Do I have the Right to Remain Ahmadi?
By Faheem Younus
March 1, 2012
In 1966, nearly 180
million people in the US received Miranda rights – the right to remain silent
to avoid self-incrimination.
Half a century later,
a religious community in Pakistan, another country of nearly 180 million
people, is facing a rather caustic version of the Miranda rights. They don’t
have the right, but a duty, to remain silent.
The religious group is
the Ahmadiyya community.
Two recent events
frame the issue aptly. First, on January 29, 2012, clerics organized an
anti-Ahmadiyya rally in Rawalpindi, attended by 5,000 Madrasa students,
chanting threatening anti-Ahmadiyya slogans and demanding to take over a
17-year-old Ahmadiyya ‘place of worship’. Then on February 11, 2012,
approximately 100 lawyers, from the Lahore Bar Association, rallied to ban
Shezan drinks on court premises.
So while the clerics
have the right to incite violence against Ahmadis, by publicly calling them
‘worthy of death’ and Madrasa students have the right to wall chalk phrases
like, ‘hang them all’, schools have the right to expel Ahmadi students and
lawyers have the right to ban Shezan - Ahmadis, on the other hand, have the
right to remain silent!
Is it not true that
the right to remain silent assumes a right to free speech in the first place?
Something the Ahmadis have been long deprived of?
Unlike the Miranda
rights, this ‘right’ to silence is by definition, self-incriminating. Try to
voice your opinion as an Ahmadi and you may land in jail under section 295-B/C
of Pakistan’s penal code offers pending a three year imprisonment simply for
exercising your right to free speech. Try voicing dissent, and you may end up
in a graveyard. Even after death, the mullah menace has the right to white wash
Quranic verses like ‘God is gracious, ever merciful’ from an Ahmadi’s
tombstones.
Consequently, hundreds
and thousands of Pakistani Ahmadis, including myself, have tearfully migrated
to other countries, but not without sustaining one final jab; the passport
application. It requires 97% of
Pakistan’s Muslim population to complete a declaration stating that not only do
they consider all Ahmadis as ‘non-Muslims’ but they also declare the founder of
Ahmadiyya Community to be an ‘impostor’. While I have never met a Pakistani
Muslim who refused to sign this absurd declaration, Ahmadis do scratch it out.
Their passports are thus stamped with the word ‘Ahmadi’ and the plight of their
right to remain silent continues.
For decades, the
Ahmadi perspective was systematically hushed under the pretense of
‘sensitivity’. But organizations like Amnesty International are now calling it,
‘a real test of the authorities’. And 0nline newspapers and opinion pieces by
courageous Pakistanis have started challenging the suffocating status quo.
For the Pakistani
government, there is a way to be good again. Rein in the mullah, stop defining
who is and who is not Muslim, and subject the medieval anti-Ahmadiyya laws to a
modern paper shredder. Give Ahmadis the right to free speech before offering
them the right to remain silent.
Finally, the Ahmadiyya
diaspora is choosing to expose this oppression by speaking up. The mullahs and
their proxy politicians will have to deal with the bitter truth.
Maybe a glass of
Shezan could have helped to sweeten the bitterness. But then I guess that’s
just too Ahmadi.
Source: The Tribune
Express, Lahore
URL: https://newageislam.com/the-war-within-islam/do-i-right-remain-ahmadi/d/6787