by Kim Ghattas
Miles away and just hours apart in the city of the crime, roses were also being showered on the killer, who was making his first appearance in court. A smiling, burly Qadri appeared before the bench amid cheers and felicitations. He faced charges of murder and terrorism, but people slapped him on the back and a garland of flowers was placed around his neck. The trial would take ten months, and he would be sentenced to death. In the meantime, tragedy struck again, twice.
In March, Pakistan’s minister of minority rights, a Christian who had spoken in favor of reviewing Asia Bibi’s case and reforming blasphemy laws, was also assassinated. Shahbaz Bhatti, traveling with only a driver despite years of threat, died on the spot when gunmen sprayed his car with bullets as he was leaving his mother’s home in Islamabad. The killers scattered pamphlets on the scene, signing the murder: Taliban al Qaeda-Punjab. Then a few months later, Shahbaz, Taseer’s eldest son, was kidnapped.
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On August 26, 2011, Shahbaz was heading to work when a car blocked his way and five masked gunmen dragged him out of his Mercedes, a gun to his head. The twenty-eight-year-old spent the next four and a half years in captivity, subjected to indescribable torture, shot, and kept in solitary confinement. He was taken across the border into Afghanistan, where he survived American drone attacks and emotional torture, and through it all, he thought of those days and weeks that his own father had spent away from his family, in Zia’s jails. “Physical pain touches only the surface, you must never let it break your spirit,” his father had once told him.
Shahbaz was first held by a shadowy, ruthless group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, whose focus had migrated from Uzbekistan to Pakistan and Afghanistan. By November 2015, he was being held by the Afghan Taliban. The exact details of the affair are still not fully known, but there was something that felt either divine or coordinated about Shahbaz’s sudden release by his captors at dawn on February 29, 2016, after five years in captivity. On that exact same day and around the same time, Qadri, the killer of Governor Taseer, was being led to the gallows in Islamabad. If Shahbaz had been held as a bargaining chip in exchange for Qadri’s release or the overturning of his sentence, he was of no use anymore. Released into nowhere, for nine days Shahbaz walked and hitchhiked from Afghanistan into Pakistan’s Balochistan province. This last phase of his ordeal meant he did not witness Qadri’s funeral in Pakistan, a funeral that celebrated his father’s assassin.
On March 1, tens of thousands of Pakistanis came out to protest Qadri’s execution, bringing cities across the country to a standstill. Thousands more traveled to the capital to attend the funeral. They walked, drove, and rode their motorbikes, blocking entire highways. The ambulance carrying Qadri’s body was strewn with roses, inching through a human sea toward Liaqat Bagh Park, in Rawalpindi, Islamabad’s adjacent twin city and headquarters of the Pakistan army. This was where Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated in 2007. Now the killer of her friend Taseer was being honored in the same spot. Several hundred thousand mourners thronged the park and the surrounding area, holding up Qadri’s picture and wearing “I am Qadri” signs around their necks. The country was tense, fearful of more violence, and the media were forbidden from broadcasting the funeral. But in the age of mobile phones and social media, there was no way for the state to hide the monster it had bred.
Aamna’s stomach churned at the size of the crowd, but she wasn’t all that surprised. She knew the country she was living in and how it had changed but, as her husband had done, she persisted in believing that those cheering Qadri were a minority—a loud and sometimes violent minority, but a minority nonetheless, in a country of almost two hundred million people. The state, too often complicit in violence, wasn’t helping. The minister of religious affairs declared Qadri a martyr.
By the end of 2016, there was a mosque and a shrine to Qadri on the outskirts of Islamabad in his home village of Athal. With two minarets and a green dome, the small mosque soon became a pilgrimage site for thousands of Pakistanis. It cost almost a million dollars to build, and the money came entirely from donations of supporters, according to Qadri’s family. Under a ceiling inlaid with mirrorwork mosaics, visitors knelt to pray by Qadri’s white marble tomb, adorned with delicate carved marble latticework. Such visitations are anathema to any fundamentalist orthodox Islam, heresy for the Saudi Wahhabis and their allies in Pakistan, the Deobandi and Ahl-e Hadith religious groups. But Qadri was actually a Barelvi Muslim, the less doctrinaire, more tolerant school of Islam on the subcontinent, which overlaps with Sufism and openly venerates saints and the prophet Muhammad. Rivals of the Deobandis since the creation of their movement in the early twentieth century, the Barelvis had long promoted themselves as a moderate counterbalance.
So what happened? How did one of theirs kill in the name of religion? The winds of extremism blowing in Pakistan for three decades had carried almost everyone further to the right. The center had moved, and everyone reorganized around a new understanding of the norms. The competition for who was a good Muslim was slowly engulfing more and more people, leading to excesses of self-righteousness and the creation of more radical groups and their ever more violent spinoffs. With minorities like Shias and Ahmadis already considered beyond the pale of Islam, the next step in the competition for purity was Sunni versus Sunni. Barelvis were attacked for their beliefs, dismissed as idolaters for their visitation of tombs. Not to be outdone by those claiming to be the standard-bearers of righteous Islam, the Barelvis began to organize in the 1990s to take over Deobandi mosques, provoking a race to the death with bombings, assassinations, and counterassassinations. They, too, resorted to violence to assert their blind devotion to the prophet. And so Mumtaz Qadri had killed Governor Salmaan Taseer and declared that, in doing so, he was a slave of the prophet.
Since the end of the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Saudi influence in Pakistan had become less obvious but perhaps more insidious. Saudi intelligence officials didn’t need to fly to Peshawar twice a month anymore with bags of cash, as they had done in the 1980s. Their network of influence was well established, with both formal and informal networks. Even well after 9/11 and the clampdown on radical outfits, American diplomats in Pakistan reported back to Washington that Saudi organizations were still paying around $100 million annually to Deobandi and Ahl-e Hadith clerics, ostensibly with the knowledge or tacit approval of the authorities. The Ahl-e Hadith movement had grown massively since the 1980s and the heirs of Ehsan Elahi Zaheer were busy converting thousands to their side. With generous Saudi and Gulf funding, they had created a publishing empire and were expanding their network of madrassas, religious seminaries. Deobandi religious seminaries were still the majority at 65 percent, but both served the Saudi worldview. Classes were taught in Arabic, and, thanks to donations from the Gulf, school fees were low. In a developing country with huge income disparities and a big youth bulge, low-cost religious schools with full room and board were a relief for families unable to provide for their children. There were now more English, math, and computer skills classes, but they were all inscribed in the activist mission of jihadi Islam. There was nothing diverse or tolerant about the teaching imparted to the children.
Just like the Iranians, the Saudis expected loyalty in return for their largesse and patronage. In their efforts to counter Iran, the Saudis sometimes descended into petty, obsessive minutiae. In 2012, Mumtaz Ahmed, the president of the International Islamic University of Islamabad (established with Saudi funding back in 1981), committed the faux pas of inviting the Iranian ambassador to a VIP reception at the university. The Saudi ambassador requested that the university rescind the invitation. The president declined, pointing out that Pakistan and the university maintained good relations with both Iran and Saudi Arabia. He was promptly replaced with a Saudi. Some of these shenanigans went unnoticed by the wider public. But often they grated on Pakistanis.
“Servility to rich Arabs” called out Pervez Hoodboy, a professor, author, and longtime critic of what he d
escribed as the Saudization of Pakistan at the expense of its historical and rich connection to Persian culture and traditions. The protestations against cultural homogenization and the Arabization of Islam seemed to have been reduced to the whimper of an older generation that insisted on responding with the traditional Persian expression Khoda hafez, May God be with you, when someone uttered the Arabized version Allah hafez. In Arabic, Allah is used by Muslims and Christians alike to say God, but in Pakistan, where Urdu was laced with Persian words, it had always been Khoda, Persian for God. Those taking a stand insisted on calling their prayers namaz rather than using the Arabic salat, and for them Ramadan was still ramzan.
Mehtab Rashdi, the rebellious television anchor, was definitely a Khoda hafez person. Now in her early sixties, she said namaz and fasted during ramzan, and she still wore her dupatta draped on her shoulders. She worried that these small daily acts of defiance were lost on a younger generation that had no memory of the country’s more pluralistic past or even the Persian influence on their history. She had been secretary of education in Sindh province at one point and saw firsthand the continued, growing influence of Islamist groups with links to Saudi Arabia. Face veils and the ankle-length overdress cloak called the abaya were spreading on university campuses, which puzzled the woman who had defied the dictator’s orders to wear the veil. There was no dictator imposing the veil anymore, but the dictatorship of the closed mind had taken root.
One day in 2000, she agreed out of curiosity to attend Quran lessons given by a woman preacher who was all the rage in Pakistan. A relative of Mehtab’s sister-in-law had been haranguing her for months, insisting that she attend a lecture by Farhat Hashmi, the founder of the Al-Huda religious schools and institutes. Hashmi was a pure product of the Zia era, just twenty years old when the dictator had come to power. The daughter of a Jamaat-e Islami activist, she became a Jamaat activist herself for a while. Hashmi got her doctorate in Islamic studies from Glasgow University, but she cited prominent Saudi or Saudi-backed scholars, including Bin Baz, as her inspiration. In 1994, she’d established the Al-Huda Foundation, a welfare organization that ran short courses and full-time classes on its bigger campuses in Islamabad and Karachi. Hashmi’s teachings were based on the Ahl-e Hadith school of thought and were openly critical of Barelvis and Shias. Al-Huda’s headquarters, a large villa in an upmarket neighborhood of Islamabad, was paid for by donations from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, according to information from bankers in Pakistan.
Mehtab walked into the Regent Plaza hotel in Karachi and up to the foyer outside a hotel conference room, where she was greeted by enthusiastic women, all veiled, giving out books, DVDs, and CDs with religious content, all published by Al-Huda. In the conference room, she sat among rows and rows of women, some four or five hundred affluent Pakistanis with designer handbags and expensive shoes. Some of them were wives of political or defense officials, or local provincial bureaucrats. They were bored, frustrated housewives, Mehtab thought, just like the relative who had brought her here. With grown children, uninterested husbands, and idle mornings, they sought to give meaning to their lives.
Hashmi entered the hall, and though her audience was made up exclusively of women, she continued to hide behind her niqab, showing only her eyes. Tall, heavyset, and wearing round glasses, the televangelist read her lecture off a laptop screen. To Mehtab’s ears, the tone was monotonous. What was all the fuss about this woman? But most of the audience seemed enraptured, scribbling notes furiously. Mehtab left before it was over. But she had instantly understood that this was about assiduous proselytizing and recruiting. Each of those women was expected to bring along more women, just as she had been dragged to this lecture. There was no definitive count of how many adhered, but the approach was a force multiplier: by 2017, there would be two hundred local branches of Hashmi’s institute across the country, providing short seminars, attended by tens of thousands of women, most of them middle- and upper-class. Another fifteen thousand women had formally graduated with a diploma or certificate. There was a cottage industry of books and tapes, clothes, even halal makeup. Mehtab could see the impact around her. The phenomenon closely resembled the religious salons of the 1990s in Egypt, where middle-class and upper-class women embraced a stricter reading of religion, often donning the veil on the spot, inspired by the pretty former actresses who’d had their come-to-God moment. Among her social circle, Mehtab began to notice not just more veils, but other subtle, insidious changes, like friends hissing at her for celebrating the prophet’s birthday, or pulling on her sleeve to make her sit down when she stood to show respect to the prophet’s name being read out. In line with Wahhabi beliefs, not even the prophet could be venerated in Hashmi’s world, only God.
The women from Hashmi’s lectures and classes began hassling their husbands, children, and friends for not being devout enough. Photographs came off the walls of homes and framed verses of the Quran went up. The women stopped listening to music, watching television, reading fiction, and dancing at weddings. Hashmi was setting new social and moral standards for Pakistani society, going even further than what had been achieved by Zia and edging ever closer to full Saudi-style Wahhabi Islam, with a complete rejection of all accretions or even traditional culture in general, in a country where music, poetry, dance, and literature were part of the DNA, where even trucks were decorated with an explosion of artful color. Women who studied full-time at Al-Huda for years, and later managed to step back, spoke of brainwashing, of being pulled into what resembled a cult, with 24/7 prayers, recitations, religious readings, and devotion to Hashmi. There was never any open call for violence, but the women were increasingly isolated from society, encased in a set of rigid rules that made them intolerant of other ways—an unhealthy fanaticism, a kind of latent radicalism.
* * *
This was not the future that Mehtab had envisioned for Pakistan in November 1988 when she returned to television to cover the election of her friend Benazir Bhutto. Mehtab had considered that moment a personal victory, as she smiled to the millions of Pakistanis who tuned in to the news, her hair uncovered, having outlasted the dictator. She meant it as a message to her country that the nightmare was over, that change had finally come. But Zia’s legacy was already too entrenched.
Perhaps the worst leftover from the Zia era was the sectarian intolerance and violence, both of which had grown exponentially since those first killings in the Kurram district in 1987. It continued with a massacre of 150 Shias by Sunni vigilantes in 1988, followed by retaliatory assassinations of militant Shia leaders. In 1996, there were five days of Sunni-Shia fighting in Parachinar that left two hundred dead. Mosques were being bombed, both Sunni and Shia. Iranians were also targeted: in 1990, the Iranian cultural attaché in Lahore was assassinated; in 1997, the Iranian cultural centers in Lahore and Multan were torched and five Iranian military personnel were assassinated in Rawalpindi.
By 2012, one in two Pakistanis did not accept that Shias were Muslims. All minorities were targets. Christians, Ahmadis, and Hindus faced a battery of discriminatory laws and the appalling practice of forced conversion to Islam by vigilante groups who abducted young girls and forced them into marriage or into a madrassa. Shias were still more fortunate and well established in society, a thirty-six-million-strong minority, the largest Shia population outside Iran. But they accounted for 70 percent of the victims of sectarian attacks in the decades since the creation of the anti-Shia group Sepah-e Sahaba Pakistan in 1985, the first overtly sectarian militant group. It was banned in 2002 but produced several spin-offs, like Ahl-e Sunnah Wal Jamaat. It was banned as well in 2012, but its leaders still gave interviews on the streets of Karachi with no fear of arrests, and still held public rallies with the screams of “Shia kafir.”
Shias had tried to fight back and set up their own sectarian militia. But they had little outside help; Iran did not invest in this enterprise as it had in Hezbollah. Sunnis got the monopoly on violence and the Shias became the hunted. From car bombs
against Shia mosques to suicide bombs during religious processions, the sectarian violence became a systemic campaign of elimination, at a fast clip. In 2011, the terrorist group Lashkar-e Jhangvi sent an open letter to the Shia community in Quetta, in Balochistan, home to around six hundred thousand Hazara Shias. “All Shias are worthy of killing. We will rid Pakistan of [this] unclean people,” read the letter. “Pakistan means land of the pure, and the Shias have no right to be here … We will make Pakistan their graveyard—their houses will be destroyed by bombs and suicide bombers.” Most chilling were the recurrent waves of targeted assassinations of middle-class Shia professionals: doctors, intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, even officers were shot at close range on the street, or had small bombs placed under their cars. In a crime-ridden, gang-infested city like Karachi, one could dismiss all this as just more random violence, but the pattern was clear. Hundreds of Shia professionals left the country. In August 2012, men wearing army uniforms stopped a bus traveling in the Gilgit-Baltistan area in northern Pakistan. The gunmen checked the IDs of passengers, pulled out those who were identifiable as Shia by their names, and shot them. It was the third time that year that Shia men had been pulled off a bus and shot. The state did nothing.
The Pakistan that Mehtab had grown up in wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly more tolerant, more liberal, more progressive, and far less ruthless. There were so many reasons for the descent into chaos: local dynamics, corruption, overpopulation, the devious military establishment. But no matter how she turned it around in her head, it always traced back to Zia and Saudi money. He was dead, but so were Benazir Bhutto and Governor Taseer and countless others, in a country now disfigured by violence.
