Pakistan has been put on a US watch list for countries of concern over “severe violations of religious freedom” – and a closer look at the situation reveals that religious minorities and atheists are at a higher risk than ever.
The State Department’s move came after a tweet by President Donald Trump in New Year accusing Pakistan of providing “safe haven to terrorists”. However, the list is significant given the state’s surrender to protests by the Islamic political party Tehreek Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLY) at the end of last year.
Islamabad’s capitulation to the radical Islamist mob has endangered the Ahmadiyya community, which has been the target of death threats made openly since the party besieged the capital a few months ago.
The Ahmadis, an Islamic sect excommunicated by the second amendment to Pakistan’s Constitution in 1974, have faced a severe backlash over the initial changes made regarding Khatm-e-Nabuwat (finality of prophethood) in the Elections Reforms Bill passed in October. According to the Pakistan Penal Code, an Ahmadi can be imprisoned for reading the Koran or even using Islamic titles.
Ahmadis face the sword of blasphemy
“What’s ironic is that those ideologues who were against the creation of Pakistan not only accuse us of heresy, but also call Ahmadis – who played a crucial role in Pakistan’s freedom struggle – anti-nationals,” Ahmadiyya spokesperson Saleem Uddin said to Asia Times. “We have been the convenient scapegoats for the state since Pakistan’s inception. What was a breach of freedom of religion in 1974 [through the Second Amendment], was transformed into apartheid a decade later when the state slashed and barred us from ‘posing as Muslims’,” he went on.
While Ahmadis are constantly under the sword of blasphemy – a ‘crime’ punishable by death in Pakistan – owing to their interpretation of Islamic theology, the state has recently begun targeting atheists.
Last year, a judge in the Islamabad High Court maintained that “blasphemers are terrorists”. That prompted the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) to not only block local Facebook pages that questioned religion, but also to send text messages to cell-phone users nationwide throughout the year, warning against blasphemy.
Social media crackdown, atheists at risk
An atheist, who organizes underground meetings for local skeptics and appeared in the BBC documentary ‘Pakistan’s Secret Atheists‘, told Asia Times there has been a significant decrease in atheist gatherings in his country.
“After the social media crackdown, many of us deactivated our profiles fearing abduction, especially after secular bloggers were abducted in January last year,” he says. “But there’s also a reluctance among atheists about meeting up at homes. Our homes and the internet used to be our safe spaces to share ideas, but even those have been taken away from us.”
While local atheists can pass off as Muslims – if that is their birth religion in Pakistan, Hindus and Christians are more visible targets. Last month, two suicide bombers killed nine and injured nearly 60 others inside Bethel Memorial Methodist Church in Quetta, the latest in a string of attacks on the local Christian community.
“We feared going out on Christmas with memories of the Easter Day bombing [at a children’s park in Lahore] from 2016 still fresh,” a member of the Christian clergy, who asked to remain anonymous, said. “But what support can we expect when our own Kamran Michael is more interested in seeking the support of Presbyterian and Anglican Church bodies for the Sharifs’ election campaigns than in safeguarding our rights.”
Kamran Michael, a senator from the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), was elected in a seat allocated for minorities and served as the minister for human rights from 2013 until Nawaz Sharif’s disqualification as prime minister last July. Many locals accuse Michael of not doing enough to protect minorities. Threats by Muslim radicals has prompted innumerable Christians to flee Pakistan and look for asylum elsewhere.
Hindus also targeted
Members of the local Hindu community have also been seeking shelter abroad. Recently, two Hindu traders were shot to death in Sindh’s Tharparkar city just days before the US announced that Pakistan was on its watch list in regard to religious freedom.
PML-N Senator Ramesh Kumar said “around 5,000 Hindus leave Pakistan every year” because of the extensive persecution. This includes forced marriages and kidnapping for ransom, as well as attacks on Hindu temples. Pakistani human rights activist Kapil Dev (named after the Indian cricket star) blames the state’s acquiescence to the radical Islamist narrative as the main reason why Pakistani Hindus are targeted.
“The mushrooming growth of seminaries of banned outfits has paved quick inroads for growing extremism in Tharparkar, where both Hindus and Muslims had been enjoying an exemplary interfaith coexistence,” Dev said to Asia Times. He believes the country’s educational curricula, which marginalizes local Hindus while outlining the Muslim separatist movement that resulted in the creation of Pakistan, needs an overhaul.
“Hatred against Hindus, primarily driven from the ideology of Two-Nation Theory, is deeply injected in the veins of raw minds through distorted history and fabricated tales taught in books,” he said. “There is a need to secularize curricula by filtering out religion and distorted versions of history promoting hatred against Hindus.”
Activists want to counter radical Islamist perspectives with a secular narrative, but Ibn Abdur Rehman, secretary-general of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, doesn’t see it happening anytime soon.
“This is only going to get worse,” he told Asia Times. “The state has surrendered to the radical Islamists and plans on gradually taking away every last bit of freedom from its citizens.”
Its a sad and common phenomena in all muslim majority coutries, where religious and ethnic minorities are terribly deprived of rights, loses their assets, being murdered, raped everyday by muslims.
Wake-up from your day dreaming. Best way is to slap yourself & you will be in land of reality immediately. Then you will start seeing what is happening in PK to Minorities & Real Islam of Mohammad (saw).
Father of the slain innocent girl showed his religious bigotry when he rejected a Qadiany Police officer as the head of Inquiry commission. He did not challange his professional competency & he challanged his religion. What a pathetic Nation of Religious Savages. Still whole nation talks about Islam while Islam is rare in PK as water in a desert.
Father of the slain innocent girl showed his reliogous bigotry when he rejected a Qadiany Police officer as the head of Inquiry commission. He did not challange his professional competency & he challanged his religion. What a pathetic Nation of Savages.
Child abuse happens every where but in Pakistan society has fallen to a new low. Why we Pakistani think it is attack on Pakistan we must tell others that it is happeing in other countries too.
You claim to be the land of Pure but why we have become a land of pure Garbage. Look at the reason. We have lost our Humanity other nations have not.
Secular Pakistan is the only way to save Pakistan.
Just look around and see how people are biased in PK. Just denying the fact will not change the fact. Why Minorities are fleeing PK? It is not a propaganda, it is reality. PK is suffering brain drain because of that. Ahmadis (Qadiani) were an educated community & because they could not practice their religion freely, they had to flee. UK, Canada, Germany, USA are benefitting from their brain now. It is not easy to leave ones country of origin, unless there is a compelling reason to do so. In the end PK is the loser & people like you will keep on saying it’s not happeing. People like you are the real enemies of PK. Kindly wake-up if not for yourself atleast for your kids. We have to separate religion from the State. Pakistan was not created for Islam it was created for opressed Muslims of India. If it was created for Islam then why Bangladesh was formed? People like you have not learnt a lesson from Fall of Dhaka.
Secular government is the only way to save PK.
But un-fortunately Politicians are using religion for their benefits & Army needs Jahadis. Creat Nationalizm & people will still die for PK. Do not British or Americans die for their country? They belong to a variety of faiths (Including Muslims) but they still die for their countries. Learn from the West’s freedom of religion and I gaurentee you that PK will become a shining star in the World.
Let Ahmadis, Christians, Hindues & Shias Practice freely. Let them Publish their litrature. Make it illegal to Use Religious Slogans in Politics. Let everybody Vote. Do you know that Ahmadis (Qadianies) are not allowed to vote in PK? It’s a reality. Why? Did not they shed their blood for PK? Are they less loyal? No. They were at the forefront of PK Movement. While Most Deobandis, who are now running the country, were with Gandhi.
Now Qadianis are not even allowed to breath let alone pracrice their religion freely. Same is true for other minorities.
Time has come to separate religion from Politics.
Just another shithole country
I am a Pakistani. And i can confirm honestly that we don’t take care of our minorities.
Michael Bagala
My comment is not anti-Islamic or anti-Mohammedan, but it was meant to be anti-islamic, anti-mohammedan. Note the capital and small letters.
Mohammed was my great-great-grand father, as of 40,000,000 Syeds today. But the point I made was that majority of muslims (85%) have abandoned the true Allah and Mohammed, and in its place taken a homo-morphic character and an illiterate pedophile of same names as god and prophet, and that has engendered a new islam as a mental disease that I identified as Bipolar Schizophrenia.
Religions are tied to economy. Just as Islam of Moses was the optimal faith for the Pastoral Era, and Islam of Jesus the correct way to go in agrarian times, the Islam of Mohammed is the natural religion of Globalization and Free Trade. Moses was a shepherd, Jesus an artisan in the Fertile Crescent, and Mohammed a businessman trader. The 3 are the Chief Economists of their respective eras.
I never implied that Judahism and Christianity are together. But I did say that while Mohammed and Koran are pro-Christian and anti-yehud –
[5:82] Strongest among men in enmity to the believers wilt thou find the Yehud and infidels; and nearest among them in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say, "We are Nazarenes (Christians)":
.. his followers till the creation of Israel allied themselves with the latter and terrorized the former, so are facing Divine Retribution.
Syed Abbas,
Your comment sounds extremely anti Islamic. You make it sound that Judaism and Christianity work together and are friends. Have you read the Talmud and what horrible things it says about Christianity and Christ? This is a book written by Rabbis. One line states that "Christ shall boil in a vat of excrement in h*ll". the passages on Christians range from us being nonhuman to acts so terrible that can be done to Christians. No holy book shows so much hatred to Christianity as the Talmud.
Sunni Muslims known to my family for 40 years have never touched any food or drink in our house because we are Ahmadis and ‘unclean’ kafirs. This is in the UK. I’m sure the situation in Pakistan is worse than this.
Unlike Christianity where Catholics dominate, in Islam everyone is a minority as no sect is more than a fifth. But as anywhere it is a minority within a minority that causes trouble.
A year after Mohammed’s 630AD win against Arabian Big Business, Bankers,and Trade Monopolists, and Tribe of Judah, it was a minority Meccans who grabbed power when he died, forming a Kaliphate that reversed all progressive gains of his Revolution – unity of mankind to division, justice to law, women’s emancipation to enslavement, knowledge to ignorance, peace to war, tolerance to conquest and colonialism, free trade to Tariffs (Arabic word).
Mohammed could not have won without timely Christian help, but the Kaliphate alied itself with Judah and terrorized Christians to this day. Slowly, Kaliphate abandoned Mohammed and his God replacing it with a new illiterate pedophile mohammed who could neither read nor write and bed a 9-year girl, and an allah who was no longer the God of Moses and Jesus but a new homo-morphic being having face, arms, legs that he dipped in hell to cool its fire, and would be seen on Judgment Friday riding a donkey.
Periodic movements tried to reject new mohammed and allah, e.g. Sufis whose poets to this day question or outright reject moslem god. This confusion led mainstream islam to lose the ability to see good from evil. Mainstream islam today is a mental disorder best diagnosed as Bipolar Schizophrenia, tolerating both terror and compassion.
Pakistan’s problems with its own neocons (typified by petrodollar sheiks) are compounded by a similar minority neocons in the West who ape the Kaliphate ways of gore and glory, conquest and colonialism. However, the petrodollar sheikhs are on the run, and once they are defeated, Pakistani Muslims, largely of Sufi bent, will have peace again.
The vile seeds planted by the British imperialists is are still bearing fruit.
The founder of Pakistan used every iota of his energy to create a state that was meant for Muslims of India using Islam as the foundation. So why expect a different results?
Ahmadiyya Anjuman Ishaat Islam : If he claimed he is an Ahmadi, the mobs will lynch in matter of minutes in the land of the Pure!
Muhammad I want to publish a book in Pakistan showing what are our beliefs. Please can you help us do so. You’ll have free right to distribute the book.
Ahson, try going out and saying you are an Ahmadi and then see what will happen to you.