Religiously motivated crimes are escalating in Pakistan, and new threatening tones can be heard in the voices of religiously motivated criminals and their supporters. Ideas and actions that are in clear contradiction to the UN Charter of Human Rights are being openly propagated and executed; and, violence against women is unashamedly condoned by the elders and lawmakers.
No wonder, Pakistani rights activists and defenders are aghast at the spectrum.
Each religion and each religious grouping exists because its members think that the universal and ultimate truth resides ‘herein’, and the rest of the population is walking the ‘wrong’ path that needs to be ‘corrected’ for the universal good and for their own salvation in the ‘thereafter’. So, in a religious context, the most discriminatory, even violent, ideas and actions are justified, and then projected as admirable and rewarding acts. I was about to cite an example when i realized that i was choosing between the many violent incidents that have happened in Pakistan in the past couple of weeks. I wish to never find myself in a situation of such multiplicity again but clearly we have been furnished last Sunday with some of the classic examples of faith-based crimes by a TV anchor, Dr. Amir Liaquat Hussain in a religious program called ‘Alam (Scholar) Online’.
In a TV broadcast on 7 September 2008, this religious ‘scholar’ with two other cowards ‘declared’ that in accordance with Islamic teachings, the Ahmadi sect members are Wajib ul Qatal ‘Must be killed’ for not believing in the last prophet Mohammad PBUH.
‘Dr. Amir repeated his instruction several times, urging fundamentalists Muslims to kill without fear’. Within 18 hours, a 45 year-old Ahmadi leader in Mirpur Khas, Dr. Abdul Manan Siddiqui was executed with 11 gun shots by six people; he ‘died on the spot’. His private guard and a woman sustained injuries. The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) notes
‘The killers remained at the hospital until the doctor was declared dead, then they walked out of the building’s front entrance. Police registered the killers as unknown‘.
On September 9, Mr. Yousaf, a 75 year-old rice trader and district chief of the Ahmadi sect was killed on his way to the prayer house in Nawab Shah, Sindh.
‘Yousaf was fired on from people on motor bikes, and sustained three bullet wounds. He died on the way to the hospital. The assailants had taken a route past a police station. No one was arrested‘.
PAKISTAN: TV Anchor Incites Murders of Two People
This is happening amidst threats of acid attacks on women, closures of schools, women being buried and burnt alive for a male concept of ‘family honor’; protectors become perpetrators; and, the worst atrocities in the name of ‘honor’ are being justified and covered up on the basis of tradition.
Still, in my view, Saudi Arabia is way ahead with a Saudi cleric who wants death for TV ‘sorcerers’. Sheikh Saleh al-Fozan told al-Madina daily ‘The Muslim consensus is that the apostate’s punishment is death by the sword’ and ‘Those who call in these shows should not be accorded Muslim rites when they die’; that the purveyors of horoscopes on Arab television should be sentenced to death. This came ‘days after another cleric argued death for TV owners’. Situation in Pakistan however is not as luxurious as for us to be going after horoscope-readers or tv-owners yet because here we are still going after women and minorities; and, within it, the women of lower economic/social status and members of Muslim Ahmadiya community.
Today, Indian Mujahideen killed 20 and injured 100 in Delhi with a series of bomb blasts in the busy commercial centers of the city. And this sad day was made sadder by the news that UK has allowed Muslim clerics to form Shariat Courts and to implement Shariah Laws for Britain’s Muslim communities. ‘The British government has ‘quietly sanctioned’ shariah judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to domestic violence’.
UK’s first official sharia courts
Fauzia Rafiq
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