VIEW: With God as my witness —Maha Malik

In work places, at schools, colleges, amongst peers, it is best to stay silent about being Ahmedi. It is this that is and will always be significant: state law facilitates the dehumanisation of our people

“Man is a witness who testifies against himself, whatever excuse he may offer. That is, let every man test only himself and discern his spiritual state” (LXXV: 14 -15) — Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, Henri Corbin.

I intended to, but could not bring myself to go to either the Model Town prayer centre or the Ahmedi Dar-ul-Zikar at Garhi Shahu. I wanted to present in newsprint persons who would directly articulate the massacre that took place on May 28. I could not bring myself to do so, out of a fear that its reality would haunt me for life. I live now, like many others, with fear, and an innate horror of such violence.

It is necessary to retain the horror. A community of Ahmedi believers was massacred during Friday prayers, over now a week ago. Indiscriminately, AK-47 rifles, shotguns, grenades, suicide jackets and automatic weapons were used at those in prayer. Aged men, young boys. Many were shot at point blank range, while trying to escape the carnage.

The perpetrators of this heinous crime: Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). The militant Islamist group has impeccably strategised, as per its own sources, with sectarian groups in Punjab. We have seen the TTP attack police and paramilitary sites. On the other hand, we have seen sectarian violence against minority groups in Pakistan. We have seen such singular targets, as doctors, teachers, as well as those falsely accused of blasphemy. We have witnessed communal violence, over the last 30 years, Shia men fanatically killed during Friday prayers. The death toll is incontrovertible.

Today, the Ahmedi massacre exemplifies something new — a breed of long-festering alliances, now emergent. It demonstrates a new vitality of terror — in the growing ranks of this devastating militant ideology. We have ‘anti-state’ actors joined by sectarian groups. We have mercenaries left over from redundant regional wars; free-floating Central Asian arsenals; generations of jihadis, trained specifically on the Pakistani territory by invested state institutions. And we have firebrand religious groups, spreading their rhetoric of hate, in place of electoral power. This is a depth perspective.

The history of minority persecution, in pluralistic Pakistan, is the stuff of legends. By far a moderate people, we have seen many of our friends, our associates, even ourselves, change over the last 63 years. We live every day in a Pakistan with laws and ordinances that enforce religious definition and religious declaration on official documents. This system of punitive segregation is absolutely criminal.

Perhaps with greater nuance, punitive state action is legislated over semantic reasons. Is it a ‘place of worship’, or did the carnage of Ahmedi families take place at their ‘mosques’? Or, repeated ad nauseam, each time you sign for an ID card as a proud Muslim, or renew your passport, you reassert cultural violence. In work places, at schools, colleges, amongst peers, it is best to stay silent about being Ahmedi. It is this that is and will always be significant: state law facilitates the dehumanisation of our people.

This includes the dear ones of those killed; the ones made witness and made fearful for their own lives; the ones in this manner silenced; those indoctrinated from birth on a rhetoric of hate, financial and cultural poverty; the children who go out blindly to kill, strapped inside suicide jackets. In the May 28 massacre of Ahmedi Muslims, we are witness to absolute dehumanisation. That is the horror.

In this, it is not you who benefits. Nor I. No matter what our religious belief system may be. According to another kind of blasphemy, a strand of sufi thought, only a personal God will lead us, each one of us, towards the single, unknowable, Divine Faith. We have no other right.

Conclusively: if you are reading this post it means you are still alive. There is a chilling truth in this fact. Every effort is necessary, and the will, to change our nation’s acts of legislative and cultural violation.

Maha Malik is a freelance columnist based in Lahore. She can be reached at maha.q.malik@gmail.com