Pakistan: Shrines attacked again

Six people have been killed ruthlessly in Karachi at the shrine of Ayub Shah Bukhari. Three of the victims were employed at the shrine while the others were frequent visitors. Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has taken responsibility for the gruesome act in which they slit the throats of the victims. The killers left a message for other shrine visitors, warning them to shun visiting shrines otherwise they too would meet the same fate. Though shrines have been attacked previously by TTP, the brutality with which these people have been killed is certainly new and speaks volumes of the inhumanity and barbaric nature of these groups. That they think their mantle of religiosity permits them to brutalize people in order to ‘cleanse’ Islam is enough to suggest that they cannot be negotiatiated with and deserve to be put down down with force.

Sufi Islam through its message of humanism and love has been historically instrumental in connecting people from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds into a single entity. In the history of the subcontinent, saints, shrines and the Sufi ideology has played a significant role in not only spreading Islam but in galvanizing Muslims divided into different denominations and sects towards the centrality of Islamic teaching: respect for human rights and tolerance for others. However, the Taliban and their Salafi brothers are bent upon disfiguring this positive message with their own narrow, literalist, rigid and fanatical interpretation of Islam. Their modus operandi is not to win hearts and minds, it is to terrorise people into acquiescence. Shrines are part of Pakistan’s culture. Their religious symbolism is enshrined in the lives of those buried there. Desecrating their places of burial is disrespecting their efforts to spread Islam’s true message. It is no service to Islam to go around brutally killing people who disagree with you and desecrate the tombs of saints, especially in the name of Islam, inherently a religion of peace and harmony. This is a crisis of religious values that would decimate the basic texture of ‘religion’, a theology that teaches violence and intolerance towards others.

It is time the government gets hold of these fanatics and punishes them for their misdeeds. A large segment of people in Pakistan connect themselves to shrines and those buried there. Frankly speaking, these saplings of hatred are of our own making. Their terrorism is the payback for the jihadist movement that we nourished so fondly. Therefore it is for us only to reverse this wrong path taken.