Purifying the Land of the Pure Quotes

“Once the Ahmadis were officially declared non-Muslim in 1974, a new campaign started with the intent to subject the Shias to similar proscriptions.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“purposes,’ he insisted. In Suhrawardy’s view, the Muslim League government was not making non-Muslims, especially Hindus, feel safe within Pakistan and questioned the government’s claims to the contrary. ‘Why are the Hindus running away from Sindh [if] they were safe and sound, where they had established business on colossal scales and which they made their homes?’ he asked, pointing to the deep cultural ties of Sindhi Hindus to Sindh. According to Suhrawardy, the rhetoric of an Islamic state was responsible for causing insecurity among non-Muslims. ‘The Pakistan State, if it is to be maintained, must be maintained by the goodwill of Pakistanis of all people, Muslims or non-Muslims whom you consider to be your nationals,’ he stressed. The minorities could not depend ‘merely on the goodwill of the Muslims or on their authority or their strength’.48”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Jinnah had chosen a Hindu, Jogendar Nath Mandal, as the country’s first law minister to affirm that secular lawyers and not theologians would run Pakistan’s legal system. But many of his followers could not comprehend this nuanced conception of a state.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“As ally and benefactor, Washington turned a blind eye to Zia’s domestic politics and his pursuit of nuclear weapons for Pakistan. Pakistan’s religious minorities suffered without much protest in the world’s capitals, where Zia was feted as a frontline ally against Soviet expansion. But it is unclear how much influence international protest might have had in diminishing the effects of Zia’s bigotry in any event. Given his stranglehold on power in Pakistan and the geo-political climate of the era, international pressure against Zia’s treatment of the country’s minorities would have been confined to moral appeals and petitions for human rights. And these would have fallen on deaf ears, for Zia’s prejudices were deeply ingrained. Upon being told that his ordinances against Ahmadis had violated global human rights norms, Zia expressed his views toward such matters in a characteristically trenchant manner: ‘Ahmadis offend me because they consider themselves Muslim … Ordinance XX may violate human rights but I don’t care.’80”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“When Pakistan’s only Nobel laureate, the physicist Dr Abdus Salam – an Ahmadi – visited the country, his lecture at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad was picketed by Islamic fundamentalists. As the New York Times reported, the protestors’ objections were ‘not directed at Dr Salem’s research but at the religious beliefs of the small community into which he was born’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“The army’s attitude towards Hindus was summarized by the New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, in a report from the town of Faridpur, published on 29 June 1971 titled ‘Hindus are Targets of Army Terror in an East Pakistani Town’.38 ‘The Pakistani Army has painted big yellow “H’s” on the Hindu shops still standing in this town to identify the property of the minority eighth of the population that it has made its special targets,”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Throughout the war there were widespread rumours of Pakistan’s Hindus and Christians operating as spies or facilitators for the invading army. In some instances, Muslim neighbours engaged in vigilante violence against their non-Muslim compatriots. Even after the war was over, Hindus were described in movies, television plays and patriotic songs as enemies of Islam and Pakistan, while Christians were portrayed as instruments of Western imperialists.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“The space for secular ideas in Pakistan shrank further with the 1965 war and the state-sponsored propaganda of that era. ‘The war brought out a striking characteristic of Pakistan’s political culture,’ observed Khalid bin Sayeed, writing soon after the 1965 India–Pakistan war.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Ayub saw Hinduism and communism as equal threats to Pakistan. In 1959, he wrote in the foreword of a book The Ideology of Pakistan and Its Implementation that one of the questions of concern for Pakistanis was ‘how can the offensive of Hinduism and Communism against the ideology of Islam be combated?’30 In his autobiography, which was published towards the end of his regime in 1968, Ayub made clear his low regard for Hindus and bluntly expressed his steadfast views on why they could not be friends of Pakistan.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, from Bengal, who served as prime minister for a brief period under the 1956 Constitution, warned against the preoccupation with ‘segregation of our voters into religious communities’ and the emphasis on Pakistan’s destiny as an ideological state. This, he said, ‘would keep alive within Pakistan the divisive communal emotions by which the subcontinent was riven before the achievement of Independence’. He proposed instead that Pakistanis start seeing Pakistan ‘in terms of a nation state’. Suhrawardy saw ‘a Pakistan great enough and strong enough to encompass all of its citizens, whatever their faith, on a basis of true civic equality and by that fact made greater and stronger’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“East Pakistan had voted for secular parties, and in West Pakistan too, the Munir Commission report had laid out any number of grounds that could be used to advocate such a course. But the national security establishment preferred to align with West Pakistani Muslim League politicians in persisting with the notion of an Islamic state.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“When asked whether they were bothered by the prospect of mistreatment of Muslims in countries where they lived as minorities, the ulema were surprisingly callous in their responses. Ataullah Shah Bukhari said that it was not possible for a Muslim to be a faithful citizen of a non-Muslim government. Others, including Maulana Abul Hasanat and Maulana Maududi said that they would have no objection to Muslims in India being subjected to Hindu law or Muslims in non-Muslim countries in general being discriminated against. Most of the ulema seemed to believe that Pakistan was somehow the reincarnation of the seventh-century caliphate and that other countries should be viewed as the caliphs (khalifa) looked upon non-Muslim empires of the time.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Liaquat and his westernized colleagues thought they had given Islamists what they wanted. But for Maududi and his fellow Islamists, the Objectives Resolution marked the beginning of a process of cleansing non-Muslim influences from Pakistani State and society. In one of his writings, Maududi had argued that non-Muslim culture had a negative impact on Muslim life. ‘It destroys its inner vitality, blurs its vision, befogs its critical faculties, breeds inferiority complexes, and gradually but assuredly saps all the springs of culture and sounds its death-knell,’ he wrote. He argued that, ‘the Holy Prophet has positively and forcefully forbidden the Muslims to assume the culture and mode of life of the non-Muslims’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Although many Islamic clerics and theologians participated in the campaign to demand Pakistan’s transformation into an Islamic state, the blueprint for a step-by-step transition was offered by Abul Ala Maududi, founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI), the South Asian analogue of the Arab Muslim Brotherhood. Maududi, joined by Mufti Shabbir Ahmed Usmani, a cleric elected to the Constituent Assembly on the Muslim League platform, called for the future constitution of Pakistan to be based on the underlying assumption that sovereignty rested with Allah and that the state’s function was solely to administer the country in accordance with God’s will. Both Islamic scholars also insisted that only the ulema (those trained in Islamic theology) could interpret the laws of Allah.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“According to Suhrawardy, a religion-based state that did not protect its minorities would be one in which ‘there will be no commerce, no business and no trade’. With remarkable prescience, the Bengali leader warned that ‘those lawless elements that may be turned today against non-Muslims will be turned later on, once those fratricidal tendencies have been aroused, against the Muslim gentry’.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Pakistan was not even three years old when its law minister voiced the fear that extremist Muslims would not allow religious diversity. Eventually, Mandal left Pakistan and moved to India,”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Attacks on religious minorities occur in several Muslim-majority nations, from Egypt to Indonesia, just as they do in Pakistan. But as Pakistan is the first country to declare itself an Islamic republic in modern times,”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“At the time of partition in 1947, almost 23 per cent of Pakistan’s population (which then included Bangladesh) comprised non-Muslim citizens. The proportion of non-Muslims has since fallen to approximately 3 per cent.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“in recent years, Pakistan has witnessed some of the worst organized violence against religious minorities since Partition. Over an eighteen-month period covering 2012 and part of 2013, at least 200 incidents of sectarian violence were reported; these incidents led to some 1,800 casualties, including more than 700 deaths.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities

“Karachi’s synagogue was demolished in July 1988 – reportedly on the direct orders of General Zia, Pakistan’s military dictator at the time – to make way for a shopping mall.”
― Farahnaz Ispahani, Purifying the Land of the Pure: Pakistan's Religious Minorities