Abstract:
The article discusses the alarming shift in the media landscape, where electronic media has become more active than print media in promoting the Shia genocide. This disturbing phenomenon is characterized by the use of “validatory hermeneutics” or persuasive arguments to justify the ongoing atrocities against Shia Muslims. The article highlights the multifaceted nature of the genocide, emphasizing how it not only targets the physical existence of the Shia community but also undermines their inner lives. It sheds light on specific cases of Shia persecution in countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Pakistan, with a focus on the complicity of state institutions in these crimes. The article concludes by emphasizing that genocide is fundamentally about one group exerting power over another and how it seeks to transform the victim in various ways.
Key Points:
1. Electronic media’s dominance: Electronic media has taken the lead in promoting the Shia genocide, surpassing print media in its influence and reach.
2. Validatory hermeneutics: The article highlights the use of persuasive arguments to rationalize and justify the Shia genocide, perpetuating false narratives.
3. Assault on inner life: The genocide not only targets the physical existence of Shia Muslims but also seeks to obliterate their inner lives, undermining their cultural and religious identity.
4. State complicity: In countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Pakistan, state institutions are complicit in the persecution and killing of Shia Muslims.
5. False Sunni-Shia conflict narrative: Journalists who frame the Shia genocide as a Shia-Sunni conflict are criticized for creating misleading perspectives on the issue.
6. Genocidal transformation: Genocide is described as transformative, aiming to change the victim’s identity and existence in various ways.
7. Genocidal campaign: The killing of Shia Muslims is viewed as a stage in a broader genocidal campaign that seeks to eradicate their inner and outer lives.
8. Media influence: The article underscores how electronic media can shape public perception, as seen in the transformation of Ahmed Ludhianvi from a Shia-killing advocate to a national political leader.
9. State complicity: The article highlights the involvement of key state institutions, including the military, judiciary, press, and political leadership, in the Shia genocide.
In summary, the article highlights the dangerous role of electronic media in promoting and justifying the Shia genocide while shedding light on the broader context of state complicity and the transformative nature of genocidal campaigns.
1.The problem of definition
“Genocide” is an unfortunate term due to contradictory stances of genocide scholars regarding its meaning and application. For instance, Michael Ignatieff (2001, p. 25) refuses to accept that the black slavery which killed millions of African slaves was genocide. In his own words:
slavery is called genocide, when—whatever else it was—it was a system to exploit the living rather than to exterminate them … Genocide has no meaning unless the crime can be connected to a clear intention to exterminate a human group in whole or in part. Something more than rhetorical exaggeration for effect is at stake here. Calling every abuse or crime a genocide makes it steadily more difficult to rouse people to action when a genuine genocide is taking place.
Ignatieff presents a humane view of slavery. By his formulation, the human costs of slavery were just an epiphenomenon. The master was not so bad after all because he wanted his slaves to live a long, healthy life so that he could utilize their bodies. Ignatieff, inter alia, is not willing even to give a basic understanding of slavery— “whatever else it was.” He is unhappy with calling “every” abuse and crime genocidal. It can be argued that few descendants of the slaves today would find Ignatieff ’s view of slavery acceptable. It may be asked: What about those slaves who ceased to be “useful” once past their physical prime? Was there a welfare system set up for them by their white masters? What about those who were not “useful” by birth because they had some disability? What if today a descendant of those slaves claims that their treatment constituted genocide? Will they be shut up because their claim (of genocide) is not in line with a definition that Ignatieff constructs?
Another unfortunate aspect of the traditional debate about genocide is its focus on the number of people physically eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of people have to be killed in order to qualify for the title. Otherwise, any debate about their status will hit one definitional snag after another, such as “carnage,” “massacre,” “violence,” “mayhem,” “bloodshed,” “bloodbath,” and even “incomplete genocide”. Thus Melson (1992, p. 3) defines partial genocide as “mass murder in order to coerce and to alter the identity and politics of the group, not to destroy it”.
As will be seen below, Melson cannot differentiate between mass killing and
genocide, a distinction which is made by Waller (2007, p. 14), thus:
Scholars use two terms to classify the collective violence stemming from state-directed terrorism. Mass killing means killing members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group or killing large numbers of people without a definition of group membership. Collective violence means genocide when a specific group is systematically and intentionally targeted for destruction.
Rubenstein (2004, p. 2) gives the following definition of genocide: “Genocide might then be defined as the deliberate killing of most or all members of a collective group for the mere fact of being members of that group.”
This may be called a numbers game—pseudoscientific positivism, at best— according to which the only criterion to qualify for genocide is the number of people killed. What if 49 percent of a targeted group are killed and 51 percent survive? According to Rubenstein’s criterion, it will not be considered genocide.
Many more scholars have insisted that genocide is no more than the actual killing of people. Pieter Drost (1959, p. 125), one of the earliest scholars of genocide, defined genocide as: “the deliberate destruction of physical life of individual human beings by their membership of any human collectivity as such.”
Thackrah’s (2004, p. 104) definition is also about physical annihilation: “the systematic elimination of a group of people who have been designated by another community or by a government to be destroyed.”
Most scholarly works on genocide reference the United Nations definition of genocide. The UN definition of genocide enshrined in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, passed in December 1948, says that any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious groups, constitutes genocide:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily harm or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures to prevent births with the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Some scholars have tried to obfuscate genocide in pain-and-pleasure, quick- recovery terms. For instance, May (2010, p. 88) contends:
The lives [of genocide survivors] may well be enormously impoverished, but people will normally be able to form new social relationships and social rules partially to replace those lost by the genocidal campaign. Second, although the lives and deaths of the victims of genocide will be impoverished because of the loss of some group-based identification, perhaps even unaffected by what has occurred in the genocide. And third, although genocide does affect the meaningfulness of both one’s life and death, it is likely that there is still some meaning to life and death ever after genocide.
This is another unfortunate example of how an armchair scholar undermines the whole notion of genocide. Expressions such as “normally,” “identification,” and “ever after” will sound vacuous, even heartless, to someone who is a member of a group targeted by a genocidal campaign.
The problem with most of the scholars and writers on genocide is that most of them seem to have spent little time with survivors of a genocide. They often rely on second-hand information, and probably lack empathy for the people they study. Another problem is that many scholars do not seem to have properly conceptualized genocide.
Understanding the concept of genocide should involve probing it from various angles, locating it in its sociohistorical perspectives, and trying to uncover hidden:
It is not that there are no good definitions of genocide; far from it. For instance, Chalk and Jonassohn (1990, p. 23) say:
Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrators.
This definition is not complete but it has a few important points: (1) genocide involves the victim and the perpetrator; (2) there is a power asymmetry between the two groups; (3) there is a formidably powerful institution backing the perpetrator; (4) it is the perpetrator who decides if the victim deserves to live or not; and (5) the victim faces potential destruction.
Shaw (2003, 34) defines genocide as: “Deliberate destruction of a people, principally but only by means of killing some of its members.”
There are two outstanding features of this definition. First, genocide is deliberate, and since it is deliberate it is executed over a certain period. In other words, genocide is not a one-off incident. Second, genocide is not just the physical elimination of the victim. As I will try to show below, genocide can be carried out without actually killing a member of a target group.
Since this chapter is not about genocide in general but the genocide of the Shias of Pakistan, I would like to end this section with a few relevant remarks.
Given the limitation of the physical-eliminative notion, I propose that genocide be explored in ecological terms. Ecology, I will try to show below, is an all-inclusive concept. The ecology of genocide will include the post-traumatic lives of survivors and also the new (future) stage(s) in the history of genocide. An ecological view of genocide will mean that the notion should be studied phenomenologically: What is it like for the victim to live in a genocidal ecology? What is it like for a Shia to live in a society (i.e., Pakistan) where wall after wall has graffiti declaring Kafir Kafir Shia Kafir”? What is it like to pass by a mosque or madrassa where loudspeakers at any time of the day shout fatwas that Shias are blasphemers, enemies of Islam, fitnah, Jewish agents, and wajib-ul-qatal? What kind of society do the Shias live in where Shia haters publicly and in the media justify Shia killing by declaring them apostate and heretics, and the state invokes no law to check them? What is the world like for a Shia who has survived a genocidal attack but is physically incapacitated? How does their mind function after escaping death? How many Shia children develop dissociative identity disorder because they live in a society where they are traumatized?
almost every day? What dreams about their future do they have? How do they regulate their “affective reactions”? What about the families of the Shias killed? How do they act out their lives economically, psychologically, and socially? What happens to their family structure?
2.Genocide: An alternative view
It is hoped that the preceding remarks clarify that genocide should not be confined to the people who are eliminated physically. The genocidal killing of members of a designated group at any given time is but a stage in a genocidal campaign. One genocidal act at a given moment brings about many repercussions. One way to engage with the phenomenon of genocide is to understand it in terms of injury recidivism. In their archaeological ethnographic-interpretative work, Harrod, Lienard, and Martin have argued that clinical data the world over has shown that people who suffer significant injury are at greater risk of future injuries. This includes a fair amount of accidental trauma too. They (2012, p. 64) further say:
In intragroup conflict, nonlethal violence is similar to lethal violence in that the desired outcome of confrontation is to gain status or resources through the submission of other individual(s).
The argument of Harrod et al. can certainly be extended to a group that faces persistent discrimination, is regularly demonized, and lives in a state of permanent insecurity because any number of its members can be (indeed, are) fatally attacked without warning.
Most of the studies done on genocide, unfortunately, fail to address this issue.
Another way of looking at the phenomenon of genocide is not to dis- cuss it in religious phraseology even if the victims are killed in the name of religion. There is no denying the fact that genocide is an ethical issue. It is an extremely emotive issue too, and it evokes the Manichaean binary of good and evil. However, religious, or moral metaphors lead to abstractions. Genocide, therefore, should be dealt with as a legal- human issue. Dying a natural death is a basic human right. Someone killed for their beliefs, race, or ethnicity is deprived of their human right to not only live out their natural span of life but also of their dreams, ideals, desires, and visions. Thus, genocide is a crime and not a moral aberration. People cannot be prosecuted for their moral shortcomings. It is only when they commit crimes that they can be punished by society. Last, collateral damage to various possessions of genocide victims should also be considered as part of genocide, such as the destruction of the victims’ means of livelihood and dwelling. Here is an example, an eyewitness account, of how genocide is a combination of loss of the victim’s life and of their possessions:
We have recently seen a horrible example of the Wahhabis’ cruel fanaticism … Now the enormous wealth that has accumulated in the [mosques of Imam Hussain] … has been exciting the Wahhabis’ avidity for a long time. They have been dreaming permanently of the looting of the town and were so sure of success that their creditors fixed the debt payment to the happy day when their hopes would come true. That day came at last … 12,000 Wahhabis suddenly attacked [the mosque of] Imam Hussain; after seizing more spoils than they had ever seized after their greatest victories they put everything to fire and sword …. Old people, women and children—every- body died at the barbarians’ sword. Besides, it is said that whenever they saw a pregnant woman, they disembowelled her and left the foetus on the mother’s bleeding corpse. Their cruelty could not be satisfied, they did not cease their murders and blood flowed like water. As a result of the bloody catastrophe, more than 4,000 people perished. The Wahhabis carried off their plunder on the backs of 4,000 camels. After the plunder and murders, they destroyed the imam’s mausoleum, and converted it into a cloaca of abomination and blood. They inflicted the greatest damage on the mina- rets and domes, believing that those structures were made of gold bricks. (Fatah 2008, p. 146)
Based on my examination of various genocidal campaigns, and with an eye on the Shia genocide in Pakistan, I would like to define genocide as an altruistic, institutionalized assault on inner and outer lives of a largely defenceless group whose culpability is designated by the perpetrator.
Below I present five points to clarify the definition. Given the focus of this work, I shall base my discussion mainly on examples from the Shia genocide in Pakistan: Altruistic: Probably every genocidal campaign is of an argumentative- justificatory nature with moralistic warrants. In the perpetrators’ discourse, words such as “killing” or “murder” seldom appear. The alibi for genocide posited is that some act or action taken by the perpetrators is based on some “higher” principle that may be for societal/social or religious/moral good. One way to approach the altruistic nature of genocide is to view it diachronically, which means that genocide is often not a one-off action; it has roots in history. The roots lie in a past incident or incidents that the perpetrator claims to be outrageous and unforgivable. The incident(s) can be of religious, political, economic, or even mythical nature, but the perpetrator claims it/them to be a matter of great significance.
The Shia genocide in Pakistan and elsewhere is based on the claim of the perpetrators that for hundreds of years the Shias have been insulting some revered personalities of Islam, including some of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad. The Shias are also blamed for waging wars against Sunni rulers in the past, thus the Deobandi claim that the Shias have historically been blasphemers and saboteurs (see below).
Given the altruistic nature of genocide, it can be claimed that it is fundamentally an obliterative project. Thus, there is no room for the victim to live with the perpetrator in peaceful co-existence. The only way for the victim to live peacefully is to give up their lifestyle and/or belief system and adopt that of the perpetrator or live as a second- class citizen. Thus, it may be said that genocide is transformative because it seeks the victim’s transformation one way or another.
The Shia killers in Pakistan, and elsewhere, are very categorical and uncompromising about wiping the Shias out of existence for being kafir. They openly claim that the Shias should either give up their “blasphemous” beliefs or get ready to be killed.
Institutionalized:
The word “institution” covers a large terrain. First, the genocidal mind and intent are rooted in the ideological belief system of the perpetrator. The history of the relations between the perpetrator and the victim is based on and/or backed by widely accepted tracts and edicts that the victim’s existence is unacceptable. “Institution” also means a powerful organization, often a state that puts its weight behind the perpetrator. Genocide is not possible without the patronage of a state or an immensely powerful organization. Sometimes the state itself carries out genocide. However, where a state is weak, non-state actors—states within a state— carry out genocidal violence. Brass (2003) claims that the genocidal violence in Punjab at the time of Partition had nothing to do with the state. He is, if at all, only partially correct. The violence was the result of the established British policy of divide and rule. Besides, at the time of Partition, the British state abandoned people to their fate, giving marauders and assassins complete impunity to act violently.
Historically there have been countless state-sanctioned fatwas against the Shias, declaring them infidels and unworthy of living. It has been because of these fatwas that the Shias have historically been indiscriminately killed, crushed, or pushed to extreme marginality in every society where they have lived with non-Shia Muslims. In Pakistan, it is the state itself that has created Shia killers and has been patronizing them. All the main institutions of the state of Pakistan—such as the army, the judiciary, the press, and the political rulers—are complicit in the Shia genocide. In Saudi Arabia and Bahrain too, it is the state which has been killing Shias with impunity. In the words of Rosen (2006, p. 182),
In Saudi Arabia, hone to Wahabi Islam, Shias are known as rafida, or “rejectionists”. A highly pejorative term, it means that Shias are outside Islam. To Shias it is the equivalent of being called “nigger.” Zarqawi uses the word to describe Shias, as do many other Sunni radicals in the region. Saudi Arabia’s Shias have been persecuted, prevented from celebrating their festivals, and occasionally threatened with extermination.
Inner and outer lives:
This is the crucial point of the definition presented above. As I have tried to show in my discussion of various definitions of genocide, it is wrong to think of it only in terms of the physical elimination of the victim. The genocidal perpetrator aims to obliterate the victim’s inner and outer lives. The perpetrator wants to destroy the culture and the soul of the victim. This is why, ethnocide is part of genocide. Indeed, ethnocide is the softer side of genocide because its declared intent is not to kill the victim. Ethnocide admits the relativity of evil in difference: others are evil, but we can improve them by making them transform themselves until they are identical, to the model we propose and impose (Clastres 1994, p. 23).
Thus, if the victim is weaned away from their culture and is made to adopt the culture of the perpetrator, their identity and inner life cease to exist. In addition, as noted above, the victim living in a genocidal society lives in permanent fear and is constantly traumatized. It would not be hard to imagine that in such a condition the victim either becomes defensive with respect to their culture and beliefs, or begins to hate their community, its various practices, and, perhaps, themselves. In any case, they experience helplessness and hopelessness:
Genocide in the generic sense is the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defencelessness and helplessness of the victims. (Charny 1997, p. 86)
Clastres (1994, p. 44) has also notes:
Ethnocide is then the systematic destruction of the ways of living and thinking of people different from those who lead this venture of destruction. In sum, genocide assassinates people in their body, ethnocide kills them in their mind.
Whereas Clastres distinguishes genocide from ethnocide, I argue that ethnocide is part of genocide. I draw support for my view, for instance, from Manne, who says:
A national inquiry last year found that the [Australian] government policy of forced removal was a gross violation of human rights and technically an act of genocide because it has the intention of destroying Australia’s indigenous culture by forced assimilation. (R. Manne cited by Martin and Rose 2003, p. 32)
The outer life has at least two aspects. First is the very physical existence that the genocidal perpetrator seeks to eliminate. This is pure murder. However, the other aspect of the outer life is about how an individual functions as part of society. The outer life is also the physical correlative of one’s cultural and religious beliefs and practices. In a genocidal situation, the victim faces discrimination in various forms and at various levels. Thus, they cannot carry out activities to which they are entitled as humans. The perpetrator robs the victim of their human essence. It is in this context that Card has claimed that genocide is “social death”.
To cite her, Specific to genocide is the harm inflicted on its victims’ social vitality. It is not just that one’s group membership is the occasion for harms that are definable independently of one’s identity as a member of the group. When a group with its own cultural identity is destroyed, its survivors lose their cultural heritage and may even lose their intergenerational connections. To use Orlando Patterson’s terminology, in that event, they may become “socially dead” and their descendants “natally alienated,” no longer able to pass along and build upon the traditions, cultural developments (including languages), and projects of earlier generations. The harm of social death is not necessarily less extreme than that of physical death. Social death can even aggravate physical death by making it indecent, removing all respectful and caring rituals, social connections, and social contexts that can make dying bearable and even making one’s death meaningful. In my view, the special evil of genocide lies in its infliction of not just physical death (when it does that) but social death, producing consequent meaninglessness of one’s life and even of its termination. (Card 2003, p. 73)
A view of a genocidal campaign carried out in the past or the present will amply show that the perpetrator’s intention was as much destroying the mind and soul of the victim as destroying their body. Turkey is one significant example. It is one country that has historically carried out multiple genocides. The example of Turkey’s Kurdish population is relevant here. The Kurds have not been allowed to use their own language for any meaningful activity other than day-to-day communication. Turkey did not allow the Kurds to publish anything in their language. They were not allowed to study Kurdish in school. No assault on a culture of a group is as far-reaching and destructive as banning its language. The wholesale killing of the natives by the Conquistadores went hand in
hand with the banning of native religious and cultural practices. It would not be hard to argue that a religious-fanatic mind and a genocidal mind are more or less the same in their obsession with destroying the inner and outer lives of the victim group.
In Pakistan, the Shias find it hard to continue to carry out their religious and cultural practices. By holding a religious gathering, they put their lives on the line. Shia mosques, houses, and religious gatherings and processions are routinely bombed. They are allowed to hold gatherings and processions only in those places and areas where they have been doing so for decades. They are required to obtain a licence from the government to stage a procession or hold a gathering, called majlis. Having spoken to hundreds of Shias, I can safely claim that since General Zia ul Haq took over in July 1977, they have not been issued a single licence for a religious procession.
The entire cultural and educational scene of Pakistan aims to create a sense of irrelevance, marginality, and inferiority among the Shias. A few examples by way of illustration are in order here, such as the yearly literary festivals held in Karachi and Lahore. Every festival includes sessions on “literature and society” and “literature and politics”. In 2012, 2013, and 2014, the two festivals were preceded by Shia killings in Quetta and Karachi. In the various discussions held by the participants, the possibility of striking peace with the Taliban was discussed in a pros-and-cons spirit, but no mention was made of the Shia killings. A few people who tried to raise the issue were asked to leave. The media totally blacked out the fact that anyone tried to say a word about the Shia killings. The Shia identity is so suspect that, even at a book fair, anything suspected to be Shia is not allowed to be displayed or sold. Even at international book fairs, a ‘Shia’ Iranian bookstall is forced to pack up and leave because there are “Shia books” on sale.
In Pakistan, “religious studies” and “Pakistan studies” are compulsory subjects up to the college level. In these two subjects, every effort is made to destroy the Shia identity. In religious studies, students are told that the only proper ways of doing ablution, offering prayers, living like a true Muslim, and burying the dead are the Sunni ways. No recognition is given to the fact that Islam in Pakistan is not monolithic. The Shias constitute 20 percent of Pakistan’s population, but in the “Islamic studies” books they are not acknowledged, even as one of the sects making up Islam. In these books, Islam means everything which is non-Shia, even anti-Shia. Even in those areas where they are in the majority, Shia students are forced to read books that explicitly tell them that their way of praying and so forth is not the “proper Islamic” way. In this respect, the case of Gilgit-Skardu is significant where the Shias are in the majority, constituting 75
percent of the population. Shia students have been forced to read Islamic studies books that portray them as heretics. When in 2000 the Shias demanded the removal of controversial content from the textbooks, scores of them, including their community leaders, were killed by the security forces. The Shia areas were placed under curfew and the students were not allowed to enter schools and colleges for a year. Their economic lives were curtailed too. It took them almost five years to change the highly offensive contents.
Apart from the religious rituals, the inner lives of Shias are attacked in another way. Pakistan society is awash with national heroes who happen to be those Muslim warriors who in the past conquered and/or ruled India. As Ahmed has pointed out, every hero promoted in various forums—media, schools, cultural shows, and festivals—was a Shia killer. In addition to the warrior-heroes, Pakistani textbooks have “Islamic” heroes too. These are theologians of yore, such as Shah Waliullah and Sheikh Ahmed Sirhindi, who spent their lives preaching not only hatred of Shias but also their physical annihilation. The intensity of anti-Shia curricula in Pakistanis has led to the majority of students at Pakistan’s universities regarding the Shias as kafirs (infidels).
Largely defenceless:
The victim group is largely defenceless. It is possible that the victim can put up a fight in some circumstances, such as a place/area where the victim community has a significant number of people. However, in the overall scenario of genocide, it matters little. The victim group is defenceless and is at the mercy of the perpetrator.
As a result of the incessant killings of Shias, especially Shia doctors in the early 1990s, some Shia youths formed a group called Sipah-e-Muhammad (the Soldiers of Muhammad), which resisted the SSP (the Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet). Some Shias claim that the Soldiers of Muhammad was created by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to bring a bad name to the Shias to prove that they were also capable of violence. However, even if the Soldiers of Muhammad was a genuinely Shia resistance group, it was officially banned in 2001, and its leaders and activists were either killed or jailed without any legal process or procedure being followed. One of its leaders, Ghulam Raza Naqvi, spent 18 years in jail (1996–2014) without ever being charged. No publication, no human rights group, and no politicians ever raised a voice about him.
Victim’s culpability:
That the victim’s culpability—or crime or sin—is defined by the perpetrator is indicative of the immense power of the latter. One way to do this is to identify the victim in sinful or criminal terms. Dabag (2005, p. 52) has put it clearly thus:
The exertion of violence and its authorization are also closely related to the construction of collective identity in the perpetrator society. Thus, the study of genocide and identity raises two issues: for the victims, suffering from genocide implies a multitude of discontinuities, injuries, and losses. The experience of extreme physical and psychological violation not only leads to long-term traumatic effects which are passed on to following generations, but also to the radical destruction of their identities. This kind of destruction, however, is not a mere side effect of genocidal violence, but rather its primary objective. Since the perpetrators are powerful, they can construct ‘facts/truths’ about their victims which justify genocide. The perpetrator’s power to inscribe a specific identity on the victims also robs them of their dignity that, inter alia, is a violation of their basic human rights:
human persons possess an inherent dignity by virtue of the properties of their existent personal being. Simply by being the kinds of creatures they are ontologically; persons are characterized by real dignity. Dignity is not an extra benefit conferred upon persons by social contract or positive law. Dignity is not the culturally relative invention of some people who socially construct it in their minds and discourse. Dignity is a real, objective feature of human personhood. (Smith 2010, p. 434)
The Shias claim to be Muslims because they believe in all the basic five fundamental doctrines of Islam, like other Islamic sects. However, the Shia killers, given their sheer power and backing by the state of Pakistan, have forced a different identity on them: they are kafir. Had Dr Ali Haider converted to, say, the Deobandi sect of Islam, he would have become a hero, a poster boy of the Deobandis, purified of all sins for having been a Shia in the past, and his life would have been spared. However, he would have ceased to be a Shia. Similarly, if, for the sake of argument, all the Shias of Pakistan were to give up their beliefs as demanded by the Deobandis, they would not be killed, but their Shia identity, and various cultural and denominational practices, would be wiped out of existence. In other words, without a single Shia being killed, the genocide of the Shias would be complete. This should support my claim above that genocide is possible without any actual killing taking place. Reducing the life chances of a group will result in its disappearance as group eventually. An all-out assault on a group’s inner life will obliterate every other aspect of that life.
3.Modelling genocide
Consequent to the above discussion, it is perhaps possible to work out a model for
the concept of genocide. I propose the following model, which, Iwould liketo claim, covers almost the entire range of the concept:
Ideational grounding
This refers to the provenance and locale of a given instance of genocide. Genocidal violence seeks its justification in some actual or perceived historical incident and is perpetuated on certain people in a certain place or places. The grounding can be epistemological. For instance, the genocidal violence against the Shias is as old as the 1400- year history of Islam. The justification for the violence is based upon the persecutors’ claim that the Shias insult some companions of the Prophet Muhammad. The ‘insult’ originated in the succession dispute after the death of the Prophet (for a concise account of the origins of the dispute, see Hazleton 2009). The Shias at that time supported the unsuccessful succession claim of Ali bin Abu Talib, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law. To this day, the Shias argue that the claim of Ali bin Abu Talib was more legitimate than that of those who succeeded the Prophet.
It is interesting to note that the Shias are killed not because they have any disagreement with other Muslims over any of the fundamentals of Islam; they are killed because they do not accept the legitimacy of some of the companions of the Prophet to rule over more than 1,000 years ago. Thus, the Shias and their homes, workplaces, mosques, bodies, and minds have become hostage to an epistemological ideational grounding (see below).
Evaluative positioning
One way of positioning the victims is to deny that their genocide is taking place or has ever taken place. For instance, an outright denial is made: no such thing as genocide is taking place. This is done by denying the very identity, which is the very cause of genocide, of the victims. Another way of denying genocide is to claim that some people of a certain group are being killed, but they are either killed at random—that is, the killing is not systematic—or the number is too low to qualify as genocide. By not reporting the identity of the victims, the denier puts an irrelevant gloss on the killing in question.
Another way to position an issue in question is to adopt cognitive vagueness about it. This is done by adopting twisted axiology. In the context of the Shia genocide, it is done in many ways. One way is to explain the Shia genocide by creating a false Shia– Sunni binary—that is, it is a Shia-versus-Sunni conflict. The Shia genocide in Pakistan is being carried out not by Sunnis but by Deobandis. More than 55 percent of Pakistanis are Barelvi Sunnis. The Deobandi Sunnis make up 20 percent. Those journalists who call the Shia genocide a Shia–Sunni conflict are in fact guilty of creating false perspectives from which to view the issue. A few more ways of creating obfuscation are (1) to call the violence against the Shias a ramification of the Iran–Saudi conflict in the Middle East; (2) to claim that the anti-Shia violence is a result of the US drone attacks following 9/11 (since the Deobandi Taliban cannot strike back at the Americans, they attack the Shias); and (3) the Shia killers are well-meaning but misguided Muslims—‘our people’—who can be convinced to scale back their ‘militancy’.
Validatory hermeneutics, or justification of the Shia genocide, is posited through ‘persuasive’ argumentation. Such argumentation is based on jurisprudence, theology, and nationalism. In accordance with such validatory hermeneutics, the argument that blasphemers and infidels have to be put to the sword is naturalised. Through the twisted exegesis of ‘authoritative’ sources, murder is justified. It is also justified because of nationalism: the Shias of Pakistan are ‘agents’ of Shia Iran who have secretly been gnawing at the foundations of Pakistan.
The justification of genocide is also couched in other terms, such as ridiculing the victims or giving Marxist and psychological explanations of the motives behind killing (see below for more on the Marxist view of the Shia genocide).
Thematic representation
In a genocidal campaign, the victims’ beliefs and practices are foregrounded in terms that portray them as hostile to and incompatible with those of their tormentors. The commonalities that can bring the tormentors and their victims together are backgrounded.
There are five basic tenets of Islam: shahadah (the belief that Allah is the only deity and Muhammad was his messenger); salat (daily prayers); zakat (charity); fasting; and hajj (a Muslim must perform the pilgrimage at least once). There are other tenets that must be accepted: belief in the holy books; belief in the prophets who preceded Prophet Muhammad; belief in the angels; and belief in the Day of Judgment.
All Shias follow the above tenets. All Shias follow the above tenets. However, they don’t accept the legitimacy of concept of consultation-based selection of Imam/Amir (The commander) of the Muslim Community that is big and basic difference with Sunni Muslims. Primary/Initial Shi’a-Muslim had rejected the selection of Abu Bakar as the Commander of the early Muslim community after death of the Holy Prophet because in their view the Holy Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had appointed Ali Ibne Abi Talib as his successor and the commander of the Muslim community at the Place of Ghadeer-e-Khum while returning from Mecca after performing of Hajj to Medina. Thus, Shi’a Muslim had rejected the nomination of Umar as 2nd Caliph by Abu Bakar at the bed of the death and they had rejected the nomination of Usman as 3rd Caliph. We can understand that in Shi’a Muslims’ point of view these were not Shi’a Muslims who had deviated from any principle of Islam but Proto-Sunni and Sunni Islam had deviated from the way of running the affairs of Muslim community after the death of the Holy Prophet, which was advised but the Holy Prophet after receiving the instruction from Allah through the last verse of the Quran:
یَااٴَیُّہَا الرَّسُولُ بَلِّغْ مَا اٴُنزِلَ إِلَیْکَ مِنْ رَبِّکَ وَإِنْ لَمْ تَفْعَلْ فَمَا بَلَّغْتَ رِسَالَتَہُ وَاللهُ یَعْصِمُکَ مِنْ النَّاسِ إِنَّ اللهَ لاَیَہْدِی الْقَوْمَ الْکَافِرِینَ
O Messenger! convey to the people what has been revealed to thee from thy Lord; and if thou do it not, thou has not conveyed HIS Message. And ALLAH will protect thee from men. Surely ALLAH guides not the disbelieving people.
Al-Quran,Surah Akmaidah,Verse,67
According to many initial the Migrants and the Helpers, in the last Verse of the Quran revealed to the Holy Prophet while he was returning from Mecca to Medina at the place of Ghadeer-i-Khum, Allah had ordered the Holy Prophet to convey to all Muslims that Ali Ibne Abi Talib would be the Commander /Imam of the Muslim Community after his death. Every person who accepted the Ali, the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet after the selection of Abu Bakar as first Commander of the Muslim community was silenced by forced and persecuted.
Perpetrators of Shi’a genocide don’t accept that Shia’ Muslims believe in the basic tenets of Islam just like the Sunnis.
4.Conclusion
Genocide, as I have indicated above, is a matter of one group’s power over another. The unchallenged power of the Deobandi groups is possible only if the Deobandis have the backing of elements in the state institutions, especially in the Pakistan Army, which is the de facto ruling elite of the country. Apart from the elements in the army, the main backers have been Salafi Takfiri elements in Saudi Arabia and the Takfiri lobbies in Right Wing religious or center right parties like Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz Sharif Group), PMLQ, JI JUIF-F etc. Research on the Deobandi nexus with these actors can be carried out to find out how national/local and international elements have contributed to making Pakistan a land of genocides.
The electronic media’s construction of Ahmed Ludhianvi 70 from the chief promoter of the Shia killing to a national political leader is instructive. I remember that when the Geo channel first put Ludhianvi on a talk show, no other guest was willing to sit with him.71 Now he is an “Islamic scholar” and the voice of the “moderate Sunnis”. Electronic media is now more active than print media in promoting the Shia genocide. Research on its advocacy of the genocide is urgently needed.
