By Fareed Ahmad for Human Rights Without Frontiers
HRWF (30.08.2024) – The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Pakistan is enduring an alarming rise in violence and systemic persecution in 2024, with a disturbing trend of targeted murders, desecration of mosques and graves, and the continued denial of basic civil rights.
This year, up to July 2024 alone, four Ahmadi Muslims have been brutally murdered in religiously motivated attacks. These include the killing of Tahir Iqbal, the president of the local Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Bahawalpur, who was gunned down by motorcyclists in March. In June, a 16-year-old madrassa student murdered two Ahmadi men, Ghulam Sarwar and Rahat Ahmad Bajwa, in separate incidents in Mandi Bahauddin, citing religious motives. The violence continued in July when Zaka ur Rehman, a 53-year-old dentist, was shot dead in his clinic in Lala Musa, Gujrat. These heinous acts reflect the extreme vulnerability of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, who are routinely targeted for their faith, with little accountability for the perpetrators.
The violence against the community extends beyond physical attacks to the systematic desecration of Ahmadi Muslim mosques and graves. In February 2024, extremists armed with guns, hammers, and shovels attacked an Ahmadi mosque in Kotli, Azad Jammu and Kashmir,destroying its minarets and brutally beating worshippers. In June, during Eid celebrations, a mob of 150 people attacked another Ahmadi mosque in Kotli and across Pakistan more than 30 Ahmadis were arrested – including a 13 year old boy – for celebrating the Islamic festival of Eid.
The violence against Ahmadi Muslim mosques is compounded by state-sanctioned desecration of their graves. In January 2024, Punjab police desecrated 65 Ahmadi tombstones in Musay Wala, claiming to act on orders from a local official known for persecuting Ahmadis. These acts of desecration not only violate the sanctity of the community’s religious sites but also send a chilling message that their existence is unwelcome in Pakistan.
Adding to this climate of fear and suffocation of faith, is the ongoing legal discrimination against Ahmadi Muslims, particularly in the realm of voting rights. Since 1985, Pakistan has denied Ahmadis the right to vote as they are placed on a separate non-Muslim electoral register meaning that the only way they can vote is by renouncing their Islamic faith. As a result, the community has been systematically disenfranchised for nearly four decades including in the elections earlier this year.
The persecution of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community reached a new level of intensity in August 2024 following the ruling in the Mubarak Ahmad Sani case. In February 2024, Chief Justice Qazi Faez Isa’s bench ordered the release of Mubarak Sani, an Ahmadi Muslim accused of acting in contravention of the Punjab Holy Quran (Printing and Recording) (Amendment) Act, 2021.
Mr Sani had been charged, in 2022, for giving a copy of the book Tafseer-e-Sagheer (Holy Quran with commentary) to Ahmadi students in 2019. However, the court found that as the alleged offense of distributing such material occurred in 2019, no action could be taken as it was not unlawful until the 2021 amendment, and the law could not be applied retrospectively.
It also rejected the call for further charges under the blasphemy laws to be added as there was no evidence of such offences in the FIR or police reports, and it thus ordered his release. This ruling sparked a massive backlash from extremist groups, particularly Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), which launched widespread protests and a hate campaign against Ahmadis and Chief Justice Isa.
The situation escalated further in July when the Supreme Court issued a verdict after its review of the decision in which it upheld its decision to release Mr Sani and noted that while the status of Ahmadis under the constitution remain unchanged, Ahmadis had the right to profess and practice their faith in private. This sparked further protests and hostility against the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the issuance of a bounty on Chief Justice Isa’s head by TLP leaders.
The Supreme Court was then pressured by extremists and the Punjab Government to conduct a clarification hearing where it was pressed again to overturn the decision despite such action being beyond the remit of such a hearing. Shockingly the earlier verdict was amended – despite it being a final verdict of the country’s highest court – and a notice was issued that sections that referenced that Ahmadis had the right to practice their faith in private are to be removed.
This sets a very dangerous precedent for the country. The case underscores the dangerous intersection of the judiciary and politics in Pakistan, where judicial decisions that challenge extremist views can provoke violent reprisals, and it leaves open the door for any future verdict to be overruled by violent threats by extremists.
This is an extremely serious development that clearly threatens Ahmadis, but it also threatens all minorities and indeed every citizen as it completely undermines the independence of the judiciary. This is a far cry from the noble vision of the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, and from the respect, dignity and justice that all Pakistanis deserve, and indeed are entitled to, as equal citizens of the country.
(*) Fareed Ahmad, National Secretary External Affairs of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community UK
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