Source/Credit: IPS-Inter Press Service
By Zofeen Ebrahim | November 22, 2011

KARACHI, Nov 22, 2011 (IPS) – “Hatred against us has now spread to small towns and villages,” Saleemuddin, spokesperson of the persecuted Ahmadiya community in Pakistan, told IPS.

The Ahmadis believe that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a 19th century cleric, “was the messiah promised by God”. Such beliefs are seen by orthodox Muslims as unacceptable. Pakistan has declared its four million Ahmadis to be non-Muslim.

Speaking to IPS over the phone from Rabwah – a city in the Punjab province also known as Chenab Nagar – which is 95 percent Ahmadi, Saleemuddin added, “We are in a fix – if we say we are Muslims, we will be charged and sentenced; but we cannot say we are non-Muslim when we are Muslims.”

On May 28, last year, 94 members of the Ahmadi community were massacred in their mosques during the Friday congregation in the eastern city of Lahore. Since then, Saleemuddin said, there has been a marked increase in persecution, with 11 more people killed.

Last year, the Punjab government made it mandatory for students to reveal whether they were ‘Muslim or non-Muslim’ before being admitted to school or college, or even before registering for the board exams.

Two months ago Raziatul Bari, a 23-year-old English teacher at Chenab Public School in the Punjab village of Dharanwali, was sacked from work. The same afternoon ten students – some from Chenab Public School and some, like four-year old nursery student Manahil Jameel, from the Muslim Public School – were expelled.

Yasser Arafat, the principal of Chenab Public School, told IPS, “The teacher was preaching her faith in school despite warnings, so she was asked to leave. The students left in protest.”

Arafat charged that the students and the teacher want “international attention so they can seek asylum.”

Bari, who had studied at Chenab Public before becoming a teacher there, said she had never faced a problem like this before.

“It all began a few months ago when a cleric came and poisoned our village,” she told IPS. Following the cleric’s visit, Arafat asked Bari on several occasions to convert to Islam. “Each time I would tell him I was a Muslim,” Bari said, adding that her insistence was in vain.

Of the 210 households in Dharanwali, Bari says just nine belong to Ahmadis, who live in constant fear.

“Today our children have been expelled from schools, tomorrow we may be forced to leave our homes. Where will we go?”

For years Ahmadis in Pakistan have kept a low profile, living in constant fear and humiliation. Now the hatred has spread and the oppressors have become more belligerent, which has led to several instances of overt faith-based persecution.

In June, pamphlets listing the names and addresses of Ahmadi families alongside messages inciting murder were distributed in the Punjab city of Faisalabad. Several months later 55-year-old Naseem Ahmed, whose name had appeared on that list, was shot dead in his home.

In another case, the local cleric of a small village in Punjab issued a severe edict after seeing the sons of a deceased Ahmadi offering funeral prayers for their father: “Anyone who offers prayers for a kafir (an infidel, in this case an Ahmadi) gets expelled from Islam.”

Read more: