AHMADIYYA MUSLIM JAMAAT MALTA: Ahmadiyya Victimization: On a daily basis, on a variety of levels

Ahmadiyya Victimization:

On a daily basis, on a variety of levels

"I never felt bigoted back home, but the moment you move to a metropolitan city like Lahore or Karachi you get to hear things like 'You don't have a right to live in this country!'. Even the media people say Qadianis are worse than infidels. What do you expect from the common people?" [Arshad Ahmad, Hunza]

Her Facebook profile picture displays a night view of the minaret with the crescent in the backdrop. Showing solidarity with her family and Ahmadi friends, this is Nushmya Zia who lost her uncle Lt General (retd) Ch Nasir Ahmad in the tragic events of May 28.

"The persecution of the community is for real and it has been there, but it never got this worse," she says.

Nushmya is not just one individual who holds this thought. The majority of the people from the Ahmadiyya community have similar complaints.

"We [the Ahmadis] are persecuted on a daily basis, you can say. If it is not with a gun to the head, it is a verbal assault, a slur…" writes an (unnamed) Ahmadi friend of a friend on a common email letter "to my non-Ahmadi friends… some of whom I know and others I hope will have the honesty to see things for what they really are. This is not the first time that something like this has happened."

Actually, she is right in the sense that this is not for the first time: only two months back, on April 1, 2010, three Ahmadis were assassinated in Faisalabad. May 19, 2010, saw the murder of an Ahmadi in Karachi. And just two days after the massacre, another Ahmadi man was stabbed to death in Narowal on May 31, 2010. And this is just a glimpse of the 'reported' cases in our country.

The other day, I was speaking to a professional acquaintance, 54-year-old Zaffar Ahmad, General Manager, HR, at Civil Aviation Authority, Karachi. We got talking about the May 28 incidents and he suddenly went quiet and mumbled, "Do you know I am an Ahmadi, too?"

Hence Zaffar went on to relate his ordeal. To my shock, I found that he had lost his nephew in the Model Town attack. On a professional level, he has had to deal with the fact that he wouldn't be promoted "despite having put in 20 long years of service". Period.

There's another kind of intimidation that Zaffar has faced in his office life so far. "How would you feel if you enter your office and no one greets you? If you say 'Assalam O Alaikum!' and there is no reply as such?" he asked.

"We get an IB clearance and the text they write to us goes: 'There is nothing against him; by faith he is a Qadiani'. On passports and other related forms we have to mention our religious order and the entire creed."

As if this wasn't enough, Zaffar said he could never cast a vote. "We don't consider ourselves a minority, so why should we cast our vote in that capacity?"

Irshad Ahmad of Hunza has had similar experiences. "I never felt bigoted back home, but the moment you move to a metropolitan city like Lahore or Karachi you get to hear things like 'You don't have a right to live in this country!'. Even the media people say Qadianis are worse than infidels. What do you expect from the common people?"

Subhan Mirza, 30, a software engineer, also a survivor of the Model Town C-block attack, also shared his experiences with TNS. "I was in class 7 when everyone in school got to know that I was an Ahmadi, though I'd never told anyone this. Now I kind of woke up to the reality that Ahmadis were different [from non-Ahmadis]. Can you imagine kids telling me stuff like your kalma is different?"

Subhan said no one in his family had ever taught him to think or behave differently. "Most of the times, it's the parents who brainwash their children to the extent that they say such nasty things and even call us kafirs."

Nazia Sultana, associate editor at an NGO, says that most of her family lives in Model Town and these incidents sent them panicking. Interestingly, one side of her family, which she says is non-Ahmadi, "didn't even bother to inquire about us. Their silence was menacing.

"But they didn't forget to call me to know if my NGO was planning an event. Actually, this is our national psyche." http://jang.com.pk/thenews/jun2010-weekly/nos-06-06-2010/spr.htm#7