Forbes.com: Pakistan was created, in the words of its founder MA Jinnah, to preserve “what is most precious in Islam.” But how do you determine what is best in any faith? For more than six decades, Pakistan has been at war with itself to answer this question. The principal casualties throughout this time have been Pakistan’s intended beneficiaries: Muslims. It is to guard their “purity” in a land inhabited by a predominantly non-Muslim population that Pakistan was hacked apart from India. Pakistan’s squalid condition today is a cause for grief; but, as a direct consequence of the conscious choices made by the people who still exude pride in calling themselves “Pakistani,” it is at least understandable, in the pedestrian way that self-made tragedies often are.

But what of Pakistan’s other victims, particularly its religious minorities, who have been made to endure the inexhaustible rage of the country’s permanently self-pitying Sunni majority? More than 80 Christians were slaughtered in a bomb attack just last week in Peshawar, a city that’s only a two-hour drive from Pakistan’s capital. The news of this atrocity in one part of the country was accompanied by a very Pakistani spectacle of law-enforcement in another. When Islamic clerics in Punjab murmured that a handful of Ahmadi shrines had approximated the design of Muslim mosques – minarets, verses from the Quran – high-ranking police officials rapidly descended on the crime scenes and personally supervised the destruction of the offending structures. Islam is an untiringly welcoming religion. But for some in Pakistan, the self-appointed modern guardian of the faith, even to seek to enter its fold is to invite the penal charge of heresy. In a way, the police officers were doing the congregants a tremendous favour by demolishing their mosques. Leaving them untouched would have brought in the mobs. As a Pakistani newspaper reported:

[A] rally led by former Azad Jammu and Kashmir minister of religious affairs Sahibzada Hamid Raza stopped at Kabutranwali Ibadatgah and demanded that the minarets, covered by cement, be razed. They warned that they would do so themselves if they had to. The police complied.”

More: