Murder of Sanctity – Exhuming an Ahmadi from Muslim Graveyard

Fundamentalism is at its extreme in some parts of the country. The recent incident of an Ahmadi’s dead body being exhumed and removed from a Muslim graveyard has once again put a big, dark question mark on the religious tolerance of some communities in Pakistan.

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The deplorable incident took place in Sargogha district of Punjab province and was reported by major media channels, like the BBC. The violated dead body was that of an Ahmadi sect member named Shehzad Waraich, who died on October 30, 2010, and was buried in the graveyard designated by the government for the communities living in the area. The police of the area forced the family of the deceased to retrieve the corpse from the Muslim graveyard since it might cause violence for religious reasons.

The grieving family had to take the dead body several kilometers away for burial in another village where a graveyard for Ahmadi community was available. This act of forcing the family in grief for digging out their dead is an act that certainly won’t earn any bit of respect for Muslim communities in the world.

The attitude here is an unsurpassed exhibition of double standards. Muslims can eat with non-Muslims, work for them, and even marry some of them, but when a non-Muslim is buried near them, their dead are considered “dirty”. Why? Isn’t it a shameless instance of hypocricy? It will be mean to expect respect from non-Muslims in other countries if the enlightened Muslims didn’t stand up against this intolerable coercion of the police officers responsible for creating this situation as well as the members of what is known as “Khatm-e-Nabuwat” organization, who approached the police to force the grieving family into this shameful act.