The journalist who reported on it is now himself at risk of being arrested.
by Massimo Introvigne
Khatam-e-Nabuwat is a radical Barelvi Muslim organization in Pakistan, which opposes any change to blasphemy law and calls for increased repression of the Ahmadis, a religious movement that offers its own interpretation of Islam and is regarded as non-Islamic by Pakistani law.
Not content with the harsh existing anti-Ahmadi legislation, Khatam-e-Nabuwat activists often take the law in their own hands. Last week, journalist Bilal Farooqi tweeted that Khatam-e-Nabuwat members had demolished the dome and minaret of an Ahmadi mosque in Garmola Virkan village, Gujranwala district, Punjab, and also desecrated the kalima (a text on the fundamentals of Islam) inscribed on it. The journalist accused the local police of having actively cooperated with the extremists.
Bilal Farooqi is a well-known journalist in Pakistan. He was already arrested last year for his reporting and posts, and is now under investigation again for having posted on Twitter about the Ahmadi mosque destroyed in Punjab.
But in fact, Khatam-e-Nabuwat had advertised the event itself. One of its members tweeted that “Mujahideen Khatam-e-Nabuwat have saved Islam after demolishing the minarets of Ahmadiyya mosque in Garmula Virkan and erasing the Kalima from the mosque,” and posted a video with militants celebrating after the attack.
Leading international human rights organization have protested the long-lasting persecution of the 2,5 million Ahmadis living in Pakistan, where they are treated as second-class citizens and often attacked by extremist mobs. So far, the Pakistani government has failed to protect them against serious violence and frequent killings.
The case of Garmula Virkan is just the latest one in a long series of incidents where local police have sided with mobs attacking the Ahmadis rather than protecting the religious minority. Journalists who report on the attacks are also at risk.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
