Who are the Ahmadiyyas and why are their mosques targeted frequently in Pakistan?
Who are the Ahmadiyyas and why are their mosques targeted frequently in Pakistan?
A mosque of the minority Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan’s Karachi city was vandalised by unknown attackers on Thursday (2 February), as per a Dawn report.
The purported videos of the attack shared online show men atop an Ahmadi Masjid in Saddar, breaking its minaret with hammers.
This incident comes in the wake of a similar attack earlier this month when miscreants targeted minarets of Ahmadi Jamaat Khata on Karachi’s Jamshed Road, reported ANI.
Who is the Ahmadiyya community and why are they targeted in Pakistan? We explain.
Who are the Ahmadiyyas?
The Ahmadi movement was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889 in Qadian near Punjab’s Amritsar, India.
Ghulam Ahmad considered himself a “follower prophet” (Zilli Nabi) and a messiah chosen by Allah, as per Deutsche Welle (DW).
According to Oxford Islamic Studies Online, Ahmad “based his convictions on the belief that Muslim religion and society had deteriorated to the point where divinely inspired reforms were needed”, reported BBC.
The followers of the religious sect believe their founder was sent by God to “end religious wars, condemn bloodshed, and restore morality, justice, and peace”, says a website of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community.
Ahmadiyyas are of the view that Ghulam Ahmad was sent to disseminate the laws laid down by Prophet Mohammad, as per BBC.
However, several Muslim communities reject this claim, including hardline Muslim clerics, many of whom consider Ahmadiyyas “heretics”, reported Indian Express.
Persecution of the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan
There has been systemic persecution of the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan for decades, with attacks on the community’s members, places of worship, and vandalism of their graves.
In May 1974, at least 27 Ahmadis were killed and the community’s mosques, houses and stores damaged in riots carried out by a group of students from Jamaat-e-Islami, as per a Refworld report.
Following the violence, the then-Prime Minister of Pakistan Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared Ahmadis a “non-Muslim minority”, leading to a ban on the community members from going to mosques.
Military dictator Zia-ul-Haq’s government further segregated the Ahmadiyyas in Pakistan.
He introduced an ordinance that restricted the minority community from calling themselves Muslims and penalised them for expressing and practising their religion.
As per Indian Express, Section 298-C of the Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) states, “Any person of the Qadiani Group or the Lahori Group (who call themselves ‘Ahmedis’ or by any other name), who directly or indirectly, poses as a Muslim, or calls, or refers to, his faith as Islam, or preaches or propagates his faith, or invites others to accept his faith, by words, either spoken or written, or by visible representations, or in any manner whatsoever outrages the religious feelings of Muslims shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to three years and shall also be liable to fine.”
The Ahmadiyyas also face electoral discrimination in Pakistan.
In 2002, a separate list of voters was formed where Ahmadiyyas were categorised as non-Muslims. This supplementary electoral list continues to exist.
Notably, Pakistan’s first Nobel Prize was won by scientist Abdus Salam for Physics in 1979.
However, his legacy continues to be ignored in the country because Salam belonged to the Ahmadi minority.
Recent spate of attacks on the Ahmadiyyas
Earlier this January, a historic mosque of the Ahmadi community in Wazirabad, a city in Pakistan’s Punjab, was desecrated allegedly by the district administration.
Condemning the attack, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) had called for the protection of the religious sites of the country’s minorities.
As per ANI, a media report says that at least 13 Ahmadiyyas have been killed and 40 wounded since 2017.
In November last year, four tomb markers in an Ahmadi cemetery in the Punjab province were ransacked and anti-Ahmadi epithets were written on them, ANI reported.
Besides violent attacks, Pakistan’s 5,00,000-strong Ahmaddiya community is also being targeted under the country’s strict blasphemy laws.
As per an Al Jazeera report in 2021, at least 30 blasphemy cases and 71 other legal cases related to religion were filed against members of the Ahmadi community in 2020 alone.
Rights groups and community members blame the emergence of the far-right Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) religious group, as well as Hassan Muawiya, a religious scholar in the eastern city of Lahore, for the recent spike in violence and legal cases.
“There has been an increase in these [attacks], in [legal] cases,” Amir Mahmood, spokesman for the Ahmadi community, told Al Jazeera in 2021.
“This [persecution] has increased in the last two or three years, and it is continuing to do so.”
Rabia Mahmood, an independent human rights researcher who works on the persecution of Pakistani minorities, told Al Jazeera two years back that Hassan Muawiya is “undoubtedly” Pakistan’s “leading’ anti-Ahmadi campaigner”.
“He began the most coordinated well-thought-out offline campaign against this community, under the larger ambit of Khatm-e-Nabuwwat Council”.
She also alleged that attacks on Ahmadis often take place in the aftermath of a rise in TLP activity in that area, or with “explicit hate speech campaigns”.
With inputs from agencies
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