| Extracted from a much longer article in Friday Times... |
Tanvir Qaiser Shahid quotes from American scholar Jessica Sternâs book Terror in the Name of God . Even as the government in Islamabad announces that the seminaries in the country are free of sectarianism and violence, Stern visits the seminary Jamia Manzurul Islam run by Pir Saifullah Saif (Sword of Allah) in the heart of Lahore. She was taken there by Mujibur Rehman Inqilabi who secretly belongs to the banned Sipah Sahaba vowed to the apostatisation and elimination of the Shia community in Pakistan. Inqilabi told her that his Sipah Sahaba organisation had penetrated the Deobandi organisations and Sipah speakers were frequently invited by the Deobandi seminaries to speak on the apostatisation of the Shia in the country. Inqilabi also boasted contacts with Jaish e-Muhammad and Harkatul Mujahideen and Al Qaeda. The seminary Manzurul Islam in Lahore turned out to be a large institution giving residence to 450 students apart from numberless âday scholarsâ. When Stern talked to the seminarians they clearly told her that the Shia were not Muslims but apostates.
Tanvir Qaiser Shahid interviewed the Shia leader Allama Sajid Naqvi of the all Pakistan Shia organisation now a part of the religious alliance, MMA. Naqvi was clear why the Shia leader of the Northern Areas, Allama Ziauddin Rizvi, was killed. He discounted the report that Rizvi was agitating against the government for its establishment of a military base in the Deosai plain. He asserted that Allama Rizvi was also not greatly agitated against the Aga Khan Support Programme. The real cause of his death was his struggle in favour of a separate syllabus for the Shia students. Rizvi was for including in the textbooks content that would confirm the Shia creed. He also set aside the government suspicion that a foreign agency had killed Allama Rizvi to set alight the fire of sectarianism in Pakistan.
Allama Sajid Naqvi, despite his membership in the Deobandi-dominated MMA, accused the state agencies of gestating and giving birth to sectarian terror. He referred to the 1988 massacre of the Shia community in the Northern Areas and a similar massacre of the Shia in the Kurram Agency in the tribal areas for which he held General Zia responsible. (Zia died the same year, killed in a plane crash which his son says was an act of sabotage.) Naqvi accused Zia of being a Deobandi at heart. He pointed out that he was actually related to the leader of Pakistanâs largest Deobandi seminary, Jamia Ashrafia. For the governmentâs part, it issued an advertisement on 17 April 2005 promising a reward of Rs 15 lakh for anyone who would help in the capture of the killers of Agha Ziauddin Rizvi.
The Crisis Group Report, The State of Sectarianism in Pakistan , says: âLike other sectarian minorities, those in the Northern Areas believe that political empowerment would enable them to contain Islamic extremism. Elections to even the largely ceremonial Northern Areas Legislative Council have exposed the limited support base of religious radicals. Says a lawyer in Gilgit, âJUI could not win any of the 24 seats, not even in Sunni-dominated areasâ. |
Britains MI5 has requested its counterpart in Pakistan to question Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, killer of American journalist Daniel Pearl, in connection with the abortive plot to blow up transatlantic flights bound for the United States. The British intelligence agency wants Omar Sheikh to be questioned because the London School of Economics graduate was the right hand man of Maulana Masood Azhar, founder of the Jaish-e-Mohammad.