The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

In the spring of 1953, Punjab was swept by riots that targeted the Ahmadis – a small Muslim sect that was barely half a century old. Egged on by rabble-rousing clerics, mobs attacked Ahmadis in the streets, torched their homes and places of worship, and clashed with the riot police. In speeches, the clerics painted the Ahmadis as members of a secretive cabal that they claimed wanted to seize control of Pakistan – an ugly tale with disturbing echoes of the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, only years earlier. In truth, the Ahmadis were despised for their reverence of Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, a preacher who emerged from the Punjab countryside in the late nineteenth century, claiming to be a prophet