- Pakistan’s Barelvis used to be trusted as anti-militants. Perhaps no longer
The Economist
MALIK BASHIR, a retired builder, now spends his days sitting under the shade of a tarpaulin, supervising the transformation of his son’s final resting place into a pilgrimage site near Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital. Eventually it will incorporate a shrine, mosque and madrassa. Six weeks after the burial of Mumtaz Qadri, a policeman-turned-bodyguard who murdered his own charge in the name of Islam, there is a temporary structure above his rose-petalled grave and a shop catering to the hundreds who visit each day. Among the trinkets are data-cards packed with videos of Qadri awaiting his execution, singing religious songs from a prison cell.
The hanging of Qadri on February 29th has become a rallying point for Pakistan’s Barelvis, a broad movement within the majority Sunni community which had been regarded as non-political and non-violent as well as a useful foil to more militant sects. Their furious reaction to Qadri’s death has challenged those assumptions.
To the astonishment of senior police in Punjab province, some 100,000 people turned out for Qadri’s funeral prayers on March 2nd. Equally unexpected was the behaviour of the Barelvi mullahs at Qadri’s chehlum, an event held on March 27th to commemorate his death. The clerics led crowds of protesters into Islamabad, where they fought with police, smashed up bus stations and occupied an area outside Parliament for four days. They left only after senior ministers agreed to hear their demands.
Chief among these, many Barelvis want to preserve a draconian ban on blasphemy. They count Qadri as a hero because the man he killed, Punjab’s liberal governor, had criticised it as a “black law”, whereas they think it essential for protecting the honour of Muhammad. Their characteristically South Asian veneration of holy figures puts them at odds with an austere school of Islamic thought that emerged from the Indian seminary of Deoband in the 19th century. Deobandi hardliners disapprove of revering martyrs’ graves, and much else besides. The Barelvis, named after the north Indian town of Bareilly, were organised in defence of folk Islam; most regard themselves simply as Sunnis. The Pakistani Taliban and other terrorists are Deobandis.
Arif Jamal, an expert on religious militancy, says the Barelvis are not as far down the militant path only because Pakistan and its ally Saudi Arabia deliberately kept them out of the state-backed jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s. But “even without state patronage they will be radicalised, slowly but surely”, he says.
A radical turn could pose serious problems. The Barelvis are the majority among Pakistani Sunnis, and probably in the population as a whole. They are especially prominent in Punjab, home turf of both the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) and the army. Devotees at Qadri’s shrine say they are furious with both institutions.
Mr Bashir says he will never again vote for the PML-N, whose leader is condemned in florid graffiti near the shrine. Instead, he says, he is drawn to a new party coming up in Lahore, led by a Barelvi cleric.
