Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Perspective: Whats it like to be a minority in Pakistan? | Naeem Sabir


I noticed that when she was speaking whenever she used the word Ahmadi she would lower her voice, a habit that someone passing by the window wont hear.

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By  Naeem Sabir | January 6, 2015

As I was growing up in pakistan I never really thought of myself as a minority until the bitter reality hit me in the late 80s that everything I was, was wrong to someone. Even though I never did anything to that someone, I didn't even know that someone.

A generation that has grown belonging to my faith has known nothing but hatred from their fellow Pakistanis, Ahmadis living in big cities face discrimination as routinely as an  ordinary Pakistani does loadshedding.

Someone told me how her family was evicted from the house they were renting because they were found out as an Ahmadi & the landlord although acknowledging the fact that they were model tenants had to do it. I noticed that when she was speaking whenever she used the word Ahmadi she would lower her voice, a habit that someone passing by the window wont hear.

Such a pity that a country founded on the principal of rights of minorities (muslims were a minority in India) would be akin to an apartheid for Ahmadis and other minorities. Where parents would warn their children not to tell others children that they were Ahmadi, where school copy covers would have hate speech, where the buses would have hatred on the seats they sat on.

Where outsiders roam in your city chanting death to you and your family whenever they wished and you were not even allowed to answer. Where the media would take interviews when 87 of your fellow Ahmadis gets martyred but wont put them on Air.

What a shame that a well established cardiologist comes to this country to give medicine for free and he is murdered in front of his family in cold blood. The lows this populous has gone to is unprecedented in current history, the moral decay in every fibre of every institution. The mob in Gujranwala suffocate a family, a mother and her little girl dies, an unborn dies, the mob waves them goodbye mockingly.

Then peshawar happens, APC is called because the fire has come to their own front door now. Where was the APC when 87 Ahmadis were murdered in Lahore when Hazara were sitting in freezing cold to demand justice, when the a husband & wife were thrown into the blaze, and then you wonder why Pakistan is burning, why families are breaking, why Qaris are hanging 5 years olds.

Pakistan's dream lay shattered, a dream that never really materialised, instead of law, hatred rules, instead of education kids are given direct passes to heaven, those who preach, preach divisions, those who make mockery of islam are given prime time, those speak up, silenced.

I live in a country where the state has decided that it knows whats in my heart better than myself, where my belonging to a certain sect or religion is enough for anyone to chant slogans of death, where the upholders of law, the ones who have taken oaths, murder governors, are celebrated & showered with roses.

Still I love my Pakistan, this is the land my forefathers gave blood to create, my heart bleeds when I see whats being done to her. Although I am labeled a traitor, everything is a "Qadiani Sazish" (a conspiracy by Ahmadis). I keep on doing honest work, hardly any criminal cases against Ahamdis. Even when tempers and emotions run high like the martyrdom of 87 of our brothers in Lahore, no retaliation, still Ahmadis must be blamed, blindness to the hatred spewing mullah in the mosque, blindness to the guns handed over in the Mudrasah to children, applauding of murderers.

Have you ever really looked at the faces of those who preach hatred, cant you see evil, the barbarity when they give sermons of hatred with froth coming out of their mouths creatures worse than any animal, the worst under the sky.

I write these words not because I want to get sympathy from anyone, cause I know I am addressing those whose humanity has died. I write this for those that will come after me, I want them to know how their forefathers bared all with resileance and faith in Justice from the Almighty Allah.


اللهم مزقهم كل ممزق و سحقهم تسحيقا



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2 comments:

  1. Sad. This ain't the Pakistan I knew. In my Pakistan one of our Shia teachers would lead Shia Zohr prayers in the School and a Deobandi would lead the prayers for the rest. We Ahmadis would have our prayers and no one would object and no one would threaten.
    In my village, Kotli Loharan there was a Christian lay preacher who would say things against Islam and the Prophet of Islam (SAW) that made our blood boil, but we refuted his claims without ever threatening him.
    All my teachers knew that I was an Ahmadi, but they looked at the results I showed and loved me for that. That continued until I got my MSc. (The situation was deteriorating a little but was not as unbearable as it is now. A Govt College Lahore professor who kept corresponding with me till the 1980s was reported to have said,"When I see Zafrullah I feel alive again but when I remember that he is an Ahmadi, my blood boils". I did some research with him. He never said that to me, but ...)
    I hope and pray that sense prevails and Pakistanis realize that hate diminishes us all in every way. The results are apparent if people have eyes to see, the hate is spreading from hate against minorities to hate against each other. As a result Pakistani economy is in shambles, Pakistani education has become a joke and the grab and run attitude is on the rise in every walk of life, including the religion. The religion that was so pure in my day that a Mullah would preach love for the neighbor is so downgraded that a Mullah preaches telling lies and killing to "serve" Islam. And it was a Mullah's lies that had some innocent females suffocated in Gujranwala.

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  2. Well written reflects the feeling of every pakistani Ahmadi

    ReplyDelete

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