Ahmadi killings – we are all guilty

On Friday, May 28, 2010, gunmen wearing suicide jackets and carrying grenades opened fire on two separate Ahmadi congregations in the city of Lahore as they were gathered for Friday prayer. Men got up in the minaret and shot into the crowd, killing adults and children alike and shouting “God is Great.” In the Garrhi Shahu mosque, there was nowhere to run. Eyewitnesses said that the gunmen would shoot from high up and then come down and shoot the injured in the head point blank just to make sure. No one could call out on their mobiles because the attackers had managed to jam the signal. When the police did come, they stood outside and refused to act so that, in the end, young men from the mosque were pulling guns out of the hands of policemen to defend themselves.

When it was over, the news said that 80 people had died in both attacks. A friend of mine who was at the scene right after said he counted over a hundred on that first night in Garrhi Shahu alone. An Ahmadi student of mine said that same, that they are underreporting the death toll.

On Monday, an Ahmadi man was stabbed to death in Narowal, a town 100 kilometres from Lahore, by a man who promised to “not leave any Ahmadi alive.” On Tuesday, gunmen broke into the ICU where the one attacker that had been caught was being treated and attempted to kill him. They missed him, but at least 5 people were killed in the attack.

Media response has been to call their mosques “worship places” and try to explain the cause for this violence by narrating a 35-year history of state-sanctioned marginalization and persecution, to wit: In 1974, Ahmadis were declared non-Muslim (where there were previously understood to be a Muslim sect) and ten years later, they were forbidden from calling their mosques mosques, calling openly to prayer, or proselytizing. This is ostensibly because the founder of the sect, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, claimed to have been the promised Messiah, the second coming of Christ and the reformer who would restore the Prophet Muhammad’s true Islam to its rightful station in the world.

But the real reason for this systematic persecution of Ahmadis is a deep-rooted paranoia about Islamic identity and its survival. Having decided that “the West” is out to get Islam, having listened to George W. Bush and Daniel Pipes and Samuel Huntington in their rhetoric of crusades and clashes of civilization, we have rallied around the Prophet Muhammad and are willing to defend him to death, even though nobody can touch him. It seems we have very little faith in the Prophet’s actual words and deeds because if we did, we would be less hassled when someone draws a picture of a mug and labels it Muhammad. If we had real love for the Prophet, we would employ the Urdu adage that translates, “So dogs bark. So let them.”

But instead we say things like, “if you tore open my chest ‘Allah, Muhammad, Rasul’ would be written on my heart.” And when some zealot puts word into action by climbing up a minaret and massacring a mosque full of worshippers, the same regular people who love the Prophet, they will wring their hands a bit and say, “Shit, that’s not good, that killing, I mean, I know they were kafirs, but that’s not Islam!” and consider their work is done. Those are the regular people. The irregular people, the violent ones, the people with actual conviction and the will to kill for them, they have found friends and guns and the floor plans of Ahmadi mosques – yes mosques, dammit – and the cruelty in their hearts to shoot at innocent worshippers repeatedly to make sure they are dead.

The rest of us wax hysterical at “Draw Muhammad Day” contests and insist that the Lahore High Court ban Facebook until the abomination is ended.

Fundamentally, Muslims are deathly afraid of having to serve out and facilitate actual social justice. During the same time that mainstream Muslims were up in arms over the caricatures of the Prophet on Facebook, it came to light that a 13-year-old girl had been gang raped repeatedly for 21 days in a police station. No one came out on the streets for that. If Muslims begin serving out social justice, then maybe the West, the Islamophobes, all the bugaboos out to get the Muslim identity and ream it into the ground, they will all be proved right. They will see our “dirty laundry” as Pervez Musharraf called the gang rape of Mukhtaran Mai all those years ago. They will decide that Muslim women are oppressed, Muslim men are barbarians, minorities are brutally persecuted and the whole religion is a dangerous obsolescence.

Well, I’m a Muslim. I recognize the “Draw Muhammad Day” contest as blatant Islamophobia. Should any decent, human rights framework allow for that sort thing? Absolutely. Is it an effective expression of freedom of speech? No. It’s moronic and hateful. It deserves condemnation and opposition campaigns from all corners of civilized society. We don’t need the law to tell us that its hate speech. But by the same token, no cartoonist is going to erase for me the legacy of Muhammad Rasul Allah and I’m not so impressed with any Muslim who thinks otherwise.

I’m a Muslim and I recognize that what happened on May 28 at Friday prayers in the Ahmadi mosques was a direct result of kufr in Muslim hearts, of infidelity. The most heinous crime in Islam is to associate partners with Allah. That is why we are not allowed to worship graven images and that is why we are not allowed to depict the Prophet – we are afraid of our love for him turning into worship of him.

But we worship him already, so why not admit it? Leave behind this pretense of monotheistic devotion to the One True God. The Ahmadis want to usurp Muhammad’s place as the light of the world? Kill them all, leave not a child alive, it’s only what they deserve. They want to worship Allah? Yeah, well.

You might say that this massacre was the action of a few mad fundamentalists bent on destroying Pakistan and Islam. That might be true, but when no one says anything, when the Chief Minister Punjab says it is “sad” without promising swift and severe justice to the perpetrators, when the police believes that it can stand outside the doors of a massacre and share a quick smoke, when hardly any Sunni Pakistanis can get up and say, “I don’t care what they believe, they are people, and they are my people, and you will not be allowed to do this anymore,” then the real truth is that on May 28, 2010, every Sunni Pakistani killed the Ahmadis.