It is past 10am on a Sunday in January, but the host team -
Fazl-e-Umar - is nowhere to be seen at Rabwah's cricket ground. A teenager
arrives, looks around, and starts doing push-ups. Naveed Ahmad, the 36-year-old
club captain, arrives soon after. He makes a series of brusque phone calls telling
his team-mates to hurry to the ground. Eventually the team straggles in, in
ones and twos, and in uniforms that are several shades of white and off-white.
One player has a cap in the colours of the German flag; others wear blinding
white sneakers. The T-shirts hang off the younger players' lanky frames, their
bodies unsullied by the sedentary lifestyles so common in Punjab.
Many of these players grew up in Rabwah. Some moved here
from other cities. Abdul Hai, a 31-year-old real-estate dealer from Lahore,
comes down to Rabwah for the cricket season. Faisal and his younger brother,
Rafay Ahmed, are expected to arrive soon; they are playing for Fazl-e-Umar
today.
Rabwah is home to Pakistan's Ahmadiyya Muslim community. It
lies just past the city of Chiniot, the languid Chenab River, and a series of
oddly shaped, craggy red rock hills - a town that has literally fallen off the
map. It was renamed Chenab Nagar in 1998, but the name hasn't stuck. Rabwah has
all the signs of the newfound urbanisation sweeping Punjab; ads for Schengen
visas and magical cures to increase one's height abound. It also bears signs of
the changes wrought by years of attacks on the Ahmadiyya sect: buildings with
high walls - it is markedly visible where the new bricks were added - and
barbed wire, armed patrols and security cameras. Dozens of Ahmadis have made
Rabwah their home in recent years. Some arrived in coffins. Others were fleeing
mobs and militants.
For over 40 years, the sect has been the target of a
wide-ranging campaign of systematic abuse and discrimination, fuelled by the
state's 1974 decree that, at a stroke, made Ahmadis non-Muslims. The Pakistani
clergy and right wing believe Ahmadis dispute a key tenet of Islam - that
Muhammad was the last Prophet - while Ahmadis believe that the founder of their
movement, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, is the second coming of a promised messiah, and
not a new prophet. In 1984, Pakistan effectively made it illegal for Ahmadis to
practise Islam, equating their doing so to an act of blasphemy.
Blaspheming
against Prophet Muhammad is punishable by death in Pakistan, and the blasphemy
law is often used to target Ahmadis.
With all but state-sanctioned approval, militants have
attacked Ahmadi mosques (in 2010 one attack in Lahore killed 94) and the
right-wing clergy and hard-line religious groups have embarked on a campaign of
assassinations, blasphemy cases, a social and economic boycott, and general
widespread discrimination. If the dream of playing cricket in Pakistan is
passed down from one generation to the next, so are the reins of the
anti-Ahmadi movement. Pakistani children are told at school that Ahmadis are
non-believers and blasphemers. Every key government form - from a passport
application to voter registration - requires Pakistani Muslims to sign a
declaration rejecting the Ahmadiyya faith. The community is largely absent from
public life: they do not practise their faith openly, refuse to contest
elections or vote because they object to the separate electorate for Ahmadis,
and are legally barred from practising Islam or calling themselves Muslims.
Countless Ahmadis have left Pakistan after the sect was excommunicated, finding
new homes in Europe, the US and Canada.
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