Sundas Malik later said “offence was unintentional,” but did not apologize.
by Massimo Introvigne
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908), founder of the Ahmadis.
Ahmadis are routinely killed in Pakistan (and elsewhere), accused of being heretic by mainline Muslims, and the situation may get worse when popular activists add fuel to the fire.
Sundas Malik is the chairperson of the anti-Indian UJKC (United Jammu And Kashmir Coalition), and she is well-known in Pakistan.
On July 14, she added her voice to the widespread hate speech against the Ahmadis. She “want[ed] to say something to all my Muslim brothers, We Muslims made one mistake concerning Qadianis [Ahmadis], which we have to accept. Their leader Mirza Ahmad should have been killed right then and there,” when he proclaimed himself a prophet. “He should have been cut into pieces at that very moment. But these Muslims sat down and did nothing, which made it worse, they should have killed him.”
Audio proof of her remarks was posted on Twitter.
She changed her Twitter account to “Koshur Clemens,” after widespread and international protest. On July 15, she gave an interview where she stated that, “I never called for the killing of any group, if any offence was caused from how I said something, it was completely unintentional.”
The statement was received by Ahmadis and human rights activists as ambiguous and unsatisfactory. She did not deny that she had said that the founder of the Ahmadis “should have been killed, cut into pieces.” Denial would have been difficult since her words had been recorded.
She did not apologize for her remarks, either. What she said is that she did not call “for the killing of any group,” which is technically true, although if Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was guilty of blasphemy, so are his followers today.
The claim that “offense was completely unintentional,” on the other hand, sounded ridiculous. She could have easily foreseen that a religious group, told that its founder should have been “cut into pieces,” would have felt offended.
The problem is not only connected with the offensive features of the statement. In the explosive current Pakistani situation, a statement like Malik’s can only incite further violence against the long-suffering Ahmadis.
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.
