of appeasing disrupters of peace is the third important step towards sanity.

The next step necessary for evolving reasonable and rational behaviour is elimination of discrimination on the basis of belief in practically all walks of life. This is going to be a long haul even after the state has acquired the will and the capacity required for the task, because this will involve not only a review of the 1974 amendment and the Zia ordinance XX but also the nature of the polity. What should receive immediate attention is the need to end the Ahmadis’ exclusion from political life.

When Gen Zia revived the apartheid-like scheme of communal voting the Ahmadis declined to register themselves as non-Muslims. Whatever one may think of that decision the result is that the Ahmadis have been out of the political mainstream. The most striking illustration of their disenfranchisement is the fact that they have no say in the affairs of their town, Rabwah, forcibly renamed Chenab Nagar, and the local body functions have been assumed by a minority of land-grabbers/officially patronised settlers occupying the fringes of the town.

The 2002 election law abolished separate electorates but under a totally illegal and anti-democratic decision the Ahmadis are still denied inclusion in joint/common electoral rolls. This discrimination must end as, among other things, it strengthens discrimination in services, in educational institutions, in housing even.

Finally, the fifth step to sanity demands a critical appraisal of the theoretical foundations of religious extremism. Tomes have been written on tolerance in general, and often perfunctory, terms. Many have devoted time and resources to talks on inter-faith harmony. But very little has been done to protect Islam against its manifestly wrong interpretation by the high priests of militancy. The advocates of the liberal traditions of Islam have been forced into exile or silenced otherwise. There is no intra-Islam discourse in Pakistan, not even to the extent it is going on in many parts of the world, including a few Muslim societies. The effort to rescue belief from the clutches of hate-preachers can be delayed only at the risk of grave peril to Pakistan.

Moving away, for the time being, from the on-again off-again and largely tepid plans to regulate the working of madressahs, a commission may be set up to probe the contents of the so-called religious publications, which are believed to account for three-fourths of all publications in Pakistan every year. The objective should be compilation of the material used to brainwash young boys and convince them of the urgency of not only killing Ahmadis, the Shias, and even Sunnis for sectarian or political differences, but also of treating attacks on hospitals as a holy mission on the route to paradise.

For a people who have allowed raw emotions to rule their minds for decades the trek back to sanity will be neither easy nor painless.

©2010 DAWN Media Group. All rights reserved

URL : www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-libra...-steps-to-sanity-360-sk-04