Intolerance in Pak: Ahmadi graves desecrated, anti-Ahmadi slurs inscribed
Pakistan’s tiny Ahmadi community is routinely subjected to discrimination which often enjoys legal and state sanction…reports Asian Lite News
Unidentified suspects have desecrated Ahmadi graves in Pakistan Punjab, it has emerged, media reports said.
The suspects desecrated four grave headstones and inscribed anti-Ahmadi slurs on them, Friday Times reported.
The incident occured in Premkot, Hafizabad, on November 22, but came to light after, according to the Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya.
Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya spokesperson Aamir Mehmood said the incident took place at the same graveyard where Punjab Police had reportedly desecrated 45 graves of community members earlier in February. He said the “heart-wrenching” incident was representative of rising intolerance in Pakistan.
“Forget living Ahmadis, even our dead are not spared,” he said, Friday Times reported.
Pakistan’s tiny Ahmadi community is routinely subjected to discrimination which often enjoys legal and state sanction.
An Ahmadi man was booked by Karachi police under the nation’s Ahmadiyya-specific penal provisions for using �Syed’ as a prefix earlier in the same month. The suspect, a lawyer, had been representing other Ahmadis before a court. The man had submitted some documents in connection with the case. The documents, it has been claimed, featured Islamic terms. His name featured alongside.
A school in Punjab’s Attock district expelled four Ahmadi students over their confession earlier in September. A relative of the students, said they had been expelled for simply being Ahmadi. He said a class fellow of one of the students had been harassing one of the students for some time. The students were expelled after some parents prevailed on school principal Kulsoom Awan, Friday Times reported.
The Ahmadis are a persecuted religious minority in Pakistan through specific laws that make them second-class citizens…reports Asian Lite News
A cleric of the proscribed Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) has asked his followers to attack Ahmadi pregnant women to “make sure that no new Ahmadis are born”.
A video has emerged on social media showing a speech by TLP cleric Muhammad Naeem Chattha Qadri calling on his supporters to carry out attacks against pregnant Ahmadi women to “make sure that no new Ahmadis are born.”
He insisted that “there is but one punishment for blasphemers, decapitation.” The preacher said should the attacks not be successful, “those babies who are being born should be killed,” according to a report in Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious liberty and human rights.
Writing in the magazine, Massimo Introvigne, an Italian sociologist of religions, said the TLP is notorious for its attacks against religious minorities, including Christians and Ahmadis.
According to the report, Qadri also warned police against attempting to interfere with TLP’s religious cleansing of the Ahmadis. “Those of you who are from the police, or if there is any DPO (District Police Officer) or DC (Deputy Commissioner) or SHO (Police Station house officer) must understand that we cannot be stopped.”
On August 12, Naseer Ahmad, a 62-year-old Ahmadi father of 3, was stabbed to death at the main bus stop in Rabwah, a city with an Ahmadi majority, by a TLP activist who went there to “create an incident” with the Ahmadis, reported Introvigne.
The TLP has also targeted Pakistani Sunni Muslim politicians accused of being “soft on the Ahmadis.”
The Ahmadis are a persecuted religious minority in Pakistan through specific laws that make them second-class citizens. They are also reportedly prevented from voting and holding office. Their right to propagate and practice their religion is legally denied.
Ahmadis are routinely prosecuted for blasphemy, which carries extremely harsh punishment including the death penalty. Many Ahmadis have been falsely accused of blasphemy and executed, reported Al Arabiya Post. (ANI)
The Pakistani Constitution officially declared the Ahmadis sect of Islam to be “infidels” and barred members of the community from “posing as Muslims,” which the vandalized graves were found guilty of. The community members allege that there is government complicity … writes Dr Sakariya Kareem
Pakistan’s Ahmedi or Ahmediyya community is facing a new woe of late: Graves of its dead are being dug up and their body remains are thrown away. Over fifty such cases have been detected in Punjab and in and around Peshawar.
The latest case reported by the Friday Times (May 27, 2022), happened in a village near Peshawar. The body was that of Ishfaq Ahmed, son of one Dr Sarwar of Sangu village in Peshawar. He died in Ukraine 27 years ago. The desecration took place on May 19, according to Saleem ud Din, the spokesperson of the Ahmadi community in Pakistan.
A day earlier, a 36-year-old Ahmadi man was stabbed to death in front of his two children in Okara. The murderer, who is reported to be affiliated with Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), was a student at a local madrassa, the weekly reported.
Ahmedis are Muslims who were declared non-Muslim by Pakistan in 1973. They are subjected to increased discrimination from the government and the society at large dominated by the majority Sunnis. There are also frequent moves to ensure that they do not sport Muslim-sounding names.
The Pakistani Constitution officially declared the Ahmadis sect of Islam to be “infidels” and barred members of the community from “posing as Muslims,” which the vandalised graves were found guilty of. The community members allege that there is government complicity. Many cases are hushed up and even when cases are registered, investigation and prosecution are weak and the culprits go scot-free.
“Even mainstream political leaders do not refrain from dragging minorities in their speeches at rallies, which ends facing even more cases of hate crimes.
“Ahmadis also face mistreatment from the justice system, as many lose their lives while being tried for blasphemy, the weekly said in its report. A few sections in the media report these incidents. The press, by and large, ignores violence against the Ahmedis, unless it takes place on a large scale, attracting international attention.
Earlier this year, a 70-year-old Ahmadi man on trial for blasphemy died in Bahawalpur Jail due to alleged mistreatment despite his ill health. He was awaiting his bail hearing scheduled for later this year.
An earlier report of August 23, 2021, quoted historian and lawyer Yasser Latif Hamdani, former BBC Urdu editor Tahir Imran Mian and human rights activist Rabia Mehmood and Ali Warsi to discuss how arms of the state are complicit in this violence against this minority community.
Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif
They alleged that while Pakistan accuses the world community of indulging in Islamophobia, its own people engage in that more frequently and violently when it comes to the Ahmedi community.
In a detailed report cum analysis in The Diplomat journal (February 14, 2022), Kunwar Khuldune Shahid pointed to Dr. Abdus Salam (1926-1996), a renowned physicist and Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate. Despite his pioneering work in establishing many of Pakistan’s institutions of learning and research in physics, he was not allowed to return home despite several pleas. He remained a Pakistani national and died a dejected man in Paris.
Yet, his grave in Rabwah was damaged. The word “Muslim” has been erased from the phrase “the first Muslim Nobel laureate in the English inscription.”
Shahid also dwelt on the desecration of dead Ahmedis’ graves – this time by the Punjab Police. It desecrated 45 graves belonging to the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect in Hafizabad town.
“Police personnel damaged the tombstones and removed Islamic inscriptions in accordance with the law.”
“In addition to desecration of graves, the police also regularly demolish Ahmadi mosques over similar allegations of masquerading as Muslim worship places. Ahmadis are barred from giving the Islamic call to prayer, or even displaying “Muslim names” in front of their homes.
“Most ominously, the Ahmadiyya sect remains the most vulnerable to Pakistan’s violent blasphemy laws, with at least 13 Ahmadis killed and 40 wounded since 2017 owing to their identity. This is in addition to the jihadist attacks on the community. In 2010, twin mosque terror raids in Lahore killed at least 94 Ahmadis.
The persecution of Ahmadis is rooted in the sect’s faith in its 19th-century founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, which representatives of other Islamic sects deem sacrilegious. Ahmadis’ beliefs “are dragged into astonishingly unrelated realms in Pakistan.
In 2018, the incumbent Imran Khan government backtracked on the appointment of renowned economist Atif Mian as financial advisor owing to his Ahmadiyya faith. Besides accusing the Ahmedis of being collaborators with “India and Israel,” the Ahmadi sect “is held responsible for pretty much any predicament, including the outbreak of COVID-19.”
Shahid writes: “What Pakistan unquestionably has in place is veritable religious apartheid….. Indeed, Pakistan is indubitably more phobic of the Ahmadiyya sect, and their interpretation of Islam, than most of the states that Imran Khan vocally deems “Islamophobic.” In Pakistan, Ahmadis have been arrested for purchasing literature, partaking in Eid celebrations, or even reciting the Quran.
“The government’s Islamic advisory body has even incited genocide against Ahmadis. Ministers have called for “beheading of blasphemers,” which, incidentally, is the law in the country, used by Islamist mobs to get away with murder,” Shahid writes.
This apartheid is deepening and widening strife. “For Pakistan, ignoring the apartheid against Ahmadis has resulted in similar calls against Shia Islam being echoed in, among other places, the parliament. It has further emboldened a three-way turf war among Sunni jihadist groups, which root their Islamic terrorism in takfir, the belief that they have the right to determine who is and isn’t a Muslim.”
