Month: June 2010

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by RABIA ALI

As many as 20 to 25 girls from the Hindu community are abducted every month and converted forcibly, said Amarnath Motumal, an advocate and council member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

“There is no official record to support this statement, but according to estimates, in Karachi alone, a large number of Hindu girls are being kidnapped on a routine basis,” Motumal told The News. “The families of the victims are scared to register cases against the influential perpetrators as death threats are issued to them in case they raise their voice. So, the victims choose to remain silent to save their lives,” he said.

The News for more

by C. M. NAIM

Another, similarly beleaguered minority within Islam in Pakistan are the Zikris, an off-shoot of a fifteenth-century millenarian movement. It was launched by Miran Syed Muhammad of Jaunpur (India), who claimed to be the promised mahdi and whose tomb is in Farah (Afghanistan.) His followers in India, mainly in Hyderabad, are known as the Mahdavis. The Zikris in Pakistan, currently estimated to be half a million in number, are mostly in the coastal areas of Sindh and parts of Baluchistan. Turbat (Baluchistan) is considered a sacred place by them because the mahdi is said to have prayed and meditated there. The followers of the mahdi suffered some persecution in the fifteenth century, but since then have lived in peace with other Muslims. Evidently, having tasted success against the Ahmadis, the Jamiat-ul-Ulama-e-Islam felt encouraged to launch an attack against the Zikris — just as other similar groups increased their polemics against the Shi’a Muslims. In March 1992, at Turbat, armed zealots of the Jamiat tried to disrupt the annual pilgrimage of the Zikris. Since then they have been demanding that the Zikris should also be declared “non-Muslims.” To my knowledge, no Muslim religious leader in Pakistan — or, for that matter, in the rest of South Asia — has yet challenged that demand.

Columbia for more

by C. M. NAIM

Painted in gaudy colours and dominant in size, the sign first quoted three verses from the Quran in Urdu translation then urged people to follow their alleged message.

The Quran’s Message to the Muslim Ummah

“O believers, do not make friends of those who are my enemies and yours.” Chapter 60, verse 1.

“And those who should demean your religion you should kill them, the leaders of Kufr.” Chapter 9, verse 12.

“And fight with them, for Allah Ta’ala will punish them and demean them at your hands, and He will help you against them (Kafirs), and Allah will cool the breasts of the believers.” Chapter 9, verse 14 [2]

Therefore we request you:
“Keep yourself away from the Mirza’is and Qadianis, the worst branch of kufr and Islam’s worst enemies. And also keep your children away from them, because those who will maintain social ties with them will, on the Day of Judgment, find themselves denied any intercession on their behalf by the Prophet Muhammad.”
Khatm-i-Nabuwat Youth Wing, Ferozewala [3]

Outlook for more

(Submitted by Robin Khundkar)

by AHMED RASHID

In fact, every arm of the state seems to have an interest in denying that anything is happening in Punjab. The army would like to keep these extremist groups on ice in case tensions with India rachet up again. Some unscrupulous Punjabi politicians, including the backers of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, want to use vote banks controlled by the extremists to get elected to parliament; others get kick backs from the criminal fundraising done by the extremists.

The police and the state bureaucracy don’t want to get involved in a major crack down operation in Punjab, partly because they are scared of these groups, and the senior judiciary has been freeing numerous arrested extremists because the police refuse to provide sufficient evidence to convict them.

Members of the right wing intelligentsia, who hate the US and the West and hold the most powerful positions in the press and in universities, help promote myopic views of religious groups and non-Muslims. The government very rarely takes them to task, while the voices of liberal Pakistanis have far less influence.

The New York Review of Books for more

(Submitted by Robin Khundkar)

by LYS ANZIA

Minority religions and sectarian groups in Pakistan come from a vast collection of religious diversity which includes Christians, Buddhists, Ahmadis, Zikris, Hindus, Kalasha, Parsis, Sikhs and Shia Muslim sects, including Ismailis and Bohras. Ethnic regional groups come from 5 different communities, including the Baloch, Huhajir, Punjabis, Pushtuns and Sindhis.

…

Most of the families of Christian minority women in Punjab came, at the turn of the 20th century, from families that were originally from India. They came from dalit Hindu families who moved to what would later become the Pakistan region in 1947. Their legacy of isolation and separation from Indian society is ongoing. As dalits they were part of the lowest “untouchable” caste in India. This has been a nemesis that has followed them, even after they converted from Hinduism to Christianity. Basic women’s rights and human rights are often out of reach for these women who daily experience conditions of extreme poverty.

Women News Network for more

by NADEEM F. PARACHA

For years this narrative has gleefully been disseminated by the state, the clergy, schools and now the electronic media. It’s quite simple: Pakistan was made in the name of Islam (read, a theocratic state). Thus, only Muslims (mainly orthodox Sunnis) have the right to rule, run and benefit from this country. ‘Minority’ religions and ‘heretical Islamic sects’ living as Pakistani citizens are not to be trusted. They need to be constitutionally, socially and culturally isolated. Parliamentary democracy too can’t be trusted. It unleashes ethnic forces, ‘corruption’ and undermines the role of the military and that of Islam in the state’s make-up. It threatens the ‘unity’ of the country; a unity based on a homogeneous understanding of Islam (mainly concocted by the state and its right-wing allies). Most of our political, economic and social ills are due to the diabolical conspiracies hatched by our many enemies (especially India, Israel and the West in general). They want to break up Pakistan because Pakistan is the ‘bastion of Islam’ in a volatile region dominated by Indian, American and Shia Iranian hegemony. The many terrorist organisations operating in Pakistan are foreign funded …

Blog Dawn for more

by AMIR MIR

ISLAMABAD: Over 50 Pakistani Hindus have converted to Islam in the Sialkot district of Punjab within a week (between May 14 and May 19) under pressure from their Muslim employers in a bid to retain their jobs and survive in the Muslim-dominated society.

DNA for more

DAWN (editorial)

Take the police force, which is notorious for terrorising the poor. Even within that section of society, however, it reserves its harshest treatment for non-Muslims, for the simple reason that brutal or coercive acts directed against minorities are even less likely to get policemen into trouble. There is no shortage of more insidious means of discrimination either. To this day many job applications require candidates to state their religion. Has the irrelevance of this query never struck the organisations in question, or is it part of a screening process designed to weed out ‘undesirables’? Now let’s venture down to the basic building blocks of society, from institutions to households. In many middle-class and affluent Muslim homes, separate eating utensils of distinctly poorer quality are reserved for domestic staff. But there’s more: a further distinction in entitlement is made between Muslim and non-Muslim employees.

Dawn for more

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

The complete failure of the Sri Lankan government to genuinely address this impunity means that the United Nations must step in and conduct an independent international investigation as a first step towards international justice.

In particular, the truth must be established about the extent of violations that occurred in the final stages of the war, when the government prohibited independent monitoring and reporting by the United Nations and other observers.

Amnesty International for more