A children’s playground inside Rabwah | Haniya Javed
Muneera*, 52, another participant of the Long Island congregation, has a similarly harrowing experience of living in Swat as an Ahmadi woman. “If Mashal Khan was not spared and if Zainab’s case can become what it became, how can I ever be safe in Pakistan?” she says when asked as to why her family left Pakistan.
Mashal Khan was murdered last year by a lynch mob, at a university in Mardan where he was studying, over allegations of blasphemy and Zainab’s father rejected a government-appointed investigation team into her rape and murder in Kasur early this year because the probe was headed by an Ahmadi police officer.
Sadia, Muneera and some other women move to a community centre next to the prayer hall after the sermon is over. It is lined with tables and chairs and a buffet of lentils, rice and chicken curry.
“Each family gets to host a lunch at the end of our Sunday gathering. It is a time to meet each other,” says Sadia as she puts a spoonful from each dish into paper plates for others who are all chatting and laughing.
Ahmadi immigrants had started making their way to the United States as early as the 1930s. A larger influx of them took place between the 1950s and the 1970s. On the whole, about 100,000 Ahmadis live in North America. Sixty per cent of these are of Pakistani origin, according to Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, USA.
Gatherings such as the one at Baitul Huda are common for Ahmadi communities living in various parts of the United States. According to Professor Hussein Rashid of the department of religion at Columbia University, they are more a manifestation of a shared insecurity than of anything else. “Staying together does not tell anything about the community except the fact that they are a minority, and a besieged minority,” he says. “This is often the case with immigrant groups and those who are persecuted in their home countries that they tend to stay within themselves.”
About 457,103 Ahmadis still live in Pakistan, as per the 2017 census. Saleemuddin, a spokesperson of Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya in Karachi, says the community has never considered the option of mass migration. “We are among the makers of this country,” he says.
Those who have migrated also continue to face threats and harassment.
Tanveer Ahmed, a taxi driver from Bradford, England, stabbed an Ahmadi shopkeeper, Asad Shah, to death outside his shop in the same city. The following year, a ‘Final Prophet Conference’ was held in Springfield, Virginia, where, according to a tweet by one of the participants, most speakers were of Pakistani origin. They urged Muslims to use all their energy to stop Ahmadis from spreading within the United States. Funds to spread awareness about Ahmadis were also elicited at the conference, according to the tweet.
Zeeshan*, a Pakistani stand-up comedian popular on social media, recalls his experience from the time when he used to wait tables. He says how an uncle of his refused to have a Shezan cold drink because it is reportedly manufactured by an Ahmadi-owned company but he really enjoyed his Pepsi made by a company owned by white Christians. The Lahore Bar Association, a forum of lawyers, once famously barred the sale of Shezan products on the premises of Lahore’s district courts.
Shezan International Limited complains in a written statement that religious discrimination against its products is rampant in markets across Pakistan. “We have observed in different areas that [a] number of groups consisting of four to five people … go shop to shop to convince and threaten [Muslim retailers that they should not] continue their business with Shezan …”
Even in schools and colleges, discrimination against Ahmadis is rampant.
For Salman*, who spent his early days in Rawalpindi and migrated to Germany in 2013, his faith became a sticking point when he was seeking admission to a school of his choice. He was a student of class seven at a school run by the Pakistan Air Force in the 2000s and wanted to join a cadet college in Rawalpindi. During his admission interview, he was asked to fill a form about his faith. “I was shocked. That is when it started to hit me that we are different from others,” he says.
Salman has an active social media presence. He took to twitter recently to disclose his faith. It was scary and mentally exhausting, growing up as an Ahmadi in Pakistan, he said in a tweet. He decided to declare his faith in the wake of a sit-in protest just outside Islamabad by Muslim religious activists against a change in election nomination forms that was perceived as diluting, if not entirely obliterating, the difference between Ahmadis and non-Ahmadis in Pakistan. “I thought people should know what exactly happens to people of the Ahmadi community. Getting their sympathies was not the point.”
Back home in Pakistan, Ahmadi students have far worse to deal with. In 2011, as per media reports, 10 Ahmadi students were expelled from two schools in a village in Faisalabad district. They had to move to another district to re-enroll. In a similar incident in the summer of 2008, the Punjab Medical College, Faisalabad, first expelled 23 Ahmadi students but later suspended them for two weeks on charges of preaching their faith on campus.
Stories of discrimination against Ahmadis are ubiquitous but lately they have been more pervasive than before in the national documentation of citizens.
When Aisha* applied for her National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistanis (Nicop) in 2015, she received an email from the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) telling her to submit a copy of her foreign/Pakistani passport as well as that of her mother. After she sent the copies, NADRA officials asked her to clarify as to why her mother’s religion was given as Ahmadiyyat on her passport but her own was recorded as Islam.
She did not receive any reply from NADRA afterwards. When she pestered the officials through repeated emails, they told her that her religion needed to be changed to Ahmadi on her Nicop that she finally received two years later.
Aisha wonders what would have happened to her if she was in Pakistan. She could have been accused of either having hidden her real religious identity, which is a crime for Ahmadis in Pakistan – or, worse still, could have faced the allegations of apostasy – for changing her religion from Islam to Ahmadiyyat. “[Someone] would probably have hauled me to a court for changing my religion,” she says.
In February 2018, the Islamabad High Court did something similar. It ordered NADRA to submit a comprehensive report about more than 10,000 Ahmadis who have changed their religious status from Muslim to Ahmadi while applying for the renewal of their Computerised National Identity Cards in the last decade or so. When the court was told that more than 6,000 of them have already left Pakistan, the judge directed the federal government to show their travel history to him.
A month later, the same judge made it mandatory for all Pakistani citizens to declare their faith in oath before joining the armed forces, civil services and the judiciary. This could well be motivated by rumours that often circulate about people being given high-profile jobs — that they are Ahmadis. The most recent object of these rumours has been Qamar Javed Bajwa, the Chief of Army Staff. In the past, former chief minister of Punjab Manzoor Wattoo has faced the same allegation.
According to Peter Jacob of the Centre of Social Justice, religious minorities in Pakistan rightly feel that enhancing the scope of religion in national documentation, as has been ordered by the high court in Islamabad, “will expose them to more religious discrimination”. He, however, points out that the judge’s ruling is not unprecedented. “A Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) government in 1992 had tried to introduce a column for religion in the National Identity Cards, a move that was thwarted by a nationwide protest by religious minorities and the civil society,” he says. “What is striking this time round is that [the directive for emphasis on religion in identity-related documents] is coming from the bench [that] is supposed to [ensure the implementation] of the constitution in the light of fundamental human rights.”
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, therefore, has called on the government to seek a reversal of the ruling through an appeal at the Supreme Court. “Forums for justice … should play their due role in safeguarding the fundamental rights of the most vulnerable sections of society. It is therefore unfortunate that Pakistan‘s religious minorities should feel more unsafe as a result of a ruling by the honourable court,” the commission said in a recent statement.
Officials at the state’s own National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) have a similar point of view. They say they are asking the federal government to challenge the ruling. “This decision [has been made] on a petition by a single judge,” says Chaudhry Muhammad Shafique, an NCHR member. “Human rights of citizens cannot be left at the mercy of one individual,” he says. “Such sensitive legal or constitutional issues should be raised and decided in a full court setting of [the] Supreme Court [working] as a constitutional court to settle [such] constitutional issues.”
*Names have been changed to protect identities.
The writer is a graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism and a freelance reporter based in Karachi.
This was originally published in Herald's April 2018 issue. To read more, subscribe to the Herald in print.