FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer
2018-09-17 04:45:59 UTC
THIS SHITTY NATION PAKISTAN should NOT EXIST......
The most delusional, dumbest and intolerant bigoted TERRORIST PIGS are
PAKISTANIS.
==============================================================
http://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/2018/sep/16/pakistan-a-graveyard-of-muslims-1871653.html
Pakistan a Graveyard of Muslims
Being a minority is a death sentence in Pakistan.
Published: 16th September 2018 05:00 AM | Last Updated: 16th
September 2018 11:18 AM
By Ravi Shankar
Being a minority is a death sentence in Pakistan. Not just for a Hindu,
Christian or Sikh, but even for a Muslim—an Ahmadi, Ismaili, Bohra or
Hazara Shia. In Pakistani society, whose Sunni Muslimisation has turned
a most virulent shade of green over the past three decades, any sect
that does not follow rigid Wahhabi dogma is deemed a kafir and fair game
for a jihadi with a gun. Minorities are moreover discriminated against
on all fronts, including the right to employment, education and
worship—considered natural in India. The Pak media, especially the Urdu
press, is fanatically anti-minority and has even published entire
editions attacking the Ahmadis, one of Pakistan’s most victimised
minorities.
Thousands of Muslims in Pakistan have been killed, jailed or attacked by
mobs; their mosques burned, women and children murdered, innocents
stoned to death and schools and hospitals bombed simply because they do
not conform to the Sunni majority concept of Islam.
The persecution of minorities in Pakistan has brought the country
worldwide shame. It proves bigotry is the real power in the country,
ruling at the expense of modern models that could spur an economic
miracle and rescue it from a multi-billion debt morass. Last week, Imran
Khan, who had opened his innings with the promise of ‘Naya Pakistan’,
was forced by the extremist Islamist party Tehreek-i-Labbaik to sack
Atif R Mian from Pakistan’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC).
The only crime of the Princeton professor, who is considered one of the
top 25 economists in the world, is that he is an Ahmadi. Outraged by the
prime minister’s capitulation to the radicals, London-based economist
Imran Rasul quit the EAC. In a country where teachers have been replaced
by clerics who radicalise its youth instead of informing them, revival
is a distant hope.
WAVE OF DEATH
Hope is in short supply for Pakistan’s Ahmadiyya community, which
accepts their founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as the last prophet; considered
a heretic belief that repudiates Islam’s tenet that there is no other
prophet than Muhammad. As god’s vengeance, they are murdered, arrested,
jailed or executed for various imaginary crimes, including under the
appalling blasphemy law of Pakistan. The wave of anti-Ahmadiyya hatred
hit its shores in 1953 when prominent theologians led rioting mobs
demanding the removal of Jinnah’s associate and then foreign minister,
Sir Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadi. The agitators also clamoured for the
scalps of all Ahmadis in top government posts, and their formal
excommunication. The Ahmadi plight worsened in 1974 when the Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto government passed the second Constitutional Amendment taking
away their right to be called Muslims; they are now registered as
non-Muslims on the country’s voters’ list.
In 1984, Islamist military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, who later executed
Bhutto, passed Ordinance XX preventing Ahmadis from practicing their
religion in public.
They cannot call the azan. They cannot use Islamic terms and titles,
read Islamic texts for prayers, name their places of worship ‘masjid’
and greet people in the Islamic manner; acts punishable with three years
in jail and a fine. Ahmadis are also banned from Haj pilgrimage. Their
life just became even more dangerous when Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui
of the Islamabad High Court ordered that Ahmadis should append the word
denoting their faith to their names: “Qadianis should not be allowed to
conceal their identity by having similar names to those of Muslims,
therefore, they should be either stopped from using name of ordinary
Muslims or in the alternative Qadiani, Ghulam-e-Mirza or Mirzai must
form a part of their names and be mentioned accordingly.”(Ahmadis are
derogatorily referred to as Qadianis; the eponymous birthplace of
Ahmad.) This ruling is meant to prevent them from entering the civil
services and the judiciary since declaration of denomination is
necessary to obtain a national identity card, passport, birth
certificate and voter ID; all requirements for top government and
semi-government jobs. Lawyer Yasser Latif Hamdani, visiting fellow at
Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Programme called the ruling the
‘Yellow Star of Pakistan’ in reference to the deadly anti-Semitism of
the Nazi Holocaust. “The international community must act before there
is genocide of Ahmadis in Pakistan,” he warned. In January 2018, the US
State Department placed Pakistan on its ‘Special Watch List’ for “severe
violations of religious freedom”. But Imran, whose election plank was
anti-US, may not be easily scared. He declared last week that Pakistan
would not fight another country’s war.
VICTIMS OF HATE
Pakistan is fighting an internal war of its own, against its own people.
Farahnaz Ispahani, former media advisor to the Pak president from 2008
to 2012, said in an interview in 2016: “When Pakistan was being formed
in 1947, its population of non-Muslims was 23 percent, today we are
somewhere between 3-4 percent. So there has been a purification of
minorities.” Such purification is being carried out by militant squads
which routinely target Shias and followers of Sufi Islam. The extremist
clerics of Pakistan and their Saudi sponsors have for decades tried to
strip Pakistan of its Sufi legacy, which they consider a dilution of
Islam. Failing to escape its India obsession, Pakistani governments have
successively acted to assimilate Sufi shrines into an exclusive
narrative that eliminates the syncretism with which the saints are
worshipped by different faiths in different ways. Last year’s Islamic
State suicide attack on the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in
Sehwan, Sindh, killed around 90 people and injured hundreds. 2017 was a
bloody year for Shias; their mosques and shrines were targeted by
Saudi-backed Takfiri terrorists from Parachinar to Quetta. More than
3,000 Hazaras have been slaughtered since September 2011, according to
official figures. Minority persecution is official state policy: human
rights activists note 140 Pakistani Shias have “disappeared” over the
past two years, arrested by the intelligence services. Hazaras are the
majority indigenous population of Gilgit-Baltistan, where the Pakistani
military establishment has let loose a wave of genocide and rape to
suppress their demand for autonomy. In 2015, 43 Ismailis—16 women and 27
men—were butchered on a bus in one of the worst terror attacks in
Pakistan. The mullahs see Ismailis as a liberal, reformist and
‘Westernised’ sect that does not ask females to cover their hair in
public; the majority of Ismaili women do not wear hijabs. After
Ahmadiyyas, Shias and Ismailis, the miniscule but prosperous Dawoodi
Bohra community has come under the jihadi gaze. A Bohra mosque in
Karachi was bombed in 2015. In the last few years, members belonging to
moderate Sufi and Barelvi Muslim sects have been massacred by religious
extremists as part of jihad. In the insane communal mosaic of Pakistan,
many Barelvis have now taken up arms against the Shias. The founding
principle of jihad is takfir, which ejects a person or a group from the
Islamic faith, making their lives forfeit. It also allows the killing of
Muslims who are considered not Muslim enough. The self-defeating cycle
of Pakistan shows the state itself operates on takfir. In the 1980s, the
Pak military was behind the first organised terrorist outfit in the
country: the Sipah-e-Sahaba whose members were recruited and trained to
bomb Ahmadi mosques and Shia imambargahs. After changing its name
subsequently to Millat-e-Islamia and now Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, it
functions in the mainstream as a political party.
PATRIOTISM LOSES TO ISLAMISATION
The cardinal cause of Pak radicalisation is the gradual
de-Pakistanisation of Pakistan, led by regressive clerics and their
organisations funded liberally by Saudi Arabia, which has been exporting
violent Wahhabism for decades. After Mian was dropped from EAC last
week, Pakistan’s foreign minister Fawad Chaudhry fumed, “The entire
world is speculating that Atif Mian will receive a Nobel Prize in five
years, we have appointed him to the EAC and not to the Council of
Islamic Ideology (CII).” But historically the Nobel is not considered an
honour in Pakistan. It’s only Nobel laureate Dr Abdus Salam was an
Ahmadi, whose name has been dropped by the new government from the
premier Quaid-i-Azam University’s Physics Department under pressure from
the all powerful CII: the body that constitutionally governs all
religion-related matters. Dr Salam’s post mortem debasement had started
with the desecration of his tomb in 2014, when the word ‘Muslim’ was
erased from his gravestone at the Bahishti Maqbara—an Ahmadi cemetery in
Rabwah; the inscription had initially read ‘the first Muslim Nobel
laureate’. Dr Salam being an Ahmadi is not considered a Muslim in
Pakistan. Wrote Husain Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to the
United States, “Now that the Islamic State in Pakistan had established
the right to determine who was and was not a true Muslim, religious
identity and religious correctness became larger issues in Pakistan’s
political discourse.” He believes the schismatic policies of Zia ul-Haq
who ruled from 1977 to 1988 aggravated sectarian conflict in the
country. However, religious fanaticism had been flourishing at the high
levels of the Pak government even in the 1950s. Khawaja Nazimuddin, the
second Pak Prime Minister, had enshrined the prevailing ultraist state
philosophy by stating, “I do not agree that religion is a private affair
of the individual nor do I agree that in an Islamic state every citizen
has identical rights, no matter what his caste, creed or faith be.”
SAUDI POISON
Saudi Arabia, Islam’s self-chosen representative on earth, wouldn’t
agree more. The deepest root of minority genocide and targeted killings
of advocates of ‘soft’ and modern Islam in Pakistan is the Saudi
influence. When Pakistan was formed in 1947 as a state for Muslims, many
moderates played a major role in the nation’s birth; the first president
of the All India Muslim League was Sir Agha Khan III, an Ismaili. The
founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a Shia. So was Jinnah’s
patron Raja Sahib of Mahmudabad. Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister Sir
Zafarullah Khan was an Ahmadi. Their moderate legacy would be anathema
to the Salafists. Terrorist organisations such as the Taliban,
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat are affiliated to the
ultra-conservative Deobandi sect, whose beliefs are similar to Saudi
Wahhabism. In two decades, the Taliban have massacred over 60,000
people—mostly minorities. Wahhabi Islam, the official religion of the
Saudi kingdom, is the surging voltage of international terrorism. Its
severe interpretation of life is a bleak puritan social landscape
governed by merciless religious laws better suited to medieval desert
conditions than the modern world. The most powerful Saudi puppet in Pak
history was Zia who made Islamisation the state policy and included
religious parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami in governance. He
established new religious laws, a federal sharia court and promoted
compulsory Islamic education in schools. The madrassas were funded
generously with Saudi riyals. Zia also inserted Islamic teachings into
the military’s training syllabus, thereby effectively radicalising the
army. Muslim misogyny entered the judicial system after laws were passed
that recognised the value of a woman’s testimony only as half of a man’s
on trials over sexual offences. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military
written by Haqqani lays out how the Mullah-General nexus benefitted both
parties to control Pakistan politics and society. This bigoted bond
changed the geopolitics of not only the subcontinent but also affected
the world. America, now Islamic terror’s main target, had turned a blind
eye to Zia’s desecration of Pak democracy since he was the main conduit
of Saudi money and support for the mujahideen who were waging a bitter
war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Around 35,000
militants from 43 Muslim countries were trained jointly by the
intelligence services of the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in madrassas
and army camps. In 2008, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid had warned in
his book, Descent Into Chaos, that Pakistan’s slide into religious
anarchy “will sow the seeds of al-Qaeda and turn Pakistan into the world
centre of jihadism for the next two decades.” Before 9/11, there was
only a single recorded suicide attack in Pakistan’s history. But after
9/11, their numbers are in the hundreds. Former Foreign Minister of
Pakistan Khawaja Asif has argued that Pakistan has to get rid of the
‘ghosts’ of Zia and Pervez Musharraf if it has to move forward.
THE EDUCATION BACKLASH
The ghost of Zia will not be easily exorcised from the vast Islamic
madrassa network funded by Saudi petrodollars to promote hardline
Wahhabi and Salafi fundamentalism. Pakistan’s slide from nationhood to
Islamisation has gained at the expense of the moribund state education
system. In 2016, The Economist put the number of madrassas at 24,000
where around two million boy students are taught the scriptures in place
of science, math or the liberal arts to make them competitive in the
global employment market. The government spends only two percent of the
country’s total GDP on education. Tahir Ashrafi, head of the Pakistan
Ulema Council, affirms that 60 per cent of madrassa students are “not
involved in any training or terrorist activities” though he is not sure
about the remaining 40 per cent. Lamented author William Dalrymple, “If
only the Pakistani government could finance schools that taught respect
for the country’s own indigenous and syncretic religious traditions,
rather than buying fleets of American F-16 fighters and leaving
education to the Saudis.”
The Saudi psychological colonisation was apparent last week when
Pakistani social media exulted over Mia’s sacking, heedless of the dire
economic straits of the country and the debt burden that is driving it
even deeper into the China orbit. Mian, a firm patriot, was opposed to
the China Pakistan Economic Corridor—likely to benefit China the
most—which has saddled Pakistan with a $62 billion loan to pay for
Islamabad’s part in the construction. Pakistan’s forex levels have
dropped to a four-year low and the government may not be able to meet
its monthly export bills. But economic reality flees in the face of
fanatic hatred as has been witnessed often in the Islamic Republic’s
history. Chaudhry declared last week, “Pakistan belongs as much to its
minorities as it does to the majority”. Former interior minister Ahsan
Iqbal argued “talent and competency” should matter and “merit should not
be mixed with religion”. The madrassas couldn’t care less.
THE DECLINE OF A SOCIETY
Former Pakistan Director of the Human Rights Watch and activist Ali
Dayan Hasan tweeted in 2015 after the Ismaili carnage in Karachi,
“Increasingly, formulaic condemnations and condolences by state
institutions in the face of carnage just add insult to injury. Blaming
India & others for atrocities against minorities does not absolve the
state of failing in responsibility to protect.” In the recently
published book Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious
Minorities by scholar and parliamentarian Ispahani, Pak history has been
dissected into four consequential stages.
1. Muslimisation of Pakistan between 1945 and 1951 followed by the rise
of the Islamic identity from 1958 when state-sponsored education
rejected pluralism, demonised religious minorities and highlighted and
glorified Islamic history without historical proof.
2. The state’s redefinition of the Pakistani identity as purely Islamic.
3. Islamisation further consolidated through legislation to make Islamic
law supreme and hostile to the minorities.
4. State supported organised violence towards minorities in the form of
terrorism and lynching.
The dilemma of modern Pakistan is while it strives to retain a place in
the world, it also functions as a non-secular nation founded on an
anti-inclusive Islamic foundation that feeds on ultra conservative
hatred of its nonbelievers. “Abdus Salam, pioneer of Pakistan's nuclear
weapons programme; Zafarullah Khan, president of the UN General
Assembly; Air Marshal Zafar Chaudhry, Pakistan’s First Air Chief; and Lt
Gen Abdul Malik, hero of the 1965 conflict, were all disgraced like Atif
Mia because of their beliefs. People dishonoured and their mosques
reduced to rubble. Is this the ‘Homeland for Muslims’ that Mohammed Ali
Jinnah created?” asks G Parthasarathy, former India’s High Commissioner
to Pakistan. In the 1940s, pre-Partition Deoband clerics such as Syed
Abul Ala Maududi and Ashraf Ali Thanvi opposed the All India Muslim
League’s (AIML) demand for Pakistan on the grounds that AIML leaders
were too liberal to be true Muslims who wanted a liberal and pluralistic
Pakistan instead of a country where Allah’s will would be supreme.
The senseless savagery towards the Ahmadis and other minorities can be
traced back to AIML’s hasty politics that ignored the geographic and
sociocultural differences among Muslims in the new country and chose
Islam as the only glue. But once Pakistan was formed, its clerics
demanded that Islam should be the preeminent force. They compelled the
government to adopt the Objectives Resolution in 1949, which serves as
the Constitutional base of Pakistan. The Resolution had two Islamic
provisions—God’s will supersedes the people’s and Muslims must live
according to Koranic laws. This left Pak parliament with limited space
in democracy since its responsibilities were deemed a “sacred trust”
thereby making it subservient to the Islamic edifice. By sacrificing the
rights of its minorities to sectarian loathing, Pakistan is yielding to
the bleak laws of a bygone preacher in an Arabian desert instead
enriching peace by embracing the all-encompassing heritage of the Indian
subcontinent.
The Flashpoints
1947: Almost 23 percent of Pakistan’s population comprise non-Muslims.
1974: Ahmadis declared non-Muslims
1990s: Nearly 1,000 Hindu temples targeted by Islamists
1998: Census reports that a little over 3 percent non-Muslims
2005: 32 Hindus killed in firing by the government forces during clashes
between Bugti tribesmen and paramilitary forces in Balochistan
2009: Mass anti-Christian violence in Gojra. The Taliban impose Jizya on
non-Muslims
2010: Hindus attacked and ethnically cleansed with 60 fleeing Murad
Memon Goth in Karachi. Lahore bombings kill 50 people and wound 200
others in two suicide bombings on a Sufi shrine.
2012: Jundallah militants stop buses and massacre 18 passengers. All but
one of the victims are Shia Muslims.
2013: Twin suicide bomb attacks at a church in Peshawar; 127 people
killed and over 250 injured
2013: Bombings on Shias in Quetta
2017: Pakistan ranked fourth on the Christian support group Open Doors
World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a
Christian
Pakistan’s Muslim Sects and Their Tribulations
Ahmadiyya
The community originated with the teachings of its founder Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad (1835–1908). He saw himself as a renewer of Islam and claimed to
have been chosen by Allah. His followers regard him as the messiah and a
prophet. In 1947, the community moved its religious headquarters from
Qadian in India’s Punjab, where the movement was founded in 1889, to
Rabwah in Pakistan. The movement follows the Koran’s teachings. But it
is regarded by orthodox Muslims as heretical because it does not believe
that Mohammed was the final prophet sent to guide mankind, as they
believe is laid out in the holy book.
Shia
In 632, after the death of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad, tribal
Arabs disagreed over who should succeed him and inherit the political
and religious office. The majority—later known as the Sunnis—backed Abu
Bakr, a friend of the Prophet and father of his wife. Others considered
Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, the rightful successors. This
group became known as the Shia, and are considered a minority.
Ismailism
Throughout their 1,400-year history, the Ismailis have been led by a
living, hereditary Imam. They recognise His Highness Prince Karim
al-Husayni Aga Khan IV as their Imam in direct lineal descent from
Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law. The community can be
found in over 25 countries around the world. They have faced thousands
of years of persecution and targeted propaganda by other Muslims.
Dawoodi Bohra
The Dawoodi Bohras follow Shia Islam as propagated by the Fatimid
Imamate in medieval Egypt. Also known as the Mustali Ismailis, the sect
is derived from early Hindu converts to Ismailism who split from the
Nizaris in 1094. The Bohras split around 1600 into a majority Dawoodi
and a minority Sulaymani sub-sect. Both resulted from disputes over
succession of leadership.
The most delusional, dumbest and intolerant bigoted TERRORIST PIGS are
PAKISTANIS.
==============================================================
http://www.newindianexpress.com/magazine/2018/sep/16/pakistan-a-graveyard-of-muslims-1871653.html
Pakistan a Graveyard of Muslims
Being a minority is a death sentence in Pakistan.
Published: 16th September 2018 05:00 AM | Last Updated: 16th
September 2018 11:18 AM
By Ravi Shankar
Being a minority is a death sentence in Pakistan. Not just for a Hindu,
Christian or Sikh, but even for a Muslim—an Ahmadi, Ismaili, Bohra or
Hazara Shia. In Pakistani society, whose Sunni Muslimisation has turned
a most virulent shade of green over the past three decades, any sect
that does not follow rigid Wahhabi dogma is deemed a kafir and fair game
for a jihadi with a gun. Minorities are moreover discriminated against
on all fronts, including the right to employment, education and
worship—considered natural in India. The Pak media, especially the Urdu
press, is fanatically anti-minority and has even published entire
editions attacking the Ahmadis, one of Pakistan’s most victimised
minorities.
Thousands of Muslims in Pakistan have been killed, jailed or attacked by
mobs; their mosques burned, women and children murdered, innocents
stoned to death and schools and hospitals bombed simply because they do
not conform to the Sunni majority concept of Islam.
The persecution of minorities in Pakistan has brought the country
worldwide shame. It proves bigotry is the real power in the country,
ruling at the expense of modern models that could spur an economic
miracle and rescue it from a multi-billion debt morass. Last week, Imran
Khan, who had opened his innings with the promise of ‘Naya Pakistan’,
was forced by the extremist Islamist party Tehreek-i-Labbaik to sack
Atif R Mian from Pakistan’s Economic Advisory Council (EAC).
The only crime of the Princeton professor, who is considered one of the
top 25 economists in the world, is that he is an Ahmadi. Outraged by the
prime minister’s capitulation to the radicals, London-based economist
Imran Rasul quit the EAC. In a country where teachers have been replaced
by clerics who radicalise its youth instead of informing them, revival
is a distant hope.
WAVE OF DEATH
Hope is in short supply for Pakistan’s Ahmadiyya community, which
accepts their founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as the last prophet; considered
a heretic belief that repudiates Islam’s tenet that there is no other
prophet than Muhammad. As god’s vengeance, they are murdered, arrested,
jailed or executed for various imaginary crimes, including under the
appalling blasphemy law of Pakistan. The wave of anti-Ahmadiyya hatred
hit its shores in 1953 when prominent theologians led rioting mobs
demanding the removal of Jinnah’s associate and then foreign minister,
Sir Zafarullah Khan, an Ahmadi. The agitators also clamoured for the
scalps of all Ahmadis in top government posts, and their formal
excommunication. The Ahmadi plight worsened in 1974 when the Zulfikar
Ali Bhutto government passed the second Constitutional Amendment taking
away their right to be called Muslims; they are now registered as
non-Muslims on the country’s voters’ list.
In 1984, Islamist military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, who later executed
Bhutto, passed Ordinance XX preventing Ahmadis from practicing their
religion in public.
They cannot call the azan. They cannot use Islamic terms and titles,
read Islamic texts for prayers, name their places of worship ‘masjid’
and greet people in the Islamic manner; acts punishable with three years
in jail and a fine. Ahmadis are also banned from Haj pilgrimage. Their
life just became even more dangerous when Justice Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui
of the Islamabad High Court ordered that Ahmadis should append the word
denoting their faith to their names: “Qadianis should not be allowed to
conceal their identity by having similar names to those of Muslims,
therefore, they should be either stopped from using name of ordinary
Muslims or in the alternative Qadiani, Ghulam-e-Mirza or Mirzai must
form a part of their names and be mentioned accordingly.”(Ahmadis are
derogatorily referred to as Qadianis; the eponymous birthplace of
Ahmad.) This ruling is meant to prevent them from entering the civil
services and the judiciary since declaration of denomination is
necessary to obtain a national identity card, passport, birth
certificate and voter ID; all requirements for top government and
semi-government jobs. Lawyer Yasser Latif Hamdani, visiting fellow at
Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Programme called the ruling the
‘Yellow Star of Pakistan’ in reference to the deadly anti-Semitism of
the Nazi Holocaust. “The international community must act before there
is genocide of Ahmadis in Pakistan,” he warned. In January 2018, the US
State Department placed Pakistan on its ‘Special Watch List’ for “severe
violations of religious freedom”. But Imran, whose election plank was
anti-US, may not be easily scared. He declared last week that Pakistan
would not fight another country’s war.
VICTIMS OF HATE
Pakistan is fighting an internal war of its own, against its own people.
Farahnaz Ispahani, former media advisor to the Pak president from 2008
to 2012, said in an interview in 2016: “When Pakistan was being formed
in 1947, its population of non-Muslims was 23 percent, today we are
somewhere between 3-4 percent. So there has been a purification of
minorities.” Such purification is being carried out by militant squads
which routinely target Shias and followers of Sufi Islam. The extremist
clerics of Pakistan and their Saudi sponsors have for decades tried to
strip Pakistan of its Sufi legacy, which they consider a dilution of
Islam. Failing to escape its India obsession, Pakistani governments have
successively acted to assimilate Sufi shrines into an exclusive
narrative that eliminates the syncretism with which the saints are
worshipped by different faiths in different ways. Last year’s Islamic
State suicide attack on the Sufi shrine of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in
Sehwan, Sindh, killed around 90 people and injured hundreds. 2017 was a
bloody year for Shias; their mosques and shrines were targeted by
Saudi-backed Takfiri terrorists from Parachinar to Quetta. More than
3,000 Hazaras have been slaughtered since September 2011, according to
official figures. Minority persecution is official state policy: human
rights activists note 140 Pakistani Shias have “disappeared” over the
past two years, arrested by the intelligence services. Hazaras are the
majority indigenous population of Gilgit-Baltistan, where the Pakistani
military establishment has let loose a wave of genocide and rape to
suppress their demand for autonomy. In 2015, 43 Ismailis—16 women and 27
men—were butchered on a bus in one of the worst terror attacks in
Pakistan. The mullahs see Ismailis as a liberal, reformist and
‘Westernised’ sect that does not ask females to cover their hair in
public; the majority of Ismaili women do not wear hijabs. After
Ahmadiyyas, Shias and Ismailis, the miniscule but prosperous Dawoodi
Bohra community has come under the jihadi gaze. A Bohra mosque in
Karachi was bombed in 2015. In the last few years, members belonging to
moderate Sufi and Barelvi Muslim sects have been massacred by religious
extremists as part of jihad. In the insane communal mosaic of Pakistan,
many Barelvis have now taken up arms against the Shias. The founding
principle of jihad is takfir, which ejects a person or a group from the
Islamic faith, making their lives forfeit. It also allows the killing of
Muslims who are considered not Muslim enough. The self-defeating cycle
of Pakistan shows the state itself operates on takfir. In the 1980s, the
Pak military was behind the first organised terrorist outfit in the
country: the Sipah-e-Sahaba whose members were recruited and trained to
bomb Ahmadi mosques and Shia imambargahs. After changing its name
subsequently to Millat-e-Islamia and now Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, it
functions in the mainstream as a political party.
PATRIOTISM LOSES TO ISLAMISATION
The cardinal cause of Pak radicalisation is the gradual
de-Pakistanisation of Pakistan, led by regressive clerics and their
organisations funded liberally by Saudi Arabia, which has been exporting
violent Wahhabism for decades. After Mian was dropped from EAC last
week, Pakistan’s foreign minister Fawad Chaudhry fumed, “The entire
world is speculating that Atif Mian will receive a Nobel Prize in five
years, we have appointed him to the EAC and not to the Council of
Islamic Ideology (CII).” But historically the Nobel is not considered an
honour in Pakistan. It’s only Nobel laureate Dr Abdus Salam was an
Ahmadi, whose name has been dropped by the new government from the
premier Quaid-i-Azam University’s Physics Department under pressure from
the all powerful CII: the body that constitutionally governs all
religion-related matters. Dr Salam’s post mortem debasement had started
with the desecration of his tomb in 2014, when the word ‘Muslim’ was
erased from his gravestone at the Bahishti Maqbara—an Ahmadi cemetery in
Rabwah; the inscription had initially read ‘the first Muslim Nobel
laureate’. Dr Salam being an Ahmadi is not considered a Muslim in
Pakistan. Wrote Husain Haqqani, former Pakistani ambassador to the
United States, “Now that the Islamic State in Pakistan had established
the right to determine who was and was not a true Muslim, religious
identity and religious correctness became larger issues in Pakistan’s
political discourse.” He believes the schismatic policies of Zia ul-Haq
who ruled from 1977 to 1988 aggravated sectarian conflict in the
country. However, religious fanaticism had been flourishing at the high
levels of the Pak government even in the 1950s. Khawaja Nazimuddin, the
second Pak Prime Minister, had enshrined the prevailing ultraist state
philosophy by stating, “I do not agree that religion is a private affair
of the individual nor do I agree that in an Islamic state every citizen
has identical rights, no matter what his caste, creed or faith be.”
SAUDI POISON
Saudi Arabia, Islam’s self-chosen representative on earth, wouldn’t
agree more. The deepest root of minority genocide and targeted killings
of advocates of ‘soft’ and modern Islam in Pakistan is the Saudi
influence. When Pakistan was formed in 1947 as a state for Muslims, many
moderates played a major role in the nation’s birth; the first president
of the All India Muslim League was Sir Agha Khan III, an Ismaili. The
founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, was a Shia. So was Jinnah’s
patron Raja Sahib of Mahmudabad. Pakistan’s first Foreign Minister Sir
Zafarullah Khan was an Ahmadi. Their moderate legacy would be anathema
to the Salafists. Terrorist organisations such as the Taliban,
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat are affiliated to the
ultra-conservative Deobandi sect, whose beliefs are similar to Saudi
Wahhabism. In two decades, the Taliban have massacred over 60,000
people—mostly minorities. Wahhabi Islam, the official religion of the
Saudi kingdom, is the surging voltage of international terrorism. Its
severe interpretation of life is a bleak puritan social landscape
governed by merciless religious laws better suited to medieval desert
conditions than the modern world. The most powerful Saudi puppet in Pak
history was Zia who made Islamisation the state policy and included
religious parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islami in governance. He
established new religious laws, a federal sharia court and promoted
compulsory Islamic education in schools. The madrassas were funded
generously with Saudi riyals. Zia also inserted Islamic teachings into
the military’s training syllabus, thereby effectively radicalising the
army. Muslim misogyny entered the judicial system after laws were passed
that recognised the value of a woman’s testimony only as half of a man’s
on trials over sexual offences. Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military
written by Haqqani lays out how the Mullah-General nexus benefitted both
parties to control Pakistan politics and society. This bigoted bond
changed the geopolitics of not only the subcontinent but also affected
the world. America, now Islamic terror’s main target, had turned a blind
eye to Zia’s desecration of Pak democracy since he was the main conduit
of Saudi money and support for the mujahideen who were waging a bitter
war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Around 35,000
militants from 43 Muslim countries were trained jointly by the
intelligence services of the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in madrassas
and army camps. In 2008, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid had warned in
his book, Descent Into Chaos, that Pakistan’s slide into religious
anarchy “will sow the seeds of al-Qaeda and turn Pakistan into the world
centre of jihadism for the next two decades.” Before 9/11, there was
only a single recorded suicide attack in Pakistan’s history. But after
9/11, their numbers are in the hundreds. Former Foreign Minister of
Pakistan Khawaja Asif has argued that Pakistan has to get rid of the
‘ghosts’ of Zia and Pervez Musharraf if it has to move forward.
THE EDUCATION BACKLASH
The ghost of Zia will not be easily exorcised from the vast Islamic
madrassa network funded by Saudi petrodollars to promote hardline
Wahhabi and Salafi fundamentalism. Pakistan’s slide from nationhood to
Islamisation has gained at the expense of the moribund state education
system. In 2016, The Economist put the number of madrassas at 24,000
where around two million boy students are taught the scriptures in place
of science, math or the liberal arts to make them competitive in the
global employment market. The government spends only two percent of the
country’s total GDP on education. Tahir Ashrafi, head of the Pakistan
Ulema Council, affirms that 60 per cent of madrassa students are “not
involved in any training or terrorist activities” though he is not sure
about the remaining 40 per cent. Lamented author William Dalrymple, “If
only the Pakistani government could finance schools that taught respect
for the country’s own indigenous and syncretic religious traditions,
rather than buying fleets of American F-16 fighters and leaving
education to the Saudis.”
The Saudi psychological colonisation was apparent last week when
Pakistani social media exulted over Mia’s sacking, heedless of the dire
economic straits of the country and the debt burden that is driving it
even deeper into the China orbit. Mian, a firm patriot, was opposed to
the China Pakistan Economic Corridor—likely to benefit China the
most—which has saddled Pakistan with a $62 billion loan to pay for
Islamabad’s part in the construction. Pakistan’s forex levels have
dropped to a four-year low and the government may not be able to meet
its monthly export bills. But economic reality flees in the face of
fanatic hatred as has been witnessed often in the Islamic Republic’s
history. Chaudhry declared last week, “Pakistan belongs as much to its
minorities as it does to the majority”. Former interior minister Ahsan
Iqbal argued “talent and competency” should matter and “merit should not
be mixed with religion”. The madrassas couldn’t care less.
THE DECLINE OF A SOCIETY
Former Pakistan Director of the Human Rights Watch and activist Ali
Dayan Hasan tweeted in 2015 after the Ismaili carnage in Karachi,
“Increasingly, formulaic condemnations and condolences by state
institutions in the face of carnage just add insult to injury. Blaming
India & others for atrocities against minorities does not absolve the
state of failing in responsibility to protect.” In the recently
published book Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan’s Religious
Minorities by scholar and parliamentarian Ispahani, Pak history has been
dissected into four consequential stages.
1. Muslimisation of Pakistan between 1945 and 1951 followed by the rise
of the Islamic identity from 1958 when state-sponsored education
rejected pluralism, demonised religious minorities and highlighted and
glorified Islamic history without historical proof.
2. The state’s redefinition of the Pakistani identity as purely Islamic.
3. Islamisation further consolidated through legislation to make Islamic
law supreme and hostile to the minorities.
4. State supported organised violence towards minorities in the form of
terrorism and lynching.
The dilemma of modern Pakistan is while it strives to retain a place in
the world, it also functions as a non-secular nation founded on an
anti-inclusive Islamic foundation that feeds on ultra conservative
hatred of its nonbelievers. “Abdus Salam, pioneer of Pakistan's nuclear
weapons programme; Zafarullah Khan, president of the UN General
Assembly; Air Marshal Zafar Chaudhry, Pakistan’s First Air Chief; and Lt
Gen Abdul Malik, hero of the 1965 conflict, were all disgraced like Atif
Mia because of their beliefs. People dishonoured and their mosques
reduced to rubble. Is this the ‘Homeland for Muslims’ that Mohammed Ali
Jinnah created?” asks G Parthasarathy, former India’s High Commissioner
to Pakistan. In the 1940s, pre-Partition Deoband clerics such as Syed
Abul Ala Maududi and Ashraf Ali Thanvi opposed the All India Muslim
League’s (AIML) demand for Pakistan on the grounds that AIML leaders
were too liberal to be true Muslims who wanted a liberal and pluralistic
Pakistan instead of a country where Allah’s will would be supreme.
The senseless savagery towards the Ahmadis and other minorities can be
traced back to AIML’s hasty politics that ignored the geographic and
sociocultural differences among Muslims in the new country and chose
Islam as the only glue. But once Pakistan was formed, its clerics
demanded that Islam should be the preeminent force. They compelled the
government to adopt the Objectives Resolution in 1949, which serves as
the Constitutional base of Pakistan. The Resolution had two Islamic
provisions—God’s will supersedes the people’s and Muslims must live
according to Koranic laws. This left Pak parliament with limited space
in democracy since its responsibilities were deemed a “sacred trust”
thereby making it subservient to the Islamic edifice. By sacrificing the
rights of its minorities to sectarian loathing, Pakistan is yielding to
the bleak laws of a bygone preacher in an Arabian desert instead
enriching peace by embracing the all-encompassing heritage of the Indian
subcontinent.
The Flashpoints
1947: Almost 23 percent of Pakistan’s population comprise non-Muslims.
1974: Ahmadis declared non-Muslims
1990s: Nearly 1,000 Hindu temples targeted by Islamists
1998: Census reports that a little over 3 percent non-Muslims
2005: 32 Hindus killed in firing by the government forces during clashes
between Bugti tribesmen and paramilitary forces in Balochistan
2009: Mass anti-Christian violence in Gojra. The Taliban impose Jizya on
non-Muslims
2010: Hindus attacked and ethnically cleansed with 60 fleeing Murad
Memon Goth in Karachi. Lahore bombings kill 50 people and wound 200
others in two suicide bombings on a Sufi shrine.
2012: Jundallah militants stop buses and massacre 18 passengers. All but
one of the victims are Shia Muslims.
2013: Twin suicide bomb attacks at a church in Peshawar; 127 people
killed and over 250 injured
2013: Bombings on Shias in Quetta
2017: Pakistan ranked fourth on the Christian support group Open Doors
World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a
Christian
Pakistan’s Muslim Sects and Their Tribulations
Ahmadiyya
The community originated with the teachings of its founder Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad (1835–1908). He saw himself as a renewer of Islam and claimed to
have been chosen by Allah. His followers regard him as the messiah and a
prophet. In 1947, the community moved its religious headquarters from
Qadian in India’s Punjab, where the movement was founded in 1889, to
Rabwah in Pakistan. The movement follows the Koran’s teachings. But it
is regarded by orthodox Muslims as heretical because it does not believe
that Mohammed was the final prophet sent to guide mankind, as they
believe is laid out in the holy book.
Shia
In 632, after the death of Islam’s founder, the Prophet Muhammad, tribal
Arabs disagreed over who should succeed him and inherit the political
and religious office. The majority—later known as the Sunnis—backed Abu
Bakr, a friend of the Prophet and father of his wife. Others considered
Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, the rightful successors. This
group became known as the Shia, and are considered a minority.
Ismailism
Throughout their 1,400-year history, the Ismailis have been led by a
living, hereditary Imam. They recognise His Highness Prince Karim
al-Husayni Aga Khan IV as their Imam in direct lineal descent from
Prophet Muhammad through his cousin and son-in-law. The community can be
found in over 25 countries around the world. They have faced thousands
of years of persecution and targeted propaganda by other Muslims.
Dawoodi Bohra
The Dawoodi Bohras follow Shia Islam as propagated by the Fatimid
Imamate in medieval Egypt. Also known as the Mustali Ismailis, the sect
is derived from early Hindu converts to Ismailism who split from the
Nizaris in 1094. The Bohras split around 1600 into a majority Dawoodi
and a minority Sulaymani sub-sect. Both resulted from disputes over
succession of leadership.