Culture of intolerance

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.

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