By Usama Khalidi
The killing of the flotilla peace activists by Israelis has predictably brought howls of sanctimonious denunciations from the Muslim media in the Subcontinent, but why hasn’t the killing of 90 Ahmedis in Lahore by Punjabi Taliban troubled their conscience?
This question is of particular interest to Muslims of India because they have been victims of lethal hatred in one state, and face discrimination all over the country in one form or another.
Living in a democracy, Indian Muslims and their leaders make strong appeals to the larger community’s sense of fairness and justice, assert their rights as equal citizens, and air their grievances in every available forum, generally wallowing in their sense of victimhood. You would expect that they would develop a sensitivity to the gross abuse of human rights of all people everywhere. You will be disappointed if you look for a condemnation of the Ahmedis’ massacre at a mosque at the websites of Jamaat-e Islami’s Radiance (radianceweekly.com), Mumbai’s Inquilab daily (inquilab.com), or at Hyderabad’s Siasat (siasat.com) and Etemaad (etemaaddaily.com) daily newspapers.
Several weeks after the flotilla massacre, all of these news outlets are still carrying numerous articles denouncing the attack. Their silence on the murder of 90 human beings while at pray makes these self-proclaimed defenders of Islam complicit in the crime. These same news outlets never tired of claiming hadiths that liken the murder of one human being to the murder of entire humanity, or proclaiming that Islam is a religion of peace. Whose Islam? Which version of Islam? Oh, yes: true Islam. It is precisely when atrocities are committed in the name of Islam that the need arises for the defense of the Prophet (pbuh)’s sunnat. With their silence on the Ahmedis massacre, the ulema have failed in their duties. They have become complicit by failing to denounce deviant interpretations of the Quran that permit massacre of innocents.
One possible explanation for the tolerance of hatred against the Ahmedis among otherwise enlightened people could be the widespread ignorance about the persecution of this minority in Pakistan. It’s shocking to learn that every applicant for a Pakistani passport has to take an oath saying that “I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad an impostor prophet. And also consider his followers, whether belonging to the Lahori, Qadiani or Mirzai groups, to be non-Muslims.” It has been Pakistan’s law since 1984. For more details, see a BBC correspondent’s account of the hatred preached and fortified by law at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8744092.stm
Indian Muslims have fought attempts to institutionalize prejudice against them by including derogatory statements in school textbooks, and they had the support of many in the larger community. But similar social-conditioning efforts are widespread in Israel, Saudi Arabia and other parts of the world. When we denounce prejudice against ourselves, it becomes our responsibility to protest similar abominations against other minorities. A much-cited poem attributed to Martin Niemöller, a German pastor during the Nazi era, comes to mind:
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for the Jews,
I remained silent;
I wasn’t a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.