Ahmadi issues: Lawyer threatened with disbarment, four jailed with false blasphemy charges

The persecution of the Ahmadiyya Community in Pakistan continues. The Ahmadis recognize their 19th-century founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad as “both a prophet and a follower of the Holy Prophet [Muhammad].” This is not good enough for conservative Sunni Muslims, for whom nobody can be called a prophet after Muhammad. Accused of denying this doctrine of the “finality of prophethood,” Ahmadis are prohibited by Pakistani laws to call themselves Muslims and are continuously discriminated and persecuted, writes Willy Fautre, Human Rights Without Frontiers.  On 1 September, it was revealed on social media that the President of the Gojra Bar Association, Ejaz Akhtar Kahoja, had written a letter to an Ahmadi lawyer called Tahir Nauman. The letter stated that the lawyer should renounce his faith or they would cancel the allotment of his chamber and he would be stopped from entering the courts at Gojra, the administrative capital of Gojra tehsil in Punjab. Meanwhile, four Ahmadis remain in jail in the Narowal district, in the upper part of Punjab, for what has become the standard false accusation of blasphemy. They were allegedly seen burning pages of old books, which accusers claim were copies of the Holy Quran. The dynamic is always the same. A cleric from a radical organization, in this case the same Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat involved in the recent prosecution for blasphemy of anti-rape blogger Asma Batool, denounces the alleged blasphemy. Further reading about FORB in this country on HRWF website.

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