HVK Archives: Pakistan: Tolerance, brotherhood and equality!
Pakistan: Tolerance, brotherhood and equality! - The Observer
Arun Shourie
()
8 August 1997
Title: Pakistan: Tolerance, brotherhood and equality!
Author: Arun Shourie
Publication: The Observer
Date: August 8, 1997
To gauge the truth about an ideology one must follow five rules. Go by what
the primary texts say, not by the gloss which commentators put on them to
suit the needs of the time; go by what the primary texts as a whole say,
not by what a passage plucked from here and a passage plucked from there
says; go by the plain, manifest meaning of the primary texts, not by the
meaning which apologists strain to wring out of them; go by what the
authorities of the ideology, the custodians so to say, declare to be its
import - by what the Party says, by what the Church and the Ulema say not
by what the stray intellectual tries to make it out to be; finally, and
most important, to see the truth about the ideology, see what its adherents
do in its name when they have unfettered power to run a State in accordance
with that ideology.
How often we are reminded of two verses from the Quran: 'To you, your
religion, to me mine,' and 'There is to be no compulsion in matters of
faith.' But no one explains why the significance which is now sought to be
read into these two verses has never occurred to the Ulema, no one explains
how, for 1300 years, Islamic rulers have acted in ways completely contrary
to these injunctions.
In the same way, what the real nature of the Islamic State is, is to be
gleaned, not from what apologists inveigh in India, but from what has been
happening in Pakistan in regard to persons who in the eyes of the Muslim
rulers and clergy believe in 'false religion'.
Ahmadiyas are Muslims, and many of Pakistan's most eminent persons happened
to have been Ahmadiyas: Sir Zafarullah Khan, the famous diplomat, once the
foreign minister of the country, a judge of the international Court at The
Hague, was an Ahmadiya; Pakistan's only Nobel Prize winner, Abdus Salam,
had to live out his life in Trieste, Italy, for he too was an Ahmadiya.
As in the case of sects the world over, the Ahmadiyas too have nuanced
their position: They believe in Allah and the Prophet, but they also
believe that Allah sent a more recent Messenger in Mirza Ghulam Ahmad - he
announced in 1889 that he had been conferred the right to receive homage,
in 1891 he announced that lie was a prophet and the promised Mahdi.
On the ground that these beliefs are un-Islamic, in 1974 the Constitution
of Pakistan was amended, and 'Muslims' were so defined that Ahmadiyas were
declared to be non-Muslims by definition. By Ordinance XX which Zia-ul-Haq
promulgated in 1984, sections 298-B and 298-C were inserted into the
Pakistan Penal Code: By these Ahmadiyas were prohibited from calling
themselves Muslims, they were prohibited from calling their places of
worship ,mosques', they were prohibited from employing any nomenclature or
appellation associated with Islam, they were prohibited from following any
practices of worship associated with Islam -- as they consider themselves
to be, and in fact are Muslims, all their religions practices are those of
Islam: Therefore, these sections have meant that for them to conduct any
religious practice of their own is a crime. Furthermore, the sections make
it a crime for them to do anything which can be even construed to be aimed
at propagating their faith. Apart from it being a crime for them to call
their place of worship a 'mosque', it is a crime for them to even use the
common-place greeting, assalam-o-alaikum.
The 1996 Report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan lists the kinds
of grounds on which prosecutions have been launched against the Ahmadiyas
under these sections of the Pakistan Penal Code: 723 prosecutions for
displaying the Kalima, that is the basic declaration of faith of Muslims,
'There is none worthy of worship except Allah, Muhammad is the Messenger of
Allah'; 36 prosecutions for reciting the Azan, the Muslim call to prayers;
366 prosecutions for 'posing as Muslims'; 112 prosecutions for 'using
Islamic epithets' 93 prosecutions for 'offering prayers'; 403 prosecutions
for 'preaching'; 27 prosecutions for 'celebrating the Ahmadiya centenary in
1989'; and so on - the head of the community has to live in exile in
London: He has been charged in his absence in 16 separate cases under
section 298-C; on 15 December, 1989, the entire population of Rabwah, the
Ahmadiya headquarters in Pakistan, was charged under the section. Since
the promulgation of the Ordinance in 1984, any and every kind of meeting of
Ahmadiyas in Rabwah is banned: Even sports events organised by the
community are prohibited: For anyone in the community to convene any sort
of meeting is a crime.
The publications of the community have been successively banned. The 1994
Report of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan states, "The country's
oldest running journal, Al-Fazal was again proceeded against in July. It,
along with other Ahmadi periodicals, had had a troubled existence since the
coming of the Anti-Ahmadi Ordinance in 1984.
Writing in the November, 1996 issue of Newsline, the Advocate General of
Sindh gives us a glimpse of what seemingly arcane provisions of law spell
for the lives of the people concerned. He draws attention to -the setting
up of the Federal Shariat Court, to the Hudood Ordinances which were
promulgated to define and punish 'crimes against Islam', and to the
consequential changes which were made in the Law of Evidence and Compensation.
These put non-Muslims at a great disadvantage, he writes: "For example, a
non-Muslim advocate cannot appear in the Shariat Court but a non-Muslim can
be subjected to a decision of the Court. Also under the Hudood Law, four
male Muslim witnesses are required in a Hadd (Islamic punishment) case, and
the testimony of a non-Muslim is not admissible in any way. Hence, if
someone were to rape a non-Muslim in the presence of other non-Muslims, he
would not be liable for punishment under the Hudood Law because all the
witnesses are non-Muslims.
"The same applies to the act of robbery and murder" - that this is not
abstract legal speculation will become clear in a moment; but to continue
with the Advocate General's narrative, "The Compensation Ordinance
legislates that the perpetrator of an injustice receives the same
punishment that he has meted out to his victim. However, in the case of
compensation to a non-Muslim, the Muslim may be required to pay only half
the amount he would pay for a Muslim male."
The National Identity Card there is a National Identity Card in Pakistan:
Recall the noise which was made in India on the charge that requiring
photographs to be taken was to force Muslims into an un-Islamic act - was
sought to be converted into a Religious Identity Card, the Advocate General
points out. In 1994, the Supreme Court held as valid the Ordinances which
had declared Ahmadiyas non-Muslims and prohibited them from performing any
of their rituals as these were Islamic rituals. The Court held that
fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution are to apply only to the
extent that they did not run counter to the injunctions of Islam, and that
the words 'subject to the law' must be taken to mean ,subject to the
Islamic law'.
The full Bench of the Court held that the Ahmadis' adoption of the
Sha'air-i-Islam (their saying the Azan, their displaying the Kalima, etc.)
is indeed a threat to peace, and therefore illegal. Its reasoning is a
classic example of blaming the victim.
In a flourish of deductive reasoning which few other than the faithful will
appreciate, the Court said that if the Ahmadiyas had not had the design to
deceive, why had they not coined their own epithets? After all, there is
no law in Pakistan which prohibits them from fashioning non-Islamic
epithets for themselves.(!)
I have little doubt that the learned judges would not have been in the
least influenced by the general atmosphere which has been engendered on the
matter, even so it is well to recall what the 1996 Human Rights Commission
Report says in this connection: "When a petition was made to the Supreme
Court for a review of its earlier judgement that the anti-Ahmadi Ordinance
.was not violative of the Constitution, a strong public campaign was built
up to pressurise the Supreme Court and the government. A ' siege of the
Supreme Court was started and dire warnings were issued all round. A
panicked interior minister went out to plead with the picketers to lift
their siege, pledging that the government would fully back the earlier
judgement, and that he would himself resign his office should the review go
in favour of the Ahmadis."
The 1995 Report of the Human Rights Commission records:
"There were also several instances of fanatical groups of organisations
harassing members of the Ahmadi community. In one gruesome case, in
Shabqadar in April, two Ahmadi lawyers were publicly lynched outside the
courtroom for having come to plead a bail application for a convert to
Ahmadiyat.
"A third had sensed the atmosphere early and escaped while he could. The
police stood and watched. No one was held or charged even afterwards.
Instead the Ahmadi convert whose bail application was to be moved (he was
under detention for disturbing the peace under section 107 because of his
conversion), was further charged with posing as a Muslim and preaching
Ahmadiyat and insulting the religious sentiments of Muslims."
In the 1996 Report cases follow cases - of intimidation, assault,
harassment, dismissal from service, cases which give one a glimpse - it
:can be no more than that - of the dread in which the Ahmadiyas live.
As one would expect from the sequence of other theocratic states, the
Marxist-Leninist ones for instance, the list of demands on this front has
gone on becoming longer: For example, the demand now is that the Ahmadiyas
must be forced to change the architecture of their places of worship so
that these do not resemble mosques in any way.
At the same time, as the Human Rights Commission Reports record, demands
have been raised to declare the Zikris also to be non-Muslims. And, as we
have seen, to declare the Shias also to be non-Muslims.... And that is just
about fellow-Muslims. What of other minorities, the Christians, the Hindus?
And women?
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