[While Pakistani officials claim to have eradicated Islamist extremism and terrorism from their country after years of conflict, a new threat to public order and religious peace has risen in their place. The Movement in Service to the Prophet, which professes the benign agenda of defending Muhammad as the final prophet of Islam, also exhorts followers to violence in that cause and targets members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect, called Ahmadis, as dangerous heretics because they believe in a later prophet.]
By Pamela Constable
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Pakistani
Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal talks to journalists in Islamabad on Oct. 2,
2017.
Officials
said May 6, 2018, that a gunman opened fire on Iqbal after a public meeting,
wounding
him in shoulder. (Anjum Naveed/AP)
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By voting last week to revoke an honor
bestowed on the first Pakistani to receive a Nobel Prize in science, Pakistan’s
National Assembly opted for political expediency in the face of a fast-rising
Muslim group that denounces members of the late physicist’s faith as
blasphemers. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan —
Abdus Salam, who died in 1996, was a member
of the Ahmadiyya minority sect, and no politician was eager to challenge the
Muslim group, known as the Movement in Service to the Prophet. So lawmakers
decided to take his name off a renowned physics center.
But on Sunday, when a young member of the
movement shot and severely wounded Pakistan’s interior minister at a public
gathering, there was immediate condemnation across the political spectrum and a
flood of horrified comments on social media.
“This menace of hatred will destroy
everything,” tweeted former foreign minister Khawaja Asif. “For God’s sake, we
have to work together for our country.” In another tweet, Afrasiab Khattak, a
retired senator and a human rights activist, warned, “Weaponizing religion is a
path to horrible disaster.”
While Pakistani officials claim to have
eradicated Islamist extremism and terrorism from their country after years of
conflict, a new threat to public order and religious peace has risen in their
place. The Movement in Service to the Prophet, which professes the benign agenda
of defending Muhammad as the final prophet of Islam, also exhorts followers to
violence in that cause and targets members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect, called
Ahmadis, as dangerous heretics because they believe in a later prophet.
Neither the legislative resolution against
Abdus Salam nor the assassination attempt on Interior Minister Ahsan Iqbal was
openly supported by officials of the movement. But analysts here said there was
no doubt that the group’s emotional fervor, widespread appeal to mainstream Sunni
Muslims, demonization of Ahmadis and relentless attacks on political opponents
had played a role in both.
And while insulting a long-dead scientist did
no actual harm, the close-range attack on Iqbal, who was hospitalized with a
gunshot wound in the shoulder, was a terrifying response to his official role
in trying to quell a weeks-long sit-in in November by the movement. The
23-year-old attacker said the idea to kill the minister came to him in a dream.
The protest leaders charged that an election
law had been stealthily changed to give more political rights to Ahmadis;
officials denied this and apologized. But the protests persisted until police
were sent to quell them and failed. Later, the army was called in to negotiate
and agreed to many of the group’s demands.
“When State surrenders before bunch of
extremists and political parties try to exploit” religious causes, “then
attacks like #AhsanIqbal happen,” newspaper columnist Mubashir Zaidi said in a
tweet Monday. “Now the monster is out.”
The attempt on Iqbal’s life also brought a
chilling reminder of the 2011 death of Salman Taseer, who was governor of
Punjab province. He was killed by his own bodyguard for criticizing the
country’s harsh blasphemy laws. The guard was hanged in 2015, but many Muslims
viewed him as a martyr to Islam, and the Movement in Service to the Prophet was
created around his example.
Pakistan’s uncertain leadership situation has
added fuel to the combustible mix of religion and politics as the
Muslim-majority nation heads toward national elections later this year. The
most bizarre aspect concerns the contradictory roles played by former prime
minister Nawaz Sharif and his son-in-law, Safdar Awan. Sharif was ousted by the
Supreme Court last year after facing corruption charges.
It was Sharif, then a popular premier, who
decided 16 months ago to honor Abdus Salam by naming a physics center at the
prestigious Quaid-i-Azam University after him. Human rights groups hailed the
gesture as a hopeful turning point in the history of discrimination and violent
attacks against Ahmadis in Pakistan.
“The government should be congratulated for
correcting a historic injustice,” Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor and
rights activist, said at the time. Now, he added, perhaps Pakistan is “ready to
move ahead in science, irrespective of faith. It will help soften Pakistan’s
image” as “intolerant and terrorist.”
But one of the most outspoken critics of the
honor was Awan, the husband of Sharif’s daughter Maryam. Last year, Awan gave a
vituperative speech against Ahmadis in Parliament, and he sponsored the
resolution to remove Abdus Salam’s name from the building and give the honor
instead to 12-century Byzantine astronomer Abu al-Fath Abd al-Rahman
al-Khazini.
Some Pakistani commentators said Awan had
come under political pressure from the Movement in Service to the Prophet.
Others suggested that he was playing a good cop/bad cop role to appease the
group and help the sagging fortunes of the Sharif family’s political party, the
Pakistan Muslim League-N, which will face stiff competition in the upcoming
polls.
But the shooting of Iqbal, a well-liked and
longtime aide to Sharif and the Muslim League, seemed to eclipse party politics
and bring the potential dangers of fomenting religious hatred into sharp
national focus. While the Movement in Service to the Prophet has galvanized
fervent support from Muslims across the country, the attack has also aroused
popular concern that the group may have gone too far.
Among Ahmadis, already accustomed to being
ostracized and misunderstood, there is a growing sense that their place in
Pakistani society is even more perilous — and that the increasing influence of
the Movement in Service to the Prophet is making antagonism to Ahmadis an
unprecedented litmus test for millions of mainstream Muslims.
“The fight against Ahmadis has become a
struggle for the soul of the country,” Ahmad Usman, a photographer and
journalist based in Pakistan, wrote in the online Naya Daur Media. “The good
Pakistani and the good Muslim [are] increasingly defined by their hatred of
Ahmadis.”
Abdus Salam and others like him “are exactly
the kind of heroes Pakistan needs,” Usman added. But when public life is
infected by the “virus of hatred, they are not the heroes the country
deserves.”
Shaiq Hussain contributed to this report.
