Date: 13 Jun 2010
Grief Links Members of a Persecuted Muslim Sect///////////// By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN///////////// Published: June 11, 2010//////////////// GLEN ELLYN, Ill. — The phone rang early on the morning of May 28 in Tariq Malik’s home outside Chicago, the suburban sky still night-dark. From the hour alone, Mr. Malik and his wife, Riffat Jariullah, knew something was wrong. The voice of her brother, all the way from Pakistan, told them as much with his breathless instructions. ////////////// Enlarge This Image ///////////// Sally Ryan for The New York Times/////////// Tariq Malik, second from left, an Ahmadi Muslim, lost three relatives in the May bombing of a mosque in Lahore, Pakistan. ///////////// Enlarge This Image ///////// Sally Ryan for The New York Times//////////// Mr. Malik, 53, prayed at home in suburban Chicago. His sect of Islam is considered blasphemous by fundamentalist Muslims. ////////////// “Go turn on the TV,” Mrs. Jariullah, 47, remembers him saying. “See what happened.” ///////// So, still in their bed clothes, the couple switched on the Pakistani cable station, Geo. There they saw a man with a rifle firing from a minaret. It was a minaret they recognized, at a mosque in Lahore known as Dar-ul-Zakir, where so many of their friends and family members worshiped. ///////////// Mr. Malik and Mrs. Jariullah went straight to their cellphones, calling every relative in Lahore; not one answered. From the television, they heard gunfire crackling, grenades exploding, sirens, screams. The screen showed bodies streaked with blood. ///////////////// At some point, Mrs. Jariullah realized she was quaking, and yet unable to take her eyes off the screen. Eight hours later, the couple’s worst fears were confirmed. An uncle, a nephew and a cousin were dead, another cousin wounded. ////////////// And when they drove from their home in Plainfield, Ill., to their mosque in Glen Ellyn, Bait-ul-Jamaay, they discovered their anguish had company. Of the 120 families who belong to the mosque, a dozen or more had lost relatives in the Lahore attacks. All told, 94 people were killed in the assaults by the Punjabi Taliban on Dar-ul-Zakir and another mosque, Bait-ul-Noor, during Friday Prayer. //////////////// The thread of grief connecting Lahore to Glen Ellyn was not some ghastly anomaly. At both ends, the afflicted Muslims were members of the Ahmadi (or Ahmadiyya) sect, which claims 10 million worshipers worldwide. Moderate and peaceful in their precepts, the Ahmadis are reviled by fundamentalist Muslims, especially in Pakistan, for their belief that their 19th-century founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, was the messiah predicted by the Prophet Muhammad. “In the beginning, it was a shock, a sense of ‘How can you do this?’ ” Mr. Malik, 53, a management consultant, said this week, recalling the Lahore attacks. “Then you rewind your memories, and your feeling is, “Yes, it can happen.’ ” Sitting beside him, Mrs. Jariullah added, “The last thing you imagine someone could do is murder someone who is praying.” The attack, however horrific, came as no surprise. It follows nearly 40 years of escalating persecution in Pakistan against Ahmadi Muslims by both governmental and vigilante means. While extremists commit terrorist acts, the political leaders of Pakistan have tacitly allowed the violence by stigmatizing the nation’s two million Ahmadis under the law, much in the way that segregation laws in the American South created a climate amenable to lynching. /////////////////// In 1974, amid riots against Ahmadis, Pakistan amended its constitution to declare the sect non-Muslim. A decade later, under the military dictatorship of Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, Parliament enacted a blasphemy law with a death penalty. The measure singled out Ahmadis for prosecution for “indirectly or directly posing as a Muslim.” /////////////// Practically speaking, the measure meant that Ahmadis could be arrested for giving the Muslim greeting of “salaam aleikum,” issuing the call to prayer from a minaret, or even calling their house of worship a mosque. Emboldened by such official decisions, Sunni extremists desecrated Ahmadi cemeteries, burned Ahmadi homes and stores, and in 2005 gunned down Ahmadi worshipers in a mosque. ////////////////// Most recently, the Punjabi provincial government, led by a former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, allowed Muslim militants to hang banners throughout Lahore calling it religiously compulsory to kill Ahmadis. Other extremists have delivered letters to Ahmadi homes announcing their intent to slay the residents. //////////////////// The United Nations, the State Department, Human Rights Watch, Pakistani human-rights groups — all had been sounding the alarm about the plight of Ahmadi Muslims for years before May 28. /////////////// The unpunished atrocities of that day, then, were only the predictable outcome of decades of animosity. And the tepid response to the deaths just goes to show that Muslim lives apparently can be taken with impunity as long as the killers are other Muslims. ////////////// The mourning and outrage can be found only in Ahmadi communities in places like Glen Ellyn and mosques like Bait-ul-Jamaay. Mirza Muzaffar lost his cousin. Amer Fahim Ahmed lost his uncle. Yasser Malik lost his uncle. And that uncle, Nasir Chaudry, was apparently one of the first worshipers killed, sought out because of his stature as a retired major general in the army. ////////////// General Chaudry, his nephew recalled, thought of himself as a Pakistani patriot. He fought for the nation in three wars and carried shrapnel from one of them in his knee. Then again, as Yasser Malik added, his uncle once was invited to a Sunni mosque on Ramadan because of his military ranking, only to find out that the whole sanctuary was washed after his departure because, as an Ahmadi, he was an infidel. /////////////////// So many members of Bait-ul-Jamaay had stories like that about life in Pakistan — jobs denied, college admissions withdrawn, homes vandalized, insults endured. They are now the fortunate ones, living in America, prospering as executives or engineers or doctors, not risking prison by identifying themselves as Muslim. Here, halfway around the globe, they can console one another with the traditional prayer for the dead: “Surely we belong to Allah, and to him we shall return.” /////////////////////// As for Tariq Malik and Riffat Jariullah, they keep returning to memories. They remember their trip to Lahore in 1986, the way Riffat’s cousin, Nasir Ahmed, brought kebabs and sweets from the market for their three daughters. They remember the way Tariq’s uncle, Ansar ul-Haq, served tea with such a formal flourish, as if they were guests in a five-star hotel. //////////////////////// And Mr. Malik and Mrs. Jariullah remember, too, the cellphone images taken by Ahmadi hostages the afternoon Nasir and Ansar and all the rest were killed. One video shows a boy hiding under a table, calling out the prophet’s name amid the bullets and grenades. /////////////////// Now it is that image, not a brother’s phone call, that wakes Mrs. Jariullah in the quiet suburban midnight. //////////////////// 000000000