The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Ahmadi Muslim arrested in Pakistan for ‘posing as a Muslim’ Posted: 15 Dec 2013 02:23 AM PST Masood Ahmad is a quiet, reserved widower who returned to Pakistan to open a pharmacy in 1982 after decades of working in London to pay his children's school fees, his family said. He is also an Ahmadi, a sect that consider themselves Muslim but believe in a prophet after Mohammed. A 1984 Pakistani law declared them non-Muslims, and Ahmadis can be jailed for three years for posing as a Muslim or outraging Muslims' feelings. Some mullahs promise that killing Ahmadis earns a place in heaven. Leaflets list their home addresses. Three years ago, 86 Ahmadis were killed in two simultaneous attacks on Friday prayers in Lahore. There have been no mass attacks since then, but killings are rising: last year 20 Ahmadis were killed, up from 11 in 2009. Legal prosecutions are on the rise, say Ahmadis, some of which they say are linked to property grabs. Ahmad was arrested in Lahore last month when two men posing as patients questioned him about his faith and used mobile phones secretly to record him reading a verse from the Koran. "He (the patient) said you are like a father to me, please help me with some questions," said the doctor's older brother, Nasir Ahmad. "When (my brother) answered, they began beating him and dragged him outside." One of his accusers, Islamic teacher Muhammad Ihsan, told Reuters that Ahmad had preached to them illegally. Last year 20 cases against Ahmadis were registered, up from 10 cases in 2009. A bank clerk was arrested for wearing a ring with a Koranic verse and an entire family was charged for writing a Muslim greeting on a wedding invitation. Mullahs have twice sought the arrest of an entire town of Ahmadis - 60,000 people - for holding religious celebrations. Residents were serving food, giving out sweets and displaying bunting, the complaints said. "We would not have a problem with them if they did not use the name of Islam and the symbols of Islam," said Tahir Ashrafi, head of the Ulama Council of clerics. "We are against the killing of any innocent, Qadiani, Syiah or any non-Muslim. Such attacks are not acceptable or allowed, but if they break the law, we have a right to go to the police," he said, using another term for Ahmadis. There are about half a million Ahmadis in Pakistan, their leaders say. Many only feel safe in Rabwa, a town they bought when Pakistan was created in 1947. On its main streets, banks of security cameras monitor fruit vendors and dozing dogs. Near the playing fields, blocks of flats house families that fled other parts of Pakistan after loved ones were murdered. Rafiatta moved to Rabwa after gunmen killed her husband in 2010 in front of their young children. "He was just a hard-working man who loved his family," she said. The family fled after two Ahmadi neighbours were also killed and men tried to kidnap Raffiata's young son. The Ahmadi are also targets outside Pakistan. In Indonesia, a gruesome YouTube video recorded a mass lynching in 2011 as police looked on. Ahmadi publications are banned in Bangladesh, where a festival site was torched earlier this year. In Britain, Ahmadi buildings have been vandalised and leaflets have appeared forbidding them to enter shops and urging Muslims to kill them, British media have reported. But Pakistan is the epicentre of persecution. Last April, a 25-year-old hospital clerk and his father were at home in Lahore reading an Ahmadi newspaper when a crowd of mullahs broke down their door, the clerk said. They beat the two, while a crowd looted their home. Then a gunman forced the pair into a car without license plates, the clerk said. Their kidnappers went free, but the two were charged with impersonating Muslims in anti-terrorist courts designed to combat the Taliban. The clerk was released after a month, but his father, who has not been convicted, has been in prison for nine months. The family has since fled their home and the man now occupying it is refusing to pay them for it. "Nobody has the courage to give him bail or dismiss the case," the clerk said. That's what Masood Ahmad's family fears. He has had three bail hearings. One was picketed by scores of mullahs chanting anti-Ahmadi slogans and his frightened lawyer skipped the next two. British authorities are giving him consular assistance. His son, one of seven children in Britain and Australia, said the family suspected someone was trying to steal his father's dispensary. "I feel angry because I can't do anything from here," said 39-year-old Abbas Ahmad, a cab driver in Glasgow. "It's awful to know that people are plotting against someone you love." - Reuters, December 15, 2013. |
| Sex, lies and beef, racy scandal of Indonesia’s biggest Islamic party Posted: 15 Dec 2013 02:00 AM PST But they all feature in a racy scandal that has shattered the clean image of Indonesia's biggest Islamic party and could further damage already-unpopular Muslim parties at national polls next year. "The scandal... has given Islamic parties as a whole a bad image," said Umar S. Bakry, from pollster Lembaga Survei Nasional. The controversy that has shocked the country peaked last week when an anti-corruption court sentenced the disgraced former president of the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) to 16 years in jail. Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq (pic) was found guilty of bribery and money laundering after accepting kickbacks from firm Indoguna Utama in return for pressing the PKS-controlled agriculture ministry to increase the company's beef import quota. Two executives from the company had earlier been jailed over the case, dubbed "Beefgate" by local media, which has given blanket coverage to a scandal of enormous proportions even by the standards of graft-ridden Indonesia. Ishaaq, who resigned as president of ruling coalition member PKS when the scandal emerged, has said he will appeal the guilty verdict against him. During their probe, anti-graft investigators uncovered juicy details that tarnished the clean, pious image the PKS has sought to cultivate. They seized six cars from Luthfi and prosecutors accused the 52-year-old of trying to hide his marriage to one of his three wives, whom he wed last year when she was still a teenager. But an arguably bigger figure in the scandal is Luthfi's close aide Ahmad Fathanah, jailed for 14 years in November, who was a key middleman in efforts to get Indoguna's quota increased. His arrest in January kicked the scandal off in dramatic fashion – anti-corruption agents caught the married man in a raid in a Jakarta hotel with a naked college student. Ahmad had just collected bribe money and the student later admitted he paid her for sex. He was found to have laundered his bribe money by giving gifts, including cars and diamonds, to 45 women, including an adult magazine model and several celebrities. The PKS plays down the scandal and insists it is still on track for a strong result at legislative elections in April. But independent polls in recent months show the party is receiving far below the almost 8% it garnered at elections in 2009, and there is much public anger towards it. "PKS is such an absolute disgrace, anyone who votes for or supports this party must be either totally delusional or incapable of independent thought," said a recent comment on the website of the Jakarta Globe newspaper. "Beefgate" has scotched the party's recent efforts to reinvent itself by moving away from a purist Islamic agenda and presenting itself as a clean organisation as others were battered by graft allegations – President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democratic Party in particular. And the controversy risks affecting all Indonesia's Islamic parties, which were already struggling, analysts warn. The five main Islamic parties, including the PKS, won a combined total of more than 25% at the 2009 legislative elections. They range from moderate groups to more extreme ones that want to introduce Islamic Sharia laws. While the parties expected their share of the vote to continue the same downward trend of recent years, the PKS scandal means the fall is likely to be steeper and swifter, said Bakry from the Lembaga Survei Nasional. He cited a recent LSN survey in which 42.8% of respondents said they expected the groups' popularity to fall and only 21.6% said they expected them to win more votes. It is just another sad chapter in the history of political Islam in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim-majority country. Islamic parties have seen their support erode gradually in recent years due to their own shortcomings and the greater appeal of the major, secular-nationalist parties, such the Democratic Party and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle. Experts point to poor organisation, infighting, previous corruption scandals, and a feeling among even conservative Muslims there is no longer an obligation to vote for a party describing itself as "Islamic". "Years ago if you were a pious Muslim you voted for an Islamic party but now it's not the case," said Greg Fealy, an Indonesia expert at the Australian National University. Most voters, he added, now opted for parties with a solid track record of running the country. – AFP, December 14, 2013. |
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