[/caption]Ernest Dempsey — If you go to a passport office in Pakistan to apply for a new passport, or renew an older one, you soon find yourself face to face with an instant formula for religious intolerance. Your religious faith or affiliation is to be printed on your passport and the procedure requires you to sign a declaration that literally abuses a former Muslim sect that has long been cast out as infidels. What’s the worst is that you have to sign it or else you don’t get your passport without having to declare yourself a non-Muslim (which means potential victimization, possibly life-threatening).
The Ahmadi (also called ‘Qadiani) sect, arising out of the mainstream Islam in the late 19th century India, was declared as non-Muslim in Pakistan in 1974 when the country’s parliament amended the constitution to redefine “Muslim” (interestingly, Pakistan was created in the name of Islam in 1947, without a clear definition of “Muslim”). But it was in the 1980s, when Pakistan was under the rule of the military dictator General Ziaul Haq, that the persecution of this minority sect escalated. Through a special ordinance, the Ahmadis were legally barred from calling themselves Muslims. It was also in that period of time that the particular section of declaring one’s religion was included in the passport. Since then, all Muslim passport applicants are required to sign the three-clause declaration, the third of which reads:
“I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Qadiani to be an impostor prophet and an infidel and also consider his followers whether belonging to the Lahori, Qadiani or Mirzai groups, to be non-Muslims.”
Clearly and blatantly, the passport declaration is a verbal abuse and insult toward a religious sect. Not only does it impose declaring one’s religious faith on the masses, which is and should be a private matter, but also puts state prejudice on paper in the words of citizens many of whom can’t even read or make a signature (they put their thumb impression on the form instead of a signature). A large segment of the Muslim passport holders thus does not know what hatred and insult they are endorsing. Can they even imagine how a still-fundamentalist-dominated state policy is creating social rifts that keep dividing and thereby exploiting them?
In President Musharraf’s reign (another dictator) in 2004, the religion section of the passport was removed, only to be restored shortly after the coalition of religious fundamentalists, then in government, started protesting the president’s new policy on the grounds that it was an attack on the Islamic identity of the citizens.
The implications of this single declaration against Ahmadis and Pakistani Muslims are dark and deep. For the Ahmadis, a Pakistani passport for a Muslim citizen is a curse, a symbolic denial of their acceptance by trashing their faith. But the real persecution is that of the Muslims who are coerced indirectly into signing declarations that represent a prejudice raised to official status 37 years ago. Muslims can’t travel without calling a dissident sect’s founder “imposter”, even if they don’t know they are calling him so, let alone why. As the general saying goes, “you have to earn respect to get it.” So it won’t be unjustified to suggest the addition of another clause in the declaration of religion in the passport form: “I hereby also affirm that I won’t mind in the least if somebody from the Ahmadi sect calls my faith fake and/or despotic.” Or else, let’s declare Pakistan a fundamentalist Muslim state.
