Army Stops Anti Film Protestors from Breaking into Diplomatic Enclave

Protestors overturn container blockade
ISLAMABAD, Sept 20: The Army was called in on Thursday to prevent close to 3,000 angry protesters from entering the diplomatic enclave in Islamabad during a protest against the anti-Islam film.

The US Embassy is one kilometre away from the entrance of the diplomatic enclave and there are no barriers inside. According to Express News correspondent Qamarul Munawar, if the protesters, who are present at the gate of the enclave, manage to break through, then it will result in chaos.

He added that the Army was called in as the police shelling remained ineffective in controlling the protesters.

Express News correspondent Haider Naseem reported that the protesters coming from Rawalpindi to Islamabad headed back after the police hurled tear gas at them.

Around 50 protesters and 38 police officials were injured during the riots who were shifted to the Polyclinic hospital.

An ulema delegation met with the IG Police and chief commissioner and agreed on a deal. Maulana Zahoor Alvi confirmed that the arrested protesters were also released.

SSP Traffic Police Islamabad Dr Moeen Masood told Radio Pakistan that the red zone of Islamabad will remain closed on Friday for traffic.

He said that the normal traffic would ply between the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi as well as within Islamabad.

Dr Masood added that 274 Islamabad police personnel were deployed for controlling traffic and they would remain alert on Friday as well.

Mobile services will also remain suspended in Islamabad tomorrow (Friday) from 9am-11pm to avoid any untoward incident.

Islamabad’s heavily-guarded diplomatic enclave is home to most Western embassies, including the US, British and French missions.

Earlier during the protest, police fired live rounds and tear gas to break up a crowd of students, many armed with wooden clubs.

The crudely made Innocence of Muslims has triggered protests in at least 20 countries since excerpts were posted online, and more than 30 people have been killed in violence linked to the film.

There have been dozens of protests around Pakistan over the past week and at least two people have been killed, but Thursday is the first time protests in the capital have turned violent.

Police fired tear gas and live rounds as the protesters, chanting “We are ready to die to safeguard the Prophet’s (pbuh) honour,” tried to break through a barrier of truck containers set up to block access to the diplomatic enclave.

“I was ordered by my boss to disperse the crowd and that is why I had to open live fire but the aim was nearby trees and not the demonstrators,” Zaman Khan, a police officer deployed at the picket said.

The firing forced the protesters to scatter, but they returned later to pelt the police picket with stones.

Student Asif Mehmood demanded police let the protesters through to the US embassy and urged harsh treatment for American pastor Terry Jones, notorious for past Quran-burning episodes and who is reportedly connected to the film.

“Terry Jones and the filmmaker should be sternly punished for playing with the feelings of Muslims. We will not tolerate this blasphemy,” Mehmood said.

Fellow protester Rehan Ahmad said: “Islam is often ridiculed by America and the West and blasphemy is committed against our Prophet (pbuh) in the name of freedom of expression.”

 

French Magazine Sets off New Outrage among Muslims

Charlie Hebdo Firebombed last year (Credit: guardian.co.uk)

PARIS, Sept 19 — A French satirical magazine on Wednesday published a series of cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, setting off a new wave of outrage among Muslims and condemnation from French leaders amid widening unrest over an amateur video that has provoked violence throughout the Islamic world. The illustrations were met with a swift rebuke from the government of François Hollande, which had earlier urged the magazine, Charlie Hebdo, not to publish the cartoons, particularly in the current tense environment.

“In France, there is a principle of freedom of expression, which should not be undermined,” Laurent Fabius, the foreign minister, said in a French radio interview. “In the present context, given this absurd video that has been aired, strong emotions have been awakened in many Muslim countries. Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour oil on the fire?”

In the interview on France Info radio, Mr. Fabius announced that, as a precaution, France planned to close its embassies in 20 countries on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, which has become an occasion for many to express their anger although “no threats have been made against any institutions.” A Foreign Ministry spokesman said the closings would affect French consulates, cultural centers and schools as well.

In Egypt, representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood denounced the cartoons as blasphemous and hurtful, and called upon the French judiciary to condemn the magazine.

Mahmoud Ghozlan, a spokesman for the group, noted that French law prohibits Holocaust denial and suggested that similar provisions might be made for comments deemed blasphemous under Islam.

“If anyone doubts the Holocaust happened, they are imprisoned,” Mr. Ghozlan told Reuters. “It is not fair or logical” that the same not be the case for insults to Islam, he said.

Religious and political leaders in other majority Muslim nations also denounced the cartoons but called for calm. Tunisia’s governing Islamist party, Ennahda, warned believers against falling into a trap set by “suspicious parties to derail the Arab Spring and turn it into a conflict with the West,” Reuters reported.

Charlie Hebdo’s Web site was not functioning on Wednesday, the result of a computer attack, according to the editorial director, Stéphane Charbonnier. A Pakistani technology news outlet, ProPakistani, reported that a Pakistani hacker group claimed it had blocked the site because of its “blasphemous contents” about Muhammad. The violence provoked by the video disparaging the prophet began on Sept. 11 when a mob attacked the American Embassy in Cairo. The unrest quickly spread to Libya, where an attack on an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi claimed the lives of the American ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three staff members.

On Wednesday, police officers were dispatched to guard the offices of Charlie Hebdo in eastern Paris.

The magazine’s headquarters, not far from its present offices, were gutted by a firebomb in November after it published a spoof issue “guest edited” by Muhammad to salute the victory of an Islamist party in Tunisian elections. Mr. Charbonnier, the editorial director, has been under police protection since.

Neither he nor the publication had received threats as a result of the most recent issue of the magazine, he said.

Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said the government would prohibit a series of protests that had been planned in several French cities for Saturday — one week after a group of around 250 people staged a largely nonviolent protest of the American-made amateur film, “Innocence of Muslims,” outside the American Embassy here.

“There is no reason for us to let a conflict that doesn’t concern France come into our country,” Mr. Ayrault told RTL radio. “We are a republic that has no intention of being intimidated by anyone.”

Mr. Charbonnier contested that decision, which he called “shocking.”

“The government needs to be consistent,” he said. “Why should they prohibit these people from expressing themselves? We have the right to express ourselves, they have they right to express themselves, too.”

In a statement, the main body representing Muslims in France, the French Muslim Council, expressed its “deep concern” over the cartoons and warned that their publication risked “exacerbating tensions and provoking reactions.” The council urged French Muslims to express their grievances “via legal means.”

Mr. Charbonnier said the weekly published the cartoons in defense of freedom of the press, adding that the images “would shock only those who wanted to be shocked.”

Gérard Biard, the magazine’s editor in chief, said: “We’re a newspaper that respects French law. Now, if there’s a law that is different in Kabul or Riyadh, we’re not going to bother ourselves with respecting it.”

This week as every other week, Mr. Biard insisted, “We’ve simply commented on the news.” The caricatures are meant to satirize the video that has stirred violence across the Muslim world, he said, and to denounce that violence as absurd.

“What are we supposed to do when there’s news like this?” Mr. Biard asked. “Are we supposed to not do that news?”

Known for its sharply ironic and often vulgar tone, Charlie Hebdo has a reputation for being an equal-opportunity provocateur. In addition to episode in November, the magazine was criticized for a decision in 2006 to republish cartoons of Muhammad that first appeared in a Danish newspaper.

In an editorial on Wednesday, Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, defended the magazine’s right to publish what it pleases, within the limits of French law. But it called the most recent caricatures “in poor taste, or even appalling” and questioned the “sense of responsibility of their authors and editors.”

Mr. Charbonnier held firm.

“I’m sorry for the people who are shocked when they read Charlie Hedbo,” Mr. Charbonnier said. “But let them save 2.50 euros and not read it. That’s the only thing I have to say.

“They can’t hold us responsible for the closure of the embassies, they can’t hold us responsible for the violence and the deaths,” he said. “We’re not provoking anything.” Religious radicals can use “any pretext to start the fire,” he said.

Salman Rushdie – A Wanted Man in the Muslim World

Rushdie's Road to Notriety (Credit guardian.co.uk)

Valentine’s Day 1989 had nothing to do with love for Salman Rushdie. He “hadn’t been getting on with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins,” but that was nothing compared with the news from Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini made an announcement that plunged Rushdie into more than a decade of fear, sequestration and flight. “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world,” Khomeini said, “that the author of the ‘Satanic Verses’ book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.”

Not long after the proclamation of this fatwa, the British police who had been protecting Rushdie told him that he needed an alias, not only for receiving payments and writing checks without being identified but “for the benefit of his protectors,” who “needed to get used to it, to call him by it at all times, when they were with him and when they weren’t, so they didn’t accidentally let his real name slip . . . and blow his cover.” After some thought Rushdie “wrote down, side by side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name for the next eleven years”: Joseph Anton. These “were his godfathers now,” and “it was Conrad who gave him the motto to which he clung as if to a lifeline . . . ‘I must live until I die, mustn’t I?’ ”

Thus the title of this, Rushdie’s memoir of his entire life, but mainly of those more than 11 years of torment, years often made bearable by the friendship and love of others, yet years unceasingly under the threat of the dire unknown, while Rushdie was squirreled away in secret London hideaways and remote farmhouses. For anyone it would have been terrifying, but for this proud and passionately sociable man it was degrading as well:

“To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect. To be told to hide was a humiliation. Maybe, he thought, to live like this would be worse than death. In his novel ‘Shame’ he had written about the workings of Muslim ‘honor culture,’ at the poles of whose moral axis were honor and shame, very different from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that culture even though he was not religious, and had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride. To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed. Both shamed and ashamed.”

As that passage indicates, Rushdie has chosen to tell his story in the third person: to write not about Salman Rushdie but about Joseph Anton, the person who for more than a decade was himself yet not quite himself. It takes a few pages for the reader to get used to this, but it works: It eliminates the temptations of self-pitying bathos (temptations that surely must have been severe) and allows Rushdie to maintain a certain clinical distance from himself. He further intensifies this effect by abandoning, for the most part, the elaborate, fanciful, quasi-poetic style that characterizes most of his previous work (including “The Satanic Verses”) and to write, instead, in a plain prose that by its severity makes his ordeal all the more palpable.

Libya Attack Sparks Crisis

US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens (Credit: telegraph.co.uk)

The U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was killed when suspected Libyan religious extremists stormed the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi late Tuesday night, according to Libyan Deputy Prime Minister Mustafa Abushagour. Margaret Coker has the latest on The News Hub.

The killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, in one of the most brazen attacks on a U.S. diplomatic compound in a generation, sparked a security crisis in the North African country, elevated tensions across the Middle East and raised concerns about how well the U.S. can protect its diplomats abroad.

The U.S. responded to the assault by dispatching two Navy destroyers, dozens of Marines, federal investigators and intelligence assets to Libya to protect Americans and hunt the suspected religious extremists who carried out the attack late Tuesday. U.S. officials described the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens as complex and possibly premeditated.

The assault, along with a protest at the American embassy in Cairo, created a crisis atmosphere in Washington just as the presidential campaign is hitting its stretch run and fueled a harsh exchange between President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney.

Mr. Obama said the U.S. will work with the Libyan government to bring attackers to justice, but he and other officials didn’t rule out a unilateral U.S. strike. “Make no mistake, justice will be done,” the president said.

What’s the likely fallout from the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya as well as the storming of U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt? Eurasia Group Middle East and North Africa Analyst Hani Sabra discusses on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters.

The attack took place on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, a day when security officials are typically on heightened alert. American officials, who debriefed survivors, described a horrifying scene in the consulate where, amid thick smoke and gunfire, Mr. Stevens became separated from his security officer.

As the flames grew and attacks increased, personnel were forced to abandon the building without the ambassador. American officials retrieved his body when it was brought to the airport the next day by Libyans.

An Obama administration official declined to comment on the ambassador’s security measures but said a review conducted ahead of the anniversary found “no information and there were no threat streams to indicate that we were insufficiently postured.”

U.S. officials were still piecing together the day’s events, which followed protests at the U.S. embassy in Cairo over an anti-Islamic video. In contrast to the Cairo protest, which appeared to be spontaneous, U.S. officials said the attack in Benghazi late Tuesday night might have been planned by militants who used the protests as cover.

American intelligence agencies were poring over information that could help indicate what groups may have taken part. Officials said intelligence agencies are looking specifically at the pro-al Qaeda group Ansar al Shariah but cautioned they didn’t have solid evidence.

Nearly 24 hours after the start of the shooting, officials struggled to piece together details about what transpired through hours of chaos and terror inside the darkened consulate and a nearby annex. They warned that their preliminary version of events could change as more information became available.

Nearby, Benghazi residents described a harrowing scene of destructive mob violence. A Libyan doctor said he and several neighbors attempted to get the gang of about 200 armed men to leave as they marched toward the U.S. compound. “We told them to leave our homes alone and one [of the militants] replied, ‘The Americans are infidels and we are going to finish them,’ the doctor said. “Many of us then fled because the shooting started.”

Ali Ben Saud, the Libyan owner of the villa leased to the U.S. for the consulate, said the men arrived in the neighborhood around 8 p.m. local time, carrying weapons including rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles.

The handful of local security forces were overwhelmed. “We couldn’t stop them. They were multiplying, minute by minute. There were hundreds of them,” said Saleheddine al-Arghoubi, a neighborhood resident. “They didn’t come to talk. They came to fight.” The first shots were fired at around 10 p.m. local time, or 4 p.m. Eastern time, according to a preliminary U.S. account.

The attackers gained access to the compound and began firing into the main building, setting it afire. A senior administration official said three people were inside the compound at the time: Mr. Stevens; Sean Smith, a foreign service information-management officer; and a U.S. regional security officer.

As the three tried to leave the burning building, they became separated from each other in heavy smoke. The regional security officer, whose name hadn’t been disclosed by late Wednesday, made it outside, and then he and other security personnel rushed back into the burning building to try to rescue Mr. Stevens and Mr. Smith. They found Mr. Smith, already dead.

They were unable to find the ambassador before being forced to flee the building because of the heavy flames and continuing small-arms fire.

Around 10:45 p.m. local time, U.S. security personnel assigned to a nearby annex tried to regain control of the main building but came under heavy fire and returned to the annex. At around midnight, the mission annex came under fire. Two U.S. diplomats were killed during that attack and two others were wounded.

At around 2:30 a.m. local time, Libyan security forces regained control of the situation, according to the preliminary U.S. account. Mr. Obama was told Tuesday night that Mr. Stevens was unaccounted for.

According to Mr. Ben Saud, the landowner, Libyan security guards jumped into the compound and pulled Mr. Stevens from the burning building at around 1 a.m. local time. Libyans then drove him to Benghazi Central Hospital, where the staff there tried unsuccessfully to revive him. One Libyan doctor said the diplomat died of asphyxiation and that he tried for 90 minutes to revive him, according to the Associated Press

Obama administration officials said they didn’t know what condition the ambassador was in when he left the compound. “His body was later returned to U.S. personnel at the Benghazi airport,” an administration official said. A chartered aircraft evacuated U.S. personnel back to Tripoli, including the remains of those killed.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the attack should “shock the conscience” of people of all faiths, but wouldn’t alter U.S. policy in Libya. The “mission in Libya is noble and necessary…and will continue,” she said from Washington. The U.S. also announced increased security measures for all U.S. diplomatic facilities.

Libyan officials, many of whom led the rebel government based in Benghazi and worked with Mr. Stevens during that time, condemned the killings. The head of the new congress, Mohammed Magarief, apologized to the American public for the tragedy. By late Wednesday, no one had been arrested. Officials in Tripoli were scrambling to implement a response to what they admitted was a monumental security breach.

Egyptian protesters climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and replaced the flag with a black standard bearing an Islamic inscription, in protest of a film deemed offensive to the Prophet Muhammad. Matt Bradley has details on The News Hub.

The U.S. responded by sending two destroyers, the U.S.S. Laboon and the U.S.S. McFaul, to the Libyan coast to aid in any evacuations or humanitarian missions, said a U.S. official.

In addition, a U.S. Marine team was sent to supplement security at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, arriving there Wednesday. The unit is known as a Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team, or FAST team, and typically numbers 50 Marines.

Mr. Stevens is the first ambassador killed by hostile forces since 1979, when the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan was murdered in Kabul. Officials said intelligence agencies were now trying to determine if any threads of information may have been missed.

American intelligence agencies are poring over threat information that could help indicate what groups may have taken part in the attack.

Members of the Ansar al Shariah militant group gave an interview to the local television station from the hospital early Wednesday morning, praising the men who attacked the consulate, calling them “the top layer of Libyan society.” However, the members told Benghazi TV that their organization, a group of religious fighters who battled to help oust Moammar Gadhafi from power, didn’t plan the attack against the Americans.

Mr. Stevens, 52, who is usually based in the capital Tripoli, apparently was visiting Benghazi ahead of the planned opening of a U.S. cultural center there, said a Libyan official.

The attack on the U.S. consulate was the second this year. In June, suspected Islamic militants detonated an improvised explosive device at the same compound. A Libyan guard was injured, but no Americans were harmed. In the spring, the International Committee for the Red Cross offices in Benghazi were also targeted.

Washington has long been leery of the radical Islamic fringe in Libya. The largest number of foreign fighters in Iraq waging battles against U.S. soldiers were from two towns in eastern Libya, and U.S. drones have monitored those locations since the Libyan uprising last year.

—Siobhan Gorman, Devlin Barrett and Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.

 

A Superstar Televangelist in Pakistan Divides, Then Repents

Evangelist Aamir Liaquat Hussain (Credit: photos.aag.tv)

THE audience erupted as Aamir Liaquat Hussain, Pakistan’s premier televangelist, darted around the television studio, firing off questions about Islam. “How many gates are there to heaven?” he challenged.

Children leapt from their seats, their mothers yelled answers, fathers strained forward, all hoping to catch the eye of Mr. Hussain, who worked the crowd like a circus ringmaster — cajoling, teasing, rewarding.

“Show me the tongue of a snake!” he commanded a bearded man, as part of a question about symbolic serpents. The man obediently stuck out his tongue, prompting hoots of laughter.

To the victors, Mr. Hussain tossed prizes: mobile phones, tubs of cooking oil, chits for plots of land, shirts from his own clothing line. Then he vanished, briefly, only to return on a purring motorbike — also up for grabs.

When a shy-looking man answered Mr. Hussain’s theological teaser correctly, the preacher grabbed the man’s hand and thrust it high, in the manner of a prizefighter. The audience applauded.

“It’s the Islamic version of the ‘The Price is Right,’ ” said the studio manager, standing behind a camera.

Mr. Hussain, 41, is a broadcasting sensation in Pakistan. His marathon transmissions during the recent holy month of Ramadan — 11 hours a day, for 30 days straight — offered viewers a kaleidoscopic mix of prayer, preaching, game shows and cookery, and won record ratings for his channel, Geo Entertainment.

“This is not just a religious show; we want to entertain people through Islam,” Mr. Hussain said during a backstage interview, serving up a chicken dish he had prepared on the show. “And the people love it.”

Yet Mr. Hussain is also a deeply contentious figure, accused of using his television pulpit to promote hate speech and crackpot conspiracy theories. He once derided a video showing Taliban fighters flogging a young woman as an “international conspiracy.” He supported calls to kill the author Salman Rushdie.

Most controversially, in 2008 he hosted a show in which Muslim clerics declared that members of the Ahmadi community, a vulnerable religious minority, were “deserving of death.” Forty-eight hours later, two Ahmadi leaders, one of them an American citizen, had been shot dead in Punjab and Sindh Provinces.

Many media critics held Mr. Hussain partly responsible, and the show so appalled American diplomats that they urged the State Department to sever a lucrative contract with Geo, which they accused of “specifically targeting” Ahmadis, according to a November 2008 cable published by WikiLeaks.

Now, Mr. Hussain casts himself as a repentant sinner. In his first Ramadan broadcast, he declared that Ahmadis had an “equal right to freedom” and issued a broad apology for “anything I had said or done.” In interviews, prompted by his own management, he portrays himself as a torchbearer for progressive values.

“Islam is a religion of harmony, love and peace,” he said, as he waited to have his makeup refreshed. “But tolerance is the main thing.”

IN some ways, Mr. Hussain is emblematic of the cable television revolution that has shaped public discourse in Pakistan over the past decade. He was the face of Geo when the upstart, Urdu-language station began broadcasting from a five-star hotel in Karachi in 2002. Then he went political, winning a parliamentary seat in elections late that year. The station gave him a religious chat show, Aalim Online, which brought together Sunni and Shiite clerics. The show received a broad welcome in a society troubled by sectarian tensions; it also brought Mr. Hussain to the attention of the military leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who was reportedly touched by its content. In 2005, General Musharraf appointed him junior minister for religious affairs, a post he held for two years.

Mr. Hussain’s success, with his manic energy and quick-fire smile, is rooted in his folksy broadcasting style, described as charming by fans and oily by critics. By his own admission, he has little formal religious training, apart from a mail-order doctorate in Islamic studies he obtained from an online Spanish university in order to qualify for election in 2002.

“I have the experience of thousands of clerics; in my mind there are thousands of answers,” he said.

That pious image was dented in 2011 when embarrassing outtakes from his show, leaked on YouTube, showed him swearing like a sailor during the breaks and making crude jokes with chuckling clerics. “It was my lighter side,” Mr. Hussain said. (Previously, he had claimed the tapes were doctored.)

But that episode did little to hurt his appeal to the middle-class Pakistanis who form his core audience. “Aamir Liaquat is a warm, honest and soft-natured person,” said Shahida Rao, a veiled Karachi resident, as she entered a recent broadcast, accompanied by her 6-year-old grandson. “We like him a lot.”

Senior colleagues at Geo are less enthusiastic. After an accumulation of controversies, including the Ahmadi show and on-air criticism of sex education material in school textbooks, he left the station in 2010. But Geo struggled to find a replacement and last June brought him back, causing consternation among senior anchors and managers, several of whom threatened to resign, senior executives said.

“It created a lot of noise,” said one, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Many of us wanted to know what he was coming back as.”

The answers were provided by the network’s chief executive, Mir Ibrahim Rahman, a 34-year-old Harvard graduate who argues that Pakistan needs people like Mr. Hussain, who hold water with Islamic conservatives, to incrementally change society.

“We are still recovering from the Zia years; we can’t move too fast,” Mr. Rahman said, referring to the excesses of the Islamist dictator Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s. “We need people like him to ease us down the mountain.”

To placate internal critics, Geo has just published a code of conduct for its journalists. “We’ve taken stock of the excesses that have been committed,” said the channel’s president, Imran Aslam, referring to a variety of controversies involving the station. “It’s an important start.”

But commercial imperatives also loom large, and in that arena, Mr. Hussain’s value is unquestioned.

COMPETITION for ratings at Ramadan is fierce among Pakistan’s television stations, and this year the race had a feverish feel. One station hired Veena Malik, a racy actress better known for posing seminude for an Indian magazine, to present its religious programs. One of her shows featured a live exorcism of a supernatural spirit that, conveniently enough, had called the station by telephone. Another station broadcast the conversion of a Hindu boy to Islam, drawing wide criticism.

By contrast, Mr. Hussain’s show seemed a model of restraint, though the set’s extravagance may have suggested otherwise.

The centerpiece was a giant boat that represented Noah’s Ark, but closely resembled a craft from the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie franchise. Live animals wandered the set, including flamingos, peacocks and deer. Studio guests included Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program, and Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-conservative politician. Ratings peaked on Aug. 12 when the studio moved to a cavernous exhibition hall that held 30,000 people — the largest studio audience in Pakistan’s history, executives said.

Mr. Hussain, unsurprisingly, has become rich.

Although his salary is a closely guarded secret, Geo sources said top names can earn $30,000 a month — income that, in Mr. Hussain’s case, is increased by lucrative product sponsorship deals, his clothing line and by leading religious pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia.

He keeps tight security, including bodyguards and an armored vehicle, since his acrimonious departure from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, a political party at the center of Karachi’s often violent power struggles, in 2008. A senior party official said Mr. Hussain had “nothing to fear” from the party.

Mr. Hussain hopes to shrug controversy off in his latest incarnation. “Even the liberals will love me,” he said, a touch optimistically. He has even developed a soft spot for the United States, the bête noir of Pakistani conservatives. After a family vacation in New York last year, he returned with a honey sauce that he uses during his cooking broadcasts.

“I call it my Manhattan sauce,” he said.

 

Muslims from abroad are thriving in Catholic Colleges

Muslim women in Catholic Colleges (Credit: alamana.net)

Ohio, Sept 2 — Arriving from Kuwait to attend college here, Mai Alhamad wondered how Americans would receive a Muslim, especially one whose head scarf broadcasts her religious identity.

At any of the countless secular universities she might have chosen, religion — at least in theory — would be beside the point. But she picked one that would seem to underline her status as a member of a religious minority. She enrolled at the University of Dayton, a Roman Catholic school, and she says it suits her well.

“Here, people are more religious, even if they’re not Muslim, and I am comfortable with that,” said Ms. Alhamad, an undergraduate in civil engineering, as several other Muslim women gathered in the student center nodded in agreement. “I’m more comfortable talking to a Christian than an atheist.”

A decade ago, the University of Dayton, with 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students, had just 12 from predominantly Muslim countries, all of them men, said Amy Anderson, the director of the school’s Center for International Programs. Last year, she said, there were 78, and about one-third of them were women.

The flow of students from the Muslim world into American colleges and universities has grown sharply in recent years, and women, though still far outnumbered by men, account for a rising share.

No definitive figures are available, but interviews with students and administrators at several Catholic institutions indicate an even faster rate of growth there, with the Muslim student population generally doubling over the past decade, and the number of Muslim women tripling or more.

At those schools, Muslim students, from the United States or abroad, say they prefer a place where talk of religious beliefs and adherence to a religious code are accepted and even encouraged, socially and academically. Correctly or not, many of them say they believe that they are more accepted than they would be at secular schools.

“I like the fact that there’s faith, even if it’s not my faith, and I feel my faith is respected,” said Maha Haroon, a pre-med undergraduate at Creighton University in Omaha, who was born in Pakistan and grew up in the United States. “I don’t have to leave my faith at home when I come to school.”

She and her twin sister, Zoha, said they chose Creighton based in part on features rooted in its religious identity, like community service requirements and theology classes that shed light on how different faiths approach ethical issues.

Many Muslim students, particularly women, say they based their college choices partly on the idea that Catholic schools would be less permissive than others in the United States, though the behavior they say they witness later can call that into question.

They like the prevalence of single-sex floors in dorms, and even single-sex dorms at some schools. “I thought it would be a better fit for me, more traditional, a little more conservative,” said Shameela Idrees, a Pakistani undergraduate in business at Marymount University in Arlington, Va., who at first lived in an all-women dorm.

Some of the women land at Catholic schools more or less accidentally — some are married and simply enroll where their husbands are going, while others are steered toward particular schools by their home countries’ governments.

But for others it is a conscious choice, based on recommendations from friends or relatives, or impressions gained from growing up in places, like Lebanon, with strong traditions of church schools.

Most of the schools say they do not specifically recruit Muslim students.

“There’s no conscious effort,” said the Rev. Kail Ellis, a priest and vice president for academic affairs at Villanova University, near Philadelphia. “It’s basically something that happened through word of mouth and reputation.”

Muslim students here cite the accommodations Dayton has made, like setting aside spaces for them to pray — a small room for daily use, and two larger ones for Fridays — and installing an ablution room for the traditional preprayer washing of hands and feet.

The university also helps students arrange celebrations of major religious holidays, and it contracts with a halal meat supplier for special events.

Manal Alsharekh, a Saudi Arabian graduate student in engineering at Dayton, said, “I was in another university before that did not respect us so much.”

Even so, the adjustment to an American school can be jarring, especially for women. They are a minority even within the minority of Muslim students. Many of them follow restrictions on interaction with nonrelatives, and the head coverings most of them wear make it impossible to blend in.

The degree of culture shock students experience varies as widely as the traditions they grew up in. Some eat the nonhalal meat served daily in school cafeterias, some eat it only after saying a blessing over it and others do not eat it at all.

In a gathering of foreign-born Muslim women here, traditional attire varied widely, from Ayse Cayli, a graduate student from Turkey who does not cover her head and wore shorts and a T-shirt, to Mrs. Alsharekh, who while in public wears a floor-length cloak over her clothes and a veil across most of her face. Most wear a hijab, or head covering, and stylish but fairly conservative Western clothes extending to the ankles and wrists, even in warm weather.

The prospect of walking into an identifiably Christian institution, often for the first time in their lives, can be intimidating.

“I was afraid they will not like me because I am Muslim, or they will want me to go to church,” said Falah Nasser Garoot, a male Saudi graduate student in business at Xavier University in Cincinnati. “At first, when I saw the crosses on the classroom walls, it was very strange for me.”

Fatema Albalooshi, a graduate student from Bahrain who is studying engineering at Dayton, said that when she first looked into the school, “I thought it was going to be compulsory to take Catholic courses.”

And for the women, especially, identifiable by their head scarves, there are always questions. “People stop and ask me questions, total strangers, about my head covering, they’re curious about how I dress,” said Hadil Issa, an undergraduate here who grew up in the Palestinian territories and the United States. The more covering they wear, the more women are asked if they get hot in the summer. Muslims are consulted on etiquette by students planning to visit the Middle East. And often, they are asked why they attend a Catholic school.

“I tell people the atmosphere is very warm and supportive,” Ms. Issa said. “I feel accepted here, and that’s what matters.”

 

‘Hate Content Grows in Pakistan’s text books’ – Study

Lahore, Aug 31: Hate content in textbooks used in the Punjab has increased from ‘45 lines in 2009 to 122 in 2012’, a content analysis report published by the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) said on Thursday. The report titled Education or Promotion of Hatred was distributed at a conference, Biases in Textbooks and Education Policy, organised by the NCJP on Thursday.

The study examined 22 textbooks for the academic year 2012-13 in the Punjab and Sindh from classes 1 to 10.

The report says that one of the 30 chapters in the general knowledge textbooks for class 1 has content advocating intolerance. It says there has been a ‘marked increase’ in hate content in the curricula of classes 7 to 10.

In 2009-2011, it says, 12 chapters in various textbooks at these levels contained hate material. The number of such chapters has increased to 33.

As many as seven lessons with hate content are part of the 8th class Urdu curriculum for 2012-2013, compared to none in 2009, it says. It also says said that the number of such lessons in the Pakistan studies textbooks for classes 9 and 10 had increased to three in 2012 from none in 2009. It says that hate lessons that were part of the class 6 social studies and class 7 Islamiat books in 2009 had been excluded from the 2012 curricula.

Speaking at the launch Dr Mehdi Hasan, the School of Media and Communication dean at the Beaconhouse National University, said Muslims posed a greater danger to their fellow Muslims then to non Muslims in Pakistan.

He said, seminaries, where less than 4 per cent of the Pakistani children studied in Pakistan, did not pose a greater threat than schools, where hate material was being taught to students as young as to be in class 1.

He said, “Teaching students that a certain religion teaches ‘bad things’ is not just a violation of human rights but also a severe ethical violation.”

Dr Hasan said that a religious state was not a democratic state. He said that Pakistan had been established through a democratic process.

Wajahat Masood, an assistant professor at BNU, said future generations will likely judge the present as ‘sub-human and insensitive’.

He said hate content and distortion of history was evident in curricula as well as in Pakistani literature. Masood said that sectarian and religious discrimination should be recognised as ‘vulgar’ and discouraged.

Irfan Mufti, deputy director at the South Asia Partnership Pakistan, said that hate content in school syllabi spoke volume of an intolerant society.

“Hate content will turn our children into intolerant individuals,” he warned.

Dr Baela Raza Jamil, director of programmes at the Idara-i-Taleem-O-Aagahi highlighted the Compulsory Education Act that was passed recently by the Senate for Islamabad. She said the Act had failed to mention religion as a reason for which no discrimination would be allowed in provision of education.

‘She said after the devolution of powers to the provinces, each province was responsible for regulating its curricula.

Dr AH Nayyar, visiting professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, regretted that many such reports had been issued previously, but the matters had become worse instead of improving.

NCJP Executive Director Peter Jacob regretted that textbooks were being used to promote hatred in the country.

“Religious discrimination cannot be eliminated unless people working for it are demotivated,” he said.

 

Pakistan shuns physicist linked to ‘God particle’

Dr Abdus Salam (Credit: blogstribune.com)
ISLAMABAD — The pioneering work of Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, helped lead to the apparent discovery of the subatomic “God particle” last week. But the late physicist is no hero at home, where his name has been stricken from school textbooks.

Praise within Pakistan for Salam, who also guided the early stages of the country’s nuclear program, faded decades ago as Muslim fundamentalists gained power. He belonged to the Ahmadi sect, which has been persecuted by the government and targeted by Taliban militants who view its members as heretics.

Their plight — along with that of Pakistan’s other religious minorities, such as Shiite Muslims, Christians and Hindus — has deepened in recent years as hardline interpretations of Islam have gained ground and militants have stepped up attacks against groups they oppose. Most Pakistanis are Sunni Muslims.

Salam, a child prodigy born in 1926 in what was to become Pakistan after the partition of British-controlled India, won more than a dozen international prizes and honors. In 1979, he was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for his work on the so-called Standard Model of particle physics, which theorizes how fundamental forces govern the overall dynamics of the universe. He died in 1996.

Salam and Steven Weinberg, with whom he shared the Nobel Prize, independently predicted the existence of a subatomic particle now called the Higgs boson, named after a British physicist who theorized that it endowed other particles with mass, said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani physicist who once worked with Salam. It is also known as the “God particle” because its existence is vitally important toward understanding the early evolution of the universe.

Physicists in Switzerland stoked worldwide excitement Wednesday when they announced they have all but proven the particle’s existence. This was done using the world’s largest atom smasher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, near Geneva.

“This would be a great vindication of Salam’s work and the Standard Model as a whole,” said Khurshid Hasanain, chairman of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Salam wielded significant influence in Pakistan as the chief scientific adviser to the president, helping to set up the country’s space agency and institute for nuclear science and technology. Salam also assisted in the early stages of Pakistan’s effort to build a nuclear bomb, which it eventually tested in 1998.

Salam’s life, along with the fate of the 3 million other Ahmadis in Pakistan, drastically changed in 1974 when parliament amended the constitution to declare that members of the sect were not considered Muslims under Pakistani law.

Ahmadis believe their spiritual leader, Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who died in 1908, was a prophet of God — a position rejected by the government in response to a mass movement led by Pakistan’s major Islamic parties. Islam considers Muhammad the last prophet and those who subsequently declared themselves prophets as heretics.

All Pakistani passport applicants must sign a section saying the Ahmadi faith’s founder was an “impostor” and his followers are “non-Muslims.” Ahmadis are prevented by law in Pakistan from “posing as Muslims,” declaring their faith publicly, calling their places of worship mosques or performing the Muslim call to prayer. They can be punished with prison and even death.

Salam resigned from his government post in protest following the 1974 constitutional amendment and eventually moved to Europe to pursue his work. In Italy, he created a center for theoretical physics to help physicists from the developing world.

Although Pakistan’s then-president, Gen. Zia ul-Haq, presented Salam with Pakistan’s highest civilian honor after he won the Nobel Prize, the general response in the country was muted. The physicist was celebrated more enthusiastically by other nations, including Pakistan’s archenemy, India.

Despite his achievements, Salam’s name appears in few textbooks and is rarely mentioned by Pakistani leaders or the media. By contrast, fellow Pakistani physicist A.Q. Khan, who played a key role in developing the country’s nuclear bomb and later confessed to spreading nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is considered a national hero. Khan is a Muslim.

Officials at Quaid-i-Azam University had to cancel plans for Salam to lecture about his Nobel-winning theory when Islamist student activists threatened to break the physicist’s legs, said his colleague Hoodbhoy.

“The way he has been treated is such a tragedy,” said Hoodbhoy. “He went from someone who was revered in Pakistan, a national celebrity, to someone who could not set foot in Pakistan. If he came, he would be insulted and could be hurt or even killed.”

The president who honored Salam would later go on to intensify persecution of Ahmadis, for whom life in Pakistan has grown even more precarious. Taliban militants attacked two mosques packed with Ahmadis in Lahore in 2010, killing at least 80 people.

“Many Ahmadis have received letters from fundamentalists since the 2010 attacks threatening to target them again, and the government isn’t doing anything,” said Qamar Suleiman, a spokesman for the Ahmadi community.

For Salam, not even death saved him from being targeted.

Hoodbhoy said his body was returned to Pakistan in 1996 after he died in Oxford, England, and was buried under a gravestone that read “First Muslim Nobel Laureate.” A local magistrate ordered that the word “Muslim” be erased.

Ex MNA from Kohistan Threatens Working Women

Maulvi Abdul Haleem (Credit: elections.com.pk)

MANSEHRA, May 5: Former Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal MNA from Kohistan Maulvi Abdul Haleem on Saturday warned women working in non-governmental organisations against entering his district and said violators of the warning would be forcibly married off to locals.

“I issued a decree during Friday sermon that getting education for degrees by women is repugnant to Islamic injunctions because if a woman gets degree, she may use it for job, an act which Islam doesn’t allow in absence of mehram (close relatives),” he told reporters here.

Mr Haleem said: “If women working in NGOs enter Kohistan, we won’t spare them and solemnise their nikkah (marriage) with local men.”

Maulana Haleem, who remained MNA during the Musharraf regime, said if a woman got education and used it for job, then it was against the teachings of Islam.

“That’s why girls are not going to schools in Kohistan and girl schools are used as cattle pen,” he said.

The ex-MNA, who was once a mufti at Darul Uloom Haqqania, Akora Khattak, and also taught top clerics Maulana Samiul Haq, Maulana Anwarul Haq, Maulana Nizamuddin Shamazai, said he was not opposed to NGOs and would ensure complete protection of their male staffers in Kohistan.

He said if NGOs wanted to work for women’s development, they should spend money for the purpose through government departments.

“We won’t let them (NGOs) influence our women in the name of empowerment and financial support through women workers of NGOs,” said the ex-MNA, who remained the district chairman in Kohistan during the General Ziaul Haq regime.

He said he issued a decree in the past in favour of poppy cultivation and trade and continued to believe so.

“I also rose up against the unjustified slaughtering of animals by Jehanzeb Khan, the ruler of the formerly Swat state, at his birthday. Kohistan was part of the state of Swat at that time. Even he (ruler) put me behind the bars but I didn’t withdraw the decree,” he said.

The ex-MNA said killing of women in the name of honour was a ‘local custom and religious practice’ in Kohistan.

He said if someone witnessed female members of his family roaming with ghair mehram (other than close relatives), he could kill her without producing four witnesses,” he said.

Meanwhile, a man was killed and his father and two brothers critically wounded on Saturday when their rival tribesmen attacked their house in Palis area.

A dispute over the ownership of a water reservoir was blamed for the Narng Shahkhail attack on Badakhail tribesmen.

The dead included Azizur Rehman, while the injured were his father, Mohammad Asghar, and his brothers, Mohammad Essa and Abdul Quddos, whose condition was stated be critical at a local hospital.

The Palis police lodged an FIR and began investigation. Last year, four people were killed and three injured when Badakhail and Narng Shah-khail tribes exchanged heavy fire over the same dispute.

 

What Choices for Hindu Girls in Pakistan?

Rinkel Kumari or Faryal Shah? (Credit: Pravasitoday)

On April 18, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry ruled that the three Hindu women who had been converted to Islam, Rinkel Kumari, Dr Lata Kumari and Aasha Kumari, should decide if they want to return to their parents or stay with their new husbands. All three stated that they had willingly converted to Islam and wanted to live with their husbands.

However, there are still concerns about the climate of intimidation in which these cases were carried out and both Rinkel and Dr Lata had previously made contradictory statements in court about their conversions. Often in such cases the Hindu parents and lawmakers receive death threats and therefore raises the question if these decisions by the three women were made under duress.

Imagine your name is Bharti. You are a 15-year-old Hindu girl who lives in a small apartment in Lyari. Your father is a driver and social worker who raises money for others while struggling to pay your family’s medical bills. You have three older brothers, who are busy with their own jobs and families. Your future seems bleak.

Imagine you then meet Abid. He is the son of a police constable and promises to marry you. He promises you many things – but on the condition that you convert to Islam. You agree and run away with him. His family teaches you the Kalima and gives you a niqab to wear. After a few days, they take you to a maulvi. While the nikah form is being filled, you already know what you have to say. You tell the maulvi that you are 18-years-old and your name is now Ayesha.

Imagine that a few months pass. You are still living with Abid and his family. Your father lost the court case after a medical report was produced that stated that you are 18. You couldn’t look your mother in the eye when she came to court. You haven’t once been able to visit your home since you ran away. Your in-laws still haven’t given you a cell phone but sometimes you are able to borrow a phone and briefly talk to your brothers. When you speak to them, you can’t help but cry.

Be it the mean streets of Lyari or the dusty villages of interior Sindh, stories such as these are becoming increasingly common in Pakistan. In the last four months alone there have been at least 47 reported cases of alleged forced conversions of young girls from minority communities. But none of these cases have quite captured the fascination of the public as that of Rinkel Kumari.

Nineteen-year-old Rinkel disappeared from her home in Mirpur Mathelo, a village in the Ghotki district of Sindh, on February 24. The answer to what happened to her varies significantly, depending on whom you speak to. According to her father Nand Lal, a government schoolteacher, Rinkel woke up somewhere between four and five in the morning to go to the bathroom when she was drugged and kidnapped by armed men. She regained consciousness at around nine in the morning to find herself in Barchundi Sharif in Daharaki – a stronghold of PPP MNA Mian Abdul Haq, also known as Mian Mitho, who is the spiritual leader of the shrine where conversions regularly take place. Just hours after her arrival in Barchundi Sharif, Rinkel was forcibly converted to Islam, married off to one of the kidnappers, Naveed Shah, and subsequently renamed Faryal.

Mian Mohammed Aslam, the son of Mian Mitho, provides a different version of events. He stated on an evening news show that Rinkel showed up with Naveed Shah at his doorstep, expressing her wish to convert to Islam and get married. Aslam added that he contacted Rinkel’s parents to let them know his daughter was with him and even invited them to come visit her before she converted, but they never showed up.

And to add to the confusion, there is a third account of events according to which Rinkel was indeed in love with Naveed and went to meet him on the morning of February 24, but did not know that he would be waiting with other men, ready to kidnap her.

In response to the latter accounts, Rinkel’s family has stated that they did not want to meet their daughter at Mian Mohammad Aslam’s residence because they were concerned that they would not be able to talk freely in the presence of the MNA’s son. And her parents have denied suggestions that Rinkel knew Naveed, stating that since there is no phone in their house and Rinkel does not own a cellphone, there was no way for them to have contacted each other.

But be it Rinkel, Bharti or any other girl, the problem at the heart of all these cases is that nobody knows what actually happened to the victims. Some of the girls, including Rinkel, have made somewhat contradictory statements, initially saying that they willingly converted to Islam and later crying that they want to return to their parents. And in all known cases, the accused have fiercely guarded the girls from meeting their families. This raises several questions: Were the girls’ statements made under duress? Should non-Muslim parents be allowed to meet their now Muslim daughters? Does tempting a young girl with false promises count as coercion? Are these forced conversions and marriages essentially cases of rape and sexual harassment committed in the guise of Islam?

Advocate Iqbal Haider believes the answer to all these questions is an unequivocal yes, and he does not hide his disgust towards Mian Mitho and others involved in such conversions: “Mian Mitho is exploiting his status as an MNA and has been indulging in the most objectionable activities.” PPP MNA Mian Mitho

Haider has fought many cases of forced conversions and described the kind of problems that commonly arise in such cases. “No police officer would dare defy the orders of an MNA. The police is not independent,” stated Haider, adding, “I recently saw it in court when two police officers led the girl into the courtroom and her alleged husband was glued to her.”

The police was apparently unconcerned that the man was yet to be proven as the husband and that he was imposing his presence on the girl. It was only when Haider shouted at the police that they separated the two. The families are often not allowed anywhere near their daughters and Rinkel’s parents and their supporters have received public death threats from Mian Mitho and his abettors.

It was against this climate of intimidation that the court decided to move Rinkel and Dr Lata, a 29-year-old who also converted and got married in February, to Islamabad. Haider will not be representing any of the cases in the Supreme Court but he believes it was the right decision to move the girls to more neutral territory. “Keep the girls in Islamabad in a protected area but you can’t keep them there forever. I hope the court holds judicial inquiries into each and every case.”

Haider emphasised the importance of cross-examining all the witnesses since the girls’ statements are often made under duress. And he also pointed out the importance of having a liberal judge since, in his words, “There are bigots everywhere.”

Rinkel and Lata had their court hearing in Islamabad on March 26. Rinkel was barely able to speak and it took her two minutes to answer whether she studied science or arts in school. Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudry instructed everybody to leave the court so that he could talk to the girls privately. The girls were then allowed to briefly meet their parents before being sent to Darul-Aman for two weeks, according to the court’s orders.

In a phone conversation the day after the ruling, Rinkel’s father, Nand Lal, revealed that in the few minutes the family spent with Rinkel, she cried non-stop and said that she wanted to return home with them. She also told them that Mian Mitho’s men had threatened her to not make a statement in favour of her family. While her father hopes that Darul-Aman will provide a safe environment for his daughter, the family does fear that Mian Mitho’s men will be able to reach her there as well. If Rinkel is happily married, as Mian Mitho and his followers like to claim, then why do they feel the need to resort to these intimidatory tactics?

PPP MNA Nafisa Shah, who has publicly condemned the forced conversions, believes this environment of intimidation is the main source of the problem. “Coercion does not just mean using brute force,” she said, “We have an extremely claustrophobic environment in which there is space for only one religion.” And it is this claustrophobic environment that limits opportunities for minority communities in the country and makes the offer to convert and get married all the more alluring to young, vulnerable women. Nafisa Shah also pointed out that Hindus are rarely involved in serious crimes in Pakistan, but because they don’t have arms, they become all the more vulnerable to outside threats.

Nafisa Shah did not want to specifically talk about Mian Mitho, but she made it clear that these forced conversions go against the ideology of the PPP and points out that people like Shahbaz Bhatti and Salmaan Taseer lost their lives as a result of speaking up against prejudicial laws. Shah emphasised that the space for dialogue and multi-faith expression is shrinking and attributes Talibanisation as the source of this problem. She also added that conversions are not an issue, but the fact that in Pakistan it is a one-way street of only minorities converting to Islam that causes concern.

According to Bharti’s nikahnama she is 18-years-old.

Abdul Hai, assistant coordinator at the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, agrees that there is nothing wrong with converting, even if it is for the sole purpose of getting married. “The real problem is where is the girl going?” he adds “Maulvis will say in court that the girl’s parents are kafirs and that she can no longer meet them. How can you forcibly cut the girl off from her parents?”

Senior journalist and human rights activist, Akhtar Baloch reiterates the points made by both Shah and Hai: “You cannot stop adults from converting or getting married. But why is it only the Hindus who are converting to Islam? And that too girls? Why don’t we have men converting to Islam or Muslims converting to other religions?”

Baloch is also concerned that the cases being highlighted in the media are of those who are financially more secure and he fears that there are countless more cases that go ignored.

One such case is that of Bharti. On December 2011, Narain Das found his daughter was missing from home and filed an FIR at the Baghdadi thana only to soon discover that his daughter had run off with Abid, the son of Anwar Kalia who is a constable at Preedy police station.

This is not the first time one of Das’s children ran off to convert to Islam. Around 12 years ago, Das’s employers, car dealers, lured his oldest son Lakshman, who was at the time barely a teenager, to convert to Islam. The men, who Das drove cars for, would send the young boy to fetch alcohol and when Das scolded him, they suggested that he convert so that he would no longer have to live by his parent’s rules. Das and his wife would try to visit Lakshman but each time he would run away. When Das finally got a hold of his son, Lakshman said that he ran away because he was told that if he met his non-Muslim parents they would all become wajib-ul-qatl. Das had enough knowledge of Islam to know this was untrue but as a cautionary measure got a fatwa from a neighbourhood maulvi. When Lakshman was nearly 18, Das proposed to his son’s converters that they should get his son married and help him get started in life. The next day, Das was called to take his son back home.

“I bet nobody in all of Pakistan has done what I did next to my son,” said Das. He went on to relate how he got his son a job with a Muslim butcher and when a Hindu girl fell in love with his son, he told her parents that she would have to convert to Islam since his son is a Muslim.

“I have a Muslim son. I have Muslim grandchildren. And I am the Hindu dada of those children,” Narain said, stating that he has no issue with his daughter converting to Islam. What offends him is that his daughter was lured to run away and that Kalia’s family is preventing them from contacting each other.

Also, Das has NADRA documents stating that Bharti is 15 but the police got a medical report alleging that she is 18, over which Das lost the court case.

Das was visibly furious when I met him. “If these NADRA documents hold no meaning, then close down all their offices in the country. And how can Bharti suddenly be older than her brother Sunny? Next they’ll come and say she’s older than her parents.”

The family has received death threats for pursuing this case and Das added, “The biggest mistake I made was hiring Amarnath Motumal as my lawyer. Not because Amarnath is a bad person, but because he is a Hindu and the other side clearly threatened him.”

Motumal, who is also the vice-chairman of HRCP, confirmed that Bharti is indeed only 15 but the case is now unfortunately closed and he hopes public outcry might lead to a new, fairer trial.

Das revealed how Anwar Kalia had the police on his side. The DIG Sindh ruled that Bharti should be taken to a women’s thana and that Anwar Kalia’s family would not be allowed to visit her there. However, these orders were ignored and Kalia’s family would go take meals to Bharti everyday. He also describes Bharti’s alleged husband (Das and his family do not recognise the marriage since Bharti was under coercion) as a good-for-nothing drunkard and drug addict. Her brothers tell me I can ask anyone in the neighbourhood about Abid’s reputation.

Occasionally her brothers were able to speak to her on the phone and they said she would always cry and say she made a mistake. In trying to get in touch with Bharti, I spoke to Abid’s uncle who firmly advised me to move on and not bother them, saying “Bharti is happily married so there is no point in talking to her.”

He admitted that they medically proved her age but did not want to disclose the name of the hospital or doctor they went to. And the maulvi who presided over the nikah ceremony, Mohammed Abbasi, was of little help as well. When asked how he confirmed Bharti, or rather Ayesha’s age, when she had no form of identification on her, he said, “She said so. And you can tell by looking if someone is 15 or 18.”

He also shamelessly told me how Narain Das spoke to him on the phone for an hour, begging for help, but he did nothing. “I have given my statement to the police and the girl married willingly.” It also does not concern him that the witnesses were only from the boy’s side even though in Islam, witnesses from the bride’s side are required.

“If they didn’t accept me as a witness because I’m Hindu, then why didn’t they take my Muslim son as a witness?” Das asks. “And why is it that Dr Lata who is 29 is taken to a women’s shelter, but my 15-year-old daughter is sent away with the accused? Why should I be dealt a different judgement because I am poor?”

Had Rinkel’s family not been able to find the right contacts, had Mian Mitho not been involved, had the Pakistan Hindu Council not decided to take up the issue, her case too perhaps would have been left ignored.

New cases of forced abductions are emerging every month. But Nafisa Shah is sceptical about giving exact figures because nobody is able to find out for certain if the girl in question converted willingly or not. How can one know when soon after the conversion, the girls are married off and cut off from the public? Even in the rare case in which a girl speaks up, there is fear of persecution. According to Seema Rana, a member of the Hindu community who is doing research on these conversions, a girl from Lyari was asked to take an oath on the Quran in court. She refused, saying that she cannot take the oath since she is a Hindu and was forcibly converted. The girl was returned to her parents, but her family feared the accused might take revenge and immediately got her married. Even though the girl is willing to talk about her experiences, her family is too afraid to give her name to the media.

Without access to the girls themselves, we can only imagine what truly happened to them.

The Lost Girls

These young girls – long forgotten by all but their families – were allegedly kidnapped from their homes and forced to convert to Islam.

In December 2009, 13-year-old Radha Ram’s parents reported that she was kidnapped from their home in Rahim Yar Khan. She was kept in a madrassa and Abdul Jabbar, the leader of the madrassa, prevented the Hindu family members from meeting her since she was now Muslim.

Four men kidnapped 13-year-old Mashu from Jhaluree, a village near Mirpur Khas, on December 22, 2005. They then allegedly forced her to convert to Islam and renamed her Mariam. Pir Ayub Jan Sarhandi was involved in her conversion and soon after her abduction and conversion, she was married to one of the kidnappers.

Anita Kumar, a 22-year-old Hindu woman with two young children, was kidnapped from her house in Moro, Sindh in April 2011. In the process her two children, aged four and two, were beaten up and locked up alone in the house. The Supreme Court allowed her marriage to a Muslim man, even though she was still married to her first husband, Suresh Kumar. She has since then been renamed Aneela Fatima Pervez.

Gajri, a 15-year-old Hindu girl, was kidnapped by a neighbour from her home in Katchi Mandi in the Rahim Yar Khan district on December 21, 2009. She was later discovered in a madrassa, but by then she had already been converted to Islam and married to her neighbour, Mohammed Salim. Her parents later received an affidavit, in which the daughter stated that she had converted to Islam willingly but they were not sent a copy of the marriage certificate. The parents are not allowed to visit their daughter since they are non-Muslims.

On October 18, 2005, a Hindu driver, Sanno Amra, came home from work to find that his three daughters Reena, Usha and Rima had disappeared from their house in Punjab Colony, Karachi. The oldest sister was 21 and the youngest was 17 – legally still a minor. When Amra pursued the case he started receiving death threats and eventually found affidavits in the mail, which stated that his daughters had willingly converted to Islam. The parents were only allowed to briefly visit the daughters, and that too in the presence of maulvis and police officers.

This article was originally published in the April 2012 issue of Newsline under the headline “Unholy Vows.”