Pakistan: Persecution of Ahmadi Muslims, other minorities

The following text was found during a random Google search of the term 'religious bigotry'. Apparently, the message was part of a group-chain entitled "In the Name of Faith-Irfan Hussain(in Dawn)", referencing to an article published in Dawn, the English language daily of Pakistan. The Article with the afore-quoted title by Irfan Hussain was in reference to another article about the many murders of the Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan. The following letter exemplifies the prism through which a disinterested  person sees the issues of 'religious bigotry,' Ahmadiyya persecution and overall impression about the Muslims.

Ahmadiyya Times | News Staff |
Source & Credit: Sarai.net
By Shuddha | September 30, 2008

    Dear Rashneek,

    Many thanks for the forwarded text that mentioned the state of Ahmediyas in Pakistan. I found it interesting to read and think about.

    Ahmediyas have for a long time suffered constitutional and systemic disabilities in Pakistan of an exceptional nature, which in my view are deserving of condemnation by any sensible human being. Hindus, Christians and Parsis (legally and constitutionally) have actually had a better deal in Pakistan, at least since the time the 'Anti-Ahmediya' laws promulgated initially by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's government in 1974 (which were then ruthlessly implemented under the dictatorship of Zia ul Haq [the favourite Islamist, together with the Ibn Saud family, of the Western world] ) than have Ahmediyas.

    Given that Hindus, Sikhs, the Kalash and Christians, and even Shia Muslims, and Muslims unwilling to live by the dictates of zealots, have had a very rough time at the hands of Muslim Fundamentalists (in or out of power) in Pakistan, one can only imagine, how much worse it has been for Ahmediyas, who do not enjoy even the token constitutional protections that other 'minorities' in Pakistan have theoretical recourse to. Christians are attacked in Pakistan, their churches burnt, exactly as they are in India, and they are often made the special target of the repressive 'blasphemy' laws in Pakistan. The few Hindus, Sikhs and Kalash left in Pakistan are relatively unmolested, except for in stupid 'tit-for-tat' attacks that occur when Muslims are targeted in India. The Kalash, (inhabitants of the remote 'Northern Areas' of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir) who are probably one of the few communities with an extant, surviving and continuous links to the nature worshipping Rig Vedic and pre Rig Vedic Indo-European religious traditions in the South Asian subcontinent, are largely ignored, and have survived, because of their relative obscurity. (See Alice Albinia's excellent recent book 'Empires of the Indus' for a detailed chapter on the Kalash in Pakistan)

    Recently, only a few days ago, I personally witnessed the lament of a group of poor Pakistani Shia pilgrims in the Shrine to the decapitated head of Imam Hussain in an annex to the Umayyad mosque in Damascus. In their prayers, they spoke openly, tearfully (and movingly) of the violent campaigns against Shias and their places of worship in Pakistan, which brought home to me the vulnerable status of all 'minority' communities in South Asia. But the attacks on Ahmediyas enjoy a degree of unprecedented state sanction and protection, which makes them even more, particularly vulnerable in Pakistan. People can be prosecuted (in theory) for tearing down a Shia Mosque, or a Hindu Temple in Pakistan, but it is the state that of its own, tears down an Ahmediya place of worship (if it dares to call itself a mosque) or limits or proscribes the actual life of the Ahmediya community in Pakistan. The Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts has a very good  essay on the legal limitations on Ahmediyas in Pakistan by  which I would heartily recommend to everyone on this list.

    Earlier, in the course of my research on the 'Danish' cartoon episode, I discovered that there was an earlier 'cartoon' controversy, which involved Sunni Muslim Fundamentalists reviling Ahmediyas with cartoons (in websites and publications) that were just as obscene and pathetic as the ones now known popularly as the 'Danish' cartoons. The Ahmediya protests at the insults hurled against them in the form of a cartoon were of course at that time met with deafening and derisive silence, especially in Pakistan. As a believer in the freedom of speech and expression, I have consistently opposed the demand to ban or censor material such as the 'Danish Cartoons' even though I would myself argue very strongly against the content of the same cartoons.

    I was struck then by the hypocrisy inherent in the fact that many amongst those Muslim zealots in Pakistan and elsewhere who strongly called for a 'ban on the Danish cartoons' or even 'death to the Danish cartoonists' chose to see nothing wrong in similarly objectionable cartoons directed against their own adversaries (in this case the Ahmediyas). It’s not as if they had anything against a bona fide and maliciously obscene image, its just that they were concerned about 'injury' only when it came to a matter of to their own sentiment. I see an exact mirror of this in the fact that Hindu fundamentalists, who cry themselves hoarse over insults to their 'honour' in the form of images, often deploy the most virulent imagery in their own descriptions of the things that are sacred to their antagonists.

    Muslim fundamentalism, like all forms of religious bigotry (Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Buddhist), is fuelled by a dehumanization of the one that it designates as its principal other. Often, the most violent form of animosity is reserved, paradoxically, not for the categorical 'other', (with whom some accommodation is arrived at over a protracted historical process) but for the 'other' close enough to resemble oneself most of all. Freud used to call this 'the narcissism of minor difference' and saw in it a secret reservoir of neurotic self-hatred and insecurity projected on to those who are different from, but still closely resemble, the self.

    This explains why Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists (who have so much in common, doctrinally, and in terms of practice) hate each other so much today (even though ordinary non-fundamentalist but practicing Jews and Muslims have co-habited, collaborated and shared cultures, spaces and ways of life peacefully, intimately and fruitfully for more than a thousand years in Spain, the Arab countries, Turkey, Iran and India) and this also explains the peculiarly lethal intensity to anti-Ahmediya sentiment in Pakistan, and more recently in Bangladesh, and the venality of anti-Bahai sentiment amongst the ruling Islamic fundamentalist clique in today's Iran.

    Thank you for this opportunity to reflect (albeit fragmentarily on my part) on the 'narcissism of minor difference'. Though I agree with most of what the author of the text forwarded by you says, I do not necessarily agree that to 'fight' the Taliban, one has to do it in connivance with the United States of America's foreign policy goals. The United States of America was once just as happy arming Islamists in Pakistan as it is mobilizing everyone to fight them today, and, lest we forget, it continues to sustain the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which, in my opinion is the single most oppressive and repressive state in the world today, and that is a state run by the worst, and most regressive kind of Islamic fundamentalists ever known in human history.

    regards,
    Shuddha  The test link here: [Reader-list] In the Name of Faith-Irfan Hussain (in Dawn)


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