[According to the Holy Qur’an, peace, amity and brotherhood among the
people are among the blessings of Allah, Correspondingly, the Divine wrath and
punishments take different forms, including civil strife and “violence of one another”. In the last
decade, Pakistan’s descent into chaos has been observed with deep anguish and profound
sadness by the Messenger of Allah of our times, Hadhrat Munir Ahmad Azim Sahib (atba) of Mauritius. Time and again, he has warned the Muslim country and its religious and
political leadership against the egregious violations of freedom of conscience,
of basic human rights and the norms of Islamic propriety and decency in the country. Recent
events from there confirm that country is in the grips of Divine wrath: the
deer prophecies and warnings made by the Divine Messenger have been proved to
be presciently true and correct.
For the benefit of our readers, we reproduce below an essay on the cult of militancy in Pakistan from
one of the leading writers from contemporary Pakistan, the Award-winning
novelist Mohsin Hamid who is the author of the novels 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' and the forthcoming 'How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia'.
The essay was originally written for, and published in, the New York Times.
India’s leading newspaper, The Hindu also carried it on February 24, 2013].
At the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration
of the militant
On Monday, my mother’s and
sister’s eye doctor was assassinated. He was a Shia. He was shot six times
while driving to drop his son off at school. His son, age 12, was executed with
a single shot to the head.
Tuesday, I attended a protest in
front of the Governor’s House in Lahore demanding that more be done to protect
Pakistan’s Shias from sectarian extremists. These extremists are responsible
for increasingly frequent attacks, including bombings this year that killed
more than 200 people, most of them Hazara Shias, in the city of Quetta.
As I stood in the anguished crowd
in Lahore, similar protests were being held throughout Pakistan. Roads were
shut. Demonstrators blocked access to airports. My father was trapped in one
for the evening, yet he said most of his fellow travellers bore the delay
without anger. They sympathised with the protesters’ objectives.