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Ahmadis in Pakistan
30 November 2004Two news items from Pakistan point to growing tensions surrounding the Ahmadis, a religious minority that considers itself the purest form of Islam, but which has been persecuted as a non-Muslim group by Pakistan's Islamic government, which declared the sect beyond the faith by a constitutional amendment 30 years ago. One: A Pakistani political party, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), has filed a motion demanding a debate on the government's deletion of religious information from electronic passports, claiming that the removal was an Ahmadi conspiracy to circumvent a ban on non-Muslims entering Mecca. Two: A Pakistani man, and recent convert to the Ahmedi sect, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for "being disrespectful to the Prophet Muhammad" under the country's draconian blasphemy laws which Amnesty International has described as "'so vaguely formulated that they encourage, and in fact invite, the persecution of religious minorities or non-conforming members of [the] Muslim majority.'"
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