Khaled Ahmed - Defined by exclusion
NB - Indian citizens who feel somehow complacent because of the criminalisation of the Islamic Republic, should pay attention to the Indian politicians affiliated to the so-called 'parivar', who speak the language of exclusion on a daily basis. Their theory of Hindu Rashtra is the mirror image of the 'Muslim Nation'. It is the doctrinal source of the same ghetto-fication and terrorisation of religious minorities that has taken place in Pakistan and Bangladesh. A state that allows religious dogma or religious definitions of nation-hood any space in its constitution is stepping out on a path that leads straight to hell. DS
Khaled Ahmed - Defined by exclusion
According to a recent assessment of state persecution in Pakistan, the excommunicated Ahmadi community lost 39 members through murder in three years (2012-15). Forty Ahmadis were injured after assault and six were kidnapped. Eight Ahmadi graveyards were desecrated, 10 “places of worship” damaged, while harassment occurred in 11 cases. You can’t say “mosque” when referring to an Ahmadi place of worship if you want to avoid being thrown in jail. Ahmadis can’t say “Quran” or “namaz” either. States at times practise exclusion, the majority considering “even the smallest minority within national boundaries… as an intolerable deficit in the purity of the national whole” (Arjun Appadurai). They do it through impunity or manifest legal devices; but Pakistan did it by excommunicating the Ahmadi community through the second amendment to the constitution (1974).
"The masterminds of the 26/11 attacks are treated
like heroes in Pakistan. We are not there yet, but if hidden hands nudge
the judicial system to free murderers of the saffron variety, we will be
soon"
The
psychology of hate: How we deny human beings their humanity
Public Appeal - Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system
The
BJP and Justice, Chapter 2Public Appeal - Resist degradation of Indian criminal justice system
Khaled Ahmed - Defined by exclusion
According to a recent assessment of state persecution in Pakistan, the excommunicated Ahmadi community lost 39 members through murder in three years (2012-15). Forty Ahmadis were injured after assault and six were kidnapped. Eight Ahmadi graveyards were desecrated, 10 “places of worship” damaged, while harassment occurred in 11 cases. You can’t say “mosque” when referring to an Ahmadi place of worship if you want to avoid being thrown in jail. Ahmadis can’t say “Quran” or “namaz” either. States at times practise exclusion, the majority considering “even the smallest minority within national boundaries… as an intolerable deficit in the purity of the national whole” (Arjun Appadurai). They do it through impunity or manifest legal devices; but Pakistan did it by excommunicating the Ahmadi community through the second amendment to the constitution (1974).
In his remarkably even-handed book, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (2015), Ali Usman Qasmi, assistant
professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Lahore University
of Management Sciences, has told the story of how it happened. It is
fascinating how Pakistan’s Islamic teleology evolved as it distanced itself
from the secular “afterglow” of the British Raj and zeroed in on what looks
like a precursor phase to an al-Qaeda and Islamic State worldview in the 21st
century.
In 1953, when the
riots against the Ahmadi community first led to the setting up of a judicial
commission, the Grundnorm of the Objectives Resolution of 1949 had not yet been
internalised, and the judges ended up delivering a humane verdict in favour of
the victim community. All Muslims seem to have an internal trigger that makes
them backslide to Islamic Leviathan. Such a trigger was manifested in 1974 in a
parliament dominated by a “socialist” Pakistan People’s Party led by a
charismatic secular leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
The author provides evidence of the mystery trigger by
narrating how Bhutto never attended the apostatising sessions of the National
Assembly and actually “reprimanded” his attorney general, Yahya Bakhtiar, for
unfairly prosecuting the Ahmadis till he was reminded that he had ordered the
trial himself. The 1953 anti-Ahmadi riots had been “organised” in Punjab by
then Chief Minister M.M. Daultana, who made the most enlightened speech at the
judicial commission, saying a community could be converted into a minority only
when it asked for such exclusion.
But evidence showed that his government had funded the
riots. Then Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin was forced by states aiding
Pakistan to abstain from firing his Ahmadi foreign minister, Sir Zafarullah
Khan, and said the following in rebuttal of the famous August 11, 1947 address
of the founder of the state, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, to the Constituent Assembly,
in which he had, in a manifestly Lockean speech, pledged a pluralist country
where religion and state would be separated: “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… The
speech of the Quaid-i-Azam must be interpreted in the context in which it was
delivered.”
There are ironies in this statement that have become
manifest only in 2015, when non-Muslims are under threat of being killed and
the community of the founder of the state has been called “non-Muslim” on TV by
the leader of a “banned” sectarian organisation. The book uncannily foreshadows
this while reproducing the details of a meeting in which Bhutto’s wife actually
felt that the apostatisation of the Ahmadis would lead to the victimisation of
her own community, the Shia, in the coming days: “In this meeting Bhutto’s wife
Nusrat, a Shiite of Iranian descent, was also visibly perturbed. She expressed
apprehension that the exclusion of Ahmadis would be followed by that of
Shiites.”
In the year 2015, Pakistan is killing its Shia community, as
is being done elsewhere in the Middle East, as “correction” of the Islamic
faith. The dilemma in 1953 was that the clerics appearing before the Justices
Munir-Kiyani Commission couldn’t agree on the definition of a Muslim. If they
reduced it to the pronouncement of the “kalima” (the historic Muslim
catechism), the Ahmadis couldn’t be indicted as they said it the same way as
“normal” Muslims. If you insisted on it, however, the Shia could fall into the
trap of apostatisation as their catechism of faith actually differs.
The problem that arose in the post-apostatisation period
was: How could Ahmadis be trapped into declaring themselves as non-Muslims on
identity cards and passports? In the 1980s, General Zia-ul-Haq “purified” the
state through further Islamisation, making Pakistan the pathfinder of what is
now going on in the Islamic world. His martial law order imposed the strictest
disabilities on the Ahmadis — curse the founder of the community in order to
get ID cards and passports, stop terming the basic instruments of their faith
as “mosque”, the “Quran”, “namaz”, etc, on pain of imprisonment.
Ahmadi graves were dug up and removed from Muslim
graveyards. The state was reduced to being a silent witness as blood-thirsty
collective psychosis took over. Did Bhutto do it for Saudi money? His reference
to the “solution of a 90-year-old problem” points to the “trigger” that hides
in all Muslims. The Saudi push happened more clearly when in 1980, Zia took
Saudi dictation to impose religious tax (zakat) on the Shia. The Rabita Alam Al
Islami (World Islamic League), the Saudi organisation with billions of dollars
on its budget, was active in 1974; it was active under Zia, too.
As noted by Vali Nasr in his book, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (2006), the anti-Shia edicts
(fatwas) were “managed” through a scholar of India, Manzur Numani, then head of
the Nadwatul Ulema of Lucknow, who compiled anti-Shia fatwas of apostatisation
from the major seminaries of India and Pakistan in 1986. This compendium of
fatwas laid the foundation for Shia massacres in Pakistan. Who is next?
The
writer is consulting editor, ‘Newsweek Pakistan’
More articles on Pakistan
Khaled
Ahmed: Shrinking The Nation - From the Middle East to Malaysia, Muslim states
are ‘expelling’ minority elements
Decoding the idea of Pakistan - Venkat Dhulipala’s 'Creating a New Medina'
Decoding the idea of Pakistan - Venkat Dhulipala’s 'Creating a New Medina'
