Outcasts - The Ahmadis of Pakistan

As I was growing up in Pakistan I never really thought of myself as a minority until the bitter reality hit me in the late 80s that everything I was, was wrong to someone. Even though I never did anything to that someone, I didn't even know that someone.

A generation that has grown belonging to my faith has known nothing but hatred from their fellow Pakistanis, Ahmadis living in big cities face discrimination as routinely as an ordinary Pakistani does load shedding. As if firing from jobs, shunning from businesses, students being rusticated and separation of water glasses were a birth right, every facet of society takes its share in discrimination, in dehumanising, in rampant disregard of common human decency. 

Someone told me how her family was evicted from the house they were renting because they were found out as an Ahmadi & the landlord although acknowledging the fact that they were model tenants had to do it. I noticed that when she was speaking whenever she used the word Ahmadi she would lower her voice, a habit that someone passing by the window wouldn't hear.

Such a pity that a country founded on the principal of rights of minorities (muslims were a minority in India) would be akin to an apartheid for Ahmadis and other minorities. Where parents would warn their children not to tell other children that they were Ahmadi, where school copy covers would have hate speech, where the buses would have hatred on the seats they sat on. Where the media would take interviews when 87 of your fellow Ahmadis get martyred but wont put them on Air

Where outsiders roam in the streets of your city (Rabwah) chanting death to you and your family whenever they wished and you were not even allowed to answer, your not even allowed to hold private gatherings special to your faith.

What a shame that a well established cardiologist comes to this country to give medicine for free and he is murdered in front of his family in cold blood. The lows this populous has gone to is unprecedented in current history, the moral decay in every fibre of every institution. The mob in Gujranwala suffocate a family, a mother and her little girl dies, an unborn dies, the mob waves them goodbye mockingly.

Then peshawar happens, APC is called because the fire has come to their own front door now. Where was the APC when 87 Ahmadis were murdered in Lahore when Hazara were sitting in freezing cold to demand justice, when a husband & wife were ruthlessly thrown into the blaze, and then you wonder why Pakistan is burning, why families are breaking, why Qaris are hanging 5 years olds.

Pakistan's dream lay shattered, a dream that never really materialised, instead of law, hatred rules, instead of education kids are given direct passes to heaven, those who preach, preach divisions, those who make mockery of islam are given prime time, those speak up, silenced.

I live in a country where the state has decided that it knows what is in my heart better than myself, where my belonging to a certain sect or religion is enough for anyone to chant slogans of death, where an upholder of law, someone who had taken an oath, murders a provincial governor, gets celebrated & showered with roses.

Still I love my Pakistan, this is the land my forefathers gave blood to create, my heart bleeds when I see what's being done to her. Although I am labelled a traitor, everything is a "Qadiani Sazish" (a conspiracy by Ahmadis). I keep on doing honest work, hardly any criminal cases against Ahamdis.

Even when tempers and emotions run high like the martyrdom of 87 of our brothers in Lahore, no retaliation, even when Ahmadis manage to catch a suicide bomber alive, they don't beat him to death, they don't burn him, they hand him over to the authorities, knowing that the authorities will take no action, this is the unprecedented character of a law abiding, peace loving community, still Ahmadis must be blamed, labels like traitors or agents of the west, blindness to the actions of the hatred spewing mullah in the mosque, blindness to the guns handed over in the Mudrasah to children, applauding of murderers, blindness to a generation consumed by hatred.

Minorities of Pakistan keep burying their martyrs, the majority keeps its silence, in essence putting a stamp of approval to every act of barbarity, to every atrocity, escalating in its severity, but this cycle of violence is about to reach its peak, and the death and destruction is at your own door steps now. 

Have you ever really looked at the faces of those who preach hatred, cant you see evil, the barbarity when they give sermons of hatred with froth coming out of their mouths creatures worse than any animal, the worst under the sky.

I write these words not because I want to get sympathy from anyone, cause I know I am addressing those whose humanity has died. I write this for those that will come after my time, I want them to know how their forefathers bared all with resilience and faith in Justice from the Almighty Allah.

اللهم مزقهم كل ممزق و سحقهم تسحيقا