A woman candidate on the poster of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan
Barring women from public spaces is not peculiar to the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan. Many religious parties have a similar attitude towards them.
The only major outlier is the Pakistan Awami Tehreek, a political party set up and headed by a Lahore-based religious scholar, Dr Tahirul Qadri. It has always had women participating in its public activities in large numbers. Its sit-in protests in 2013 and 2014 in Islamabad had hundreds of women participants, if not more. Yet there is a strong link between the Pakistan Awami Tehreek and the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan. Both draw their leadership and supporters from among the Barelvi population.
The conservatism of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan may have something to do with what an academic calls “competition in piety”. The party is trying to convey to its potential supporters that it is as puritanical (if not more) as other religious organisations in the country. There is a bit of history behind this competition.
Deobandis have been more prominent and organised in the political sense than Barelvis have been throughout the first four decades since the independence of Pakistan. Dr Tahir Kamran, a teacher in the history department of Lahore’s Government College University, has quantified their comparative institutional strength in a recent research paper. There were 1,840 registered Deobandi madrasas in Pakistan in 1988 while there were only 717 registered Barelvi madrasas in the country in the same year, he states.
Many graduates of these Deobandi madrasas got jobs under the military dictatorships of Ayub Khan and Ziaul Haq in government-run mosques and madrasas as well as other public entities such as the Council of Islamic Ideology and national and provincial textbook boards. Even schools and colleges hired teachers of Arabic and Islamic studies from among the graduates of Deobandi madrasas. Some Deobandi groups came even closer to the state during the 1980s when security and intelligence agencies employed their cadres in jihadi activities in Afghanistan and later in Kashmir.
All these factors combined gave them a big edge in social, religious and political competition with Shias and Barelvis, leading to a sectarian scramble for social and political space. This scramble, in time, manifested itself in deadly sectarian violence that beset Punjab during the 1980s.
Barelvis felt left out throughout this period. Their oldest political organisation, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan, set up in 1948, was unable to make its mark on national politics as vigorously as the Deobandi-dominated Jamaat-e-Islami and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam. It did win a few legislative seats in the general elections of 1970 and 1977, mostly from Karachi, Hyderabad and Mianwali, but it failed to develop support in other parts of the country. By 1990, the party started to factionalise. Its Punjab-based leaders – particularly Abdul Sattar Niazi – joined hands with the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad, a mainly right-wing alliance led by Nawaz Sharif, while its Karachi-based founder, Shah Ahmed Noorani, continued to fight the election from his party’s own platform. The Punjab faction disappeared after Niazi’s death in 2001. The other faction, too, has fared poorly in recent elections even though it still exists nominally.
Some new Barelvi organisations emerged almost simultaneously with the demise of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan. The first was Tahirul Qadri’s Pakistan Awami Tehreek. When it was launched in Lahore in the early 1990s, many public personalities including actors, sportsmen and former government officials joined it in droves, but it never took off electorally. The only time it reached Parliament was in the 2002 election, when Tahirul Qadri won its lone National Assembly seat. He resigned from Parliament in 2005, with the proclamation that he would not take part in electoral politics again.
Though Tahirul Qadri has a large-scale following in central Punjab and his party is quite well-organised – as was evident in its two prolonged sit-ins in Islamabad in 2013 and 2014 – he has failed to convert these strengths into political and electoral gains. Rather, he has discredited himself with his opportunistic support for the military establishment, his frequent and long disappearances from the country and his inconsistent stance on many social, religious and political questions.
The other Barelvi organisation that emerged in the 1990s was the Sunni Tehreek. Soon after its advent, it acquired a violent reputation and engaged in pitched battles with various Deobandi organisations, especially the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, for the control of mosques in Karachi and Hyderabad. At one point in the mid-2000s, it became so powerful that it started challenging the political hegemony of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement in these two cities.
Its frequent clashes with other religious and political organisations soon started taking a toll and many of its frontline leaders, including its founder Saleem Qadri, were killed in targeted attacks. The biggest blow to the Sunni Tehreek came in 2006 when its entire leadership was assassinated in an explosion during one of its public meetings in Karachi’s Nishtar Park.
Barelvi politics received a shot in the arm in the 2000s when the military government of Pervez Musharraf and its foreign backers saw it as a possible substitute to the often violent Deobandi politicking. Many Deobandi organisations had joined hands with anti-state groups such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan besides having sent their militant cadres to fight international forces stationed in Afghanistan. A religious solution was urgently required within Pakistan to stem the tide of violent extremism.
The Musharraf administration and its Western allies, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, thought that a Barelvi Islam, centred on shrines and love for the Prophet of Islam (may peace be upon him), could offer a benign, moderate and non-violent counterpoint to Deobandi Islam. Foreign dignitaries visited Barelvi madrasas and provided funds for their expansion and modernisation of infrastructure, and attended graduation ceremonies and other religious events there.
In 2006, Musharraf also formed the National Council for the Promotion of Sufism. It did not have any clerics or religious leaders, but aimed to propagate the same Sufi beliefs and practices that most Barelvis swear by. Many small Barelvi organisations coalesced to form the Sunni Ittehad Council around the same time. It received 36,607 US dollars from the United States in 2009 to hold anti-Taliban rallies. The council was also instrumental in putting together a fatwa that declared that the suicide bombings and jihadi activities being carried out by non-state actors were un-Islamic.
This bonhomie did not last long. It was, in fact, doomed even before it began.
Various Barelvi organisations led violent protests across Pakistan in 2006 against the publication of caricatures in a Scandinavian newspaper. They found the caricatures offensive and blasphemous.
Salman Taseer’s murder in 2011 also brought Barelvi organisation to the forefront of mass agitations for the release of his assassin. One of the largest Barelvi groups at the time, Jamaat Ahl-e-Sunnat Pakistan, released a statement signed by 500 Barelvi clerics. It asked people not to attend the funeral prayers for Taseer or feel any sympathy for him.
Protests over the release of an anti-Islam film in America were, similarly, led by Barelvi clerics. They erupted across Pakistan in September 2012 and immediately degenerated into mob violence.
The clarion call at these agitations, gustakh-e-rasul ki aik saza, sar tan sey juda (there is only one punishment for the blasphemer, beheading), was made popular by none other than Rizvi and his Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah. They first raised it to justify Taseer’s murder.
Ali Hajevri Data Gunj Bukhsh, the saint buried at Lahore’s Data Darbar, appeared in the dream of Abid Hussain, a young villager in central Punjab’s Narowal district. By the dreamer’s own account, the saint asked him to avenge the damage done to the finality of the Prophet of Islam (may peace be upon him) through changes in the election nomination forms. Many other prominent saints, he later said, exhorted him in his dreams to do the same.
A resident of Verum village near Narowal city, Abid Hussain has been a frequent visitor to a Barelvi madrasa, Darul Uloom Ghausia Rizvia, located in a nearby village. A religious speaker associated with the madrasa, Shahid Rafiq Madni, was renowned in the area for delivering sermons on the finality of the prophethood.
In late 2017, Madni toured villages and asked people to join the Rizvi-led sit-in at Faizabad. Inspired by his sermons, Abid Hussain travelled all the way to Islamabad to participate in the protest. It was there that he decided to “send to hell” those who, in his opinion, had harmed the honour of the Prophet of Islam (may peace be upon him) through changes in the election nomination forms. Ahsan Iqbal, interior minister at the time and a member of the National Assembly from Narowal district, became one of his targets.
On May 6 this year, Iqbal addressed a public meeting in Verum. As he was leaving after the address, Abid Hussain shot at him with a pistol from 15 yards away. Multiple bullets hit Iqbal but he survived the attack.
The assailant was arrested immediately. He acknowledged his association with the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and admitted to being inspired by Madni’s speeches. He also told investigators that he maintained a personal journal about his plan to kill someone (anyone) responsible for the changes in nomination forms and had left that journal at Darul Uloom Ghausia Rizvia before shooting Iqbal. The police soon took Madni into custody as well.
The madrasa is located in a simple building. Its rooms are painted bright green and walls adorned with religious motifs. A lone poster in one of the rooms announces a public event by the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan.
Qari Fayaz Muneer, a 20-something man who runs the place, confirms that Abid Hussain was inspired by Madni’s speeches but categorically denies the allegation that the madrasa or Madni helped him to plot and carry out the attack on Iqbal. “I have read his journal. There is no mention of a plot in it. He did not even name who he wanted to kill.”
Muneer, though, avoids condemning the attack as a criminal act and instead claims that Iqbal had been saying hurtful things about the leadership of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan while the sit-in at Faizabad was going on. He also believes changes in nomination forms have made Iqbal lose public support in Narowal that, according to Muneer, is predominantly Barelvi.
Perhaps banking on this last fact, Madni announced early this year that he would contest the 2018 election from a provincial assembly constituency where his madrasa is located. His arrest has upended his plan.
Another recent incident not very far from Verum similarly shows the reputation of instant public mobilisation and destruction that the leaders and activists of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan have acquired.
According to eyewitness accounts, a mob gathered on the evening of May 23, 2018 in a Sialkot neighbourhood inhabited by a tiny Ahmadi community. A few municipal officials had arrived there a little earlier in order to demolish a building. A demolition video shows scores of excited young men vigorously wielding different tools as the slogans of the Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan are heard in the background.
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of the Ahmadi faith, had once stayed in the building during his visit to Sialkot in the early 20th century. The place was originally owned by Hakeem Hissamuddin, a paternal cousin of Allama Iqbal’s teacher, Maulvi Mir Hassan. Over a year ago, the local Ahmadi Jamaat took it over from its owners and decided to turn it into a museum. “We wanted to conserve the structure, which was falling apart,” says Ijaz Ahmad, a member of the Ahmadi community in Sialkot.
The conservation project had to stop midway. A local citizen, who also happened to be a member of the Barelvi organisation Sunni Tehreek, moved police to take action against what he called illegal construction activity. On May 12, the police sealed the building, pending an official investigation into its legal status.
The sealing did not stop municipal authorities from approving its demolition. The mob and the officials, says Ijaz Ahmad, came right after night prayers and remained at work till early dawn. “They came back after morning prayers to resume the demolition.”
By the time the mob left, the building had been stripped of its windows and doors and its newly laid wooden staircase was smashed to bits — all this while the police seal on its entrance remained intact. Parts of a nearby building, an Ahmadi prayer hall, were also reduced to rubble.