Shia Genocide Events

Khairpur, June 3, 1963 : Therhi carnage

Narrative of the Event

On June 3, 1963, a large-scale murder took place in Thehri, Sindh, Pakistan. In it, a mob of Deobandi Muslims with a predisposition towards Takfiri/Kharijite thought committed the murder of 118 Shia Muslims. Although there has been violence against Shia Muslims in Pakistan before, this event is regarded as the first significant killing of civilians in Sindh.

Therhi is a town and Union Council located in Pakistan’s Sindh province’s Khairpur District. (It was a village in 1963.). The town is located 7 kilometres from Khairpur City, through the National Highway, in the direction of Sukkur. Around 5,000 people called Therhi home in 1963.

Pakistan Times ‘s Reporter Ali Zaidi had reported the ‘Shia Massacre’ in Tehri, Sindh

One of the 118 Shia Muslims killed in Shia Massacre at Tehri Village in Sindh, Pakistan

Background:

In the Indian subcontinent, Syed Ahmad Barelvi and Shah Ismail Dihlavi were the forerunners of anti-Shia terrorism. Says Barbara Metcalf:

“A second group of Abuses Syed Ahmad held were those that originated from Shi’i influence. He particularly urged Muslims to give up the keeping of ta’ziyahs. The replicas of the tombs of the martyrs of Karbala were taken in procession during the mourning ceremony of Muharram. Muhammad Isma’il wrote,

‘A true believer should regard the breaking of a tazia by force as as virtuous an action as destroying idols. If he cannot break them himself, let him order others to do so. If this even be out of his power, let him at least detest and abhor them with his whole heart and soul’.

Sayyid Ahmad himself is said, no doubt with considerable exaggeration, to have torn down thousands of imambaras, the building that houses the taziyahs”.[4]

These attacks were carried out between 1818 and 1820. Rizvi has given more details about the time, places, and circumstances in which these attacks were carried out.[5] After their death in Balakot in 1831 while being chased by Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s army, their legacy of sectarian terrorism continued in the Deoband school of thought. Data shows that around 90 percent of religious terrorists in Pakistan are Deobandis by faith, and many of them belong to the Pashtun belt (the area where Syed Ahmad carried out his military endeavor).[6]

Anti-Shia violence reached its peak during the Madhe Sahaba agitation in Lucknow in 1936–37. [7] The main religious centers of Muslims at that time were located in the United Provinces; therefore, the sectarian violence spread all over India. Azadari in UP was no more peaceful; it would never be the same again. Violence went so far that on Ashura 1940, a Deobandi terrorist attacked the Ashura procession with a bomb. Hollister writes:

“Conflicts between Sunnis and Shias at Muharram are not infrequent. Processions in the cities are accompanied by police along fixed lines of march. The following quotations from a single newspaper are not usual. They indicate what might happen if the government did not keep the situation under control: ‘adequate measures avert incidents’, ‘Muharram passed off peacefully’, ‘All shops remained closed in… in order to avoid incidents’, ‘Several women offered satyagraha in front of the final procession… about twenty miles from Allahabad. They objected to the passing of the procession through their fields’, ‘the police took great precautions to prevent a breach of the peace’, ‘as a sequel to the cane charge by the police on a Mehndi procession, the Moslems . . . did not celebrate the Muharram today. No ta’zia processions were taken out. . . Business was transacted as usual in the Hindu localities’, ‘Bomb thrown on procession’. Not all of these disturbances spring from sectarian differences, but those differences actuate many frames. Birdwood says that, in Bombay, where the first four days of Muharram are likely to be devoted to visiting each other’s tabut khanas, women and children, as well as men, are admitted, and members of other communities—only the Sunnies—are denied’simply as a police precaution’”.[8]

The main purpose of the army of Sahaba had been achieved: Shias and Sunnis were segregated as Azadari was not safe anymore.

Congress wanted to use the sectarian card against Jinnah, who was a Shia, but the more Congress supported the religio-fascist Ulema, the more it alienated her from the Muslims, and the more the League became popular. The sectarian activities started to fire back. Deobandi ulema was becoming infamous, and the Muslim masses were disgusted with what the Muslim League interpreted as the ‘divide-and-rule’ policy of Congress. With the Pakistan movement gaining momentum, Muslims put their differences aside and started to respond to the Muslim League’s call for Muslim unity and the establishment of a separate homeland.[7] Now Deobandi ulema changed tactics: in 1944, they established a separate organization to do the dirty work, Tanzim-e-Ahle-Sunnat, solely focused on the anti-Shia violence [9], and the main leaders like Madani started to present themselves as inclusive secularists again. The irony is that the same nationalistic secular ulema were writing fake history about Akbar being the cursed infidel and Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi being a notable opposition to his secularism. Archives and history books of the Mughal period have lots of material about opposition leaders, e.g., Shiva Ji, but there is no mention of Ahmad Sirhindi. It was Molana Azad who first crafted a hero out of Ahmad Sirhindi, and later this fabrication was carried on by all Deobandi historians.[10] Some others, like Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, joined the League and, when they failed to snatch leadership from Jinnah, formed a new party in 1946, Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI), which would become the first opposition party after the foundation of Pakistan.

Violence migrates to Pakistan.

After the demise of Jinnah in mysterious circumstances, the feudal prime minister, Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan, allied with Deobandi ulema, passed the Objectives Resolution, and adopted puritanical Wahhabism as the state religion. This move against non-Muslim citizens was supported by Shias and Ahmadis too. Jinnah’s appointed law minister, Jogendra Nath Mandal, resigned from his post. Shias allege discrimination by the Pakistani government since 1948, claiming that Sunnis are given preference in business, official positions, and the administration of justice.[11] Although sectarian hateful literature had been pouring into Punjab since Shah Abd al-Aziz wrote his Tuhfa Asna Ashariya, anti-Shia violence began only after mass migration in 1947. Many students of Molana Abdul Shakoor Farooqi and Molana Hussain Ahmad Madani migrated to Pakistan and either set up seminaries here or became part of the Tanzim-e-Ahle-Sunnat (TAS) or Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam (JUI). They travelled through the length and breadth of the country, called for attacks on Azadari, and wrote books and tracts against it. Among them were: Molana Noorul Hasan Bukhari, Molana Dost Muhammad Qureshi, Molana Abdus Sattar Taunsavi, Molana Mufti Mahmood, Molana Abdul Haq Haqqani, Molana Sarfaraz Khan Safdar Gakharvi, and Molana Manzoor Ahmad Naumani. The sectarian clashes of Lucknow had attracted zealous workers of religious parties from Punjab and KPK, but with the influx of sectarian clergy, the religious sectarianism and narrow-mindedness of UP were injected into Sufism-oriented Punjab and Sindh.

In the 1950s, Tanzim-e-Ahle-Sunnat started to arrange public gatherings all over Pakistan to incite violence and mock Shia sanctities. TAS issued an anti-Shia monthly called Da’wat. In Muharram 1955, attacks took place in at least 25 places in Punjab. In 1956, thousands of armed villagers gathered to attack Azadari in the small town of Shahr Sultan, but were stopped by police from killing. On August 7, 1957, three Shias were killed during an attack in Sitpur village. Blaming the victim, TAS demanded that the government ban the thousand-year-old tradition of Azadari because it caused rioting and bloodshed. In May 1958, a Shia orator, Agha Mohsin, was target-killed in Bhakkar. Police needed to be appointed to many places; the scenario became more similar in the pre-partition Urdu-speaking areas.[12] It is important to note here that the Shia ulema were becoming part of religious alliances and not supporting secularism. The syllabus taught at Shia seminaries does not include any course on the history of the subcontinent. Shia clerics don’t have an independent political vision; they were strengthening the puritanism that was going to deprive Shias of basic human rights like equality, peace, and freedom.

Ayyub Khan enforced martial law in 1958. In the 1960s, Shias started to face state persecution when Azadari processions were banned at some places, and the ban was lifted only after protests. In Lahore, the main procession of Mochi Gate was forced to change its route. After martial law was lifted in 1962, anti-Shia hate propaganda started again, both in the form of books and weekly papers. The Deobandi organisation Tanzim-e-Ahle-Sunnat demanded the Azadari be limited to Shia ghetto’s. Following Muharram, on June 3, 1963, two Shias were killed and over a hundred injured in an attack on the Ashura procession in Lahore.

The Incident:

On the Day of Ashura on June 3, 1963, Shia Muslims of Thehri village attempted to carry a Taziya. When this news reached the nearby Wahabi madrassa of Khairpur, students of the madrassa went to Thehri and burned both Taziya and Imambargah. Many people were burned alive, and others were butchered with meat cleavers and machetes.[13]

The press did not cover the incidents properly, as the identities of both the perpetrators and the victims were concealed.[14] On June 16, six Deobandi organisations arranged a public meeting in Lahore, where they blamed the victims for the violence. In July, a commission was appointed to investigate the riots. Its report was published in December of that year, but it did not name any individuals or organisations. No one was punished.[15]

Shiite News writes,

“To hide their heinous crime, fanatics collected all the bodies, put them in an empty well, and planned to burn them after putting kerosene oil in them. However, the police arrived and took the martyrs’ bodies into custody.

Another reason for their failure to burn the bodies of martyrs was that the Assistant Director of Information at the time, Ishtiaq Azhar, and the reporter of APP, Ali Akbar Zaidi, had already released the news.

They had reported the deaths of more than 100 people to the local and international media.” [16]

References:

1. “On June 6, 1963, at least 116 Shia Muslims were massacred—LUBP.”. lubpak. Retrieved June 8, 2019.

2.^ Jump up to: “Banned terrorist outfits trying to establish networks in Interior Sindh”. www.geo.tv. Retrieved June 8, 2019.

3.^ Jump up to: Zardari, Shehnila (March 27, 2015). “Unsupervised madrassas have destroyed Sindh’s pluralism.”. The Nation. Retrieved June 8, 2019.

4.^ B. Metcalf, “Islamic revival in British India: Deoband, 1860–1900”, p. 58, Princeton University Press (1982).

5.^ S. A. A. Rizvi, “A Socio-Intellectual History of Isna Ashari Shi’is in India,” Vol. 2, pp. 306–308, Mar’ifat Publishing House, Canberra (1986).

6.^ S. E. Hussain, “Terrorism in Pakistan: Incident patterns, terrorists’ characteristics, and the impact of terrorist arrests on terrorism.”. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Pennsylvania (2010). Available online: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/136

7.^ Jump up to:a b V. Dhulipala, “Rallying the Qaum: The Muslim League in the United Provinces, 1937–1939”, pp. 603–640, Modern Asian Studies 44, 3 (2010).

8.^ J. N. Hollister, “The Shi’a of India”, p. 178, Luzac and Co., London, 1953.

9.^ A. Rieck, “The Shias of Pakistan,” p. 47, Oxford University Press (2015).

10.^ Mubarak Ali, “Almiyah-i-Tarikh,” Ch. 9 and 10, Fiction House, Lahore (2012).

11.^ Jones, Brian H. (2010). Around Rakaposhi. Brian H. Jones. ISBN 9780980810721. Many Shias in the region feel that they have been discriminated against since 1948. They claim that the Pakistani government continually gives preferences to Sunnis in business, in official positions, and in the administration of justice. The situation deteriorated sharply during the 1980s under the presidency of the tyrannical Zia-ul Haq, when there were many attacks on the Shia population.

12.^ A. Rieck, “The Shias of Pakistan,” pp. 88–98, Oxford University Press (2015).

13.^ Eamon Murphy (18 October 2018). Islam and Sectarian Violence in Pakistan: The Terror Within. Taylor & Francis, pp. 100–102. ISBN 978-1-351-70961-3. Retrieved June 9, 2019.

14.^ Abbas Zaidi, “Covering Faith-Based Violence: Structure and Semantics of News Reporting in Pakistan,” in J. Syed et al. (eds.), Faith-Based Violence and Deobandi Militancy in Pakistan, Palgrave Macmillan (2016).

15.^ A. Rieck, “The Shias of Pakistan,” pp. 109–114, Oxford University Press (2015).

16- https://shiite.news/featured/item/98247-shia-muslims-remember-great-martyrs-therhi-massacre-1963-56th-anniversary/