Washington, USA - The over two-decade-long sectarian conflict involving Shia and Sunni communities in Pakistan continues to trouble the country, and it is likely to pose a bigger threat in the future.
According to a new study—Sectarian War: Pakistan's Sunni-Shia Violence and its links to the Middle East-- by Khaled Ahmed, Contributing Editor at the Daily Times, the Shia-Sunni conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives in the last two decades, and the trend is continuing in the 21st century also.
The study notes that the level of Sunni-Shia tension has gone up since 1980, when the two sects squared off violently. Like all internecine conflicts, the war of the sects has been characterised by extreme cruelty, it says.
"Pakistanis invariably blame Saudi Arabia and Iran for the violence since they funded and trained the partisans of this war. They are aware that Pakistan was subjected to someone else's 'relocated' war. Much of the internal dynamic of this war remains hidden from public view. A kind of embarrassment over the phenomenon of Muslim-killing-Muslim has prevented Pakistanis from inquiring frankly into how the two hostile states were able to transplant their conflict in Pakistan," pakistanlink.com quotes the study, as saying.
It underlines that the laws promulgated in Pakistan against the apostatisation of the Shia do not contain any provision banning the issuance of fatwas as "private" edicts that violate the sovereignty of the state.
"The state is reluctant to bring the controversy of the apostatising fatwas into the courts of law because the courts themselves function under the sharia and will find it hard to disagree with the fatwas as edicts," it notes, adding, "The state rightly refuses to recognise the Shia as a separate community and has not given them a separate status in the census, meaning that the state does not "officially" discriminate on the basis of sect."
Ahmed, interestingly, points out that out of the big cities like Karachi, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, only the first has witnessed some Shia response at the street level to the sectarian activities of the Deobandi seminaries, but by and large they have stayed away from street violence.
Since 2004, the violence has become one-sided and Shia retaliation to Deobandi acts of terrorism has only been in extremis. Shia "retaliation" has come from secret Shia militias run by organisations that remain officially banned, adds the study.
It further says, "Sectarian peace may not return so quickly to certain regions where the Shia-Sunni populations are in a state of equipoise and the Shia have the capacity to assert themselves. The Hazara community in Quetta in Balochistan is ghettoised to an extent that it will continue to attract Sunni violence".
According to Ahmed, tribal agency of Aurakzai and the cities of Bannu and Kohat in the NWFP have been "Talibanised" by Sunni extremists, and the Shias living there are being forced to fight back.
Pointing out that the sectarian violence has drawn its strength from the past too, Ahmed says that Pakistani textbooks went back to pre-British Raj (rule) days and selected periods of Muslim rule where pluralism was at its lowest, and highlighted instead the separation of Hinduism from Islam.
"Most of this selection turned out to be sectarian. While it set Muslims and Hindus apart, it also emphasised the conflict between Sunni and Shia communities. In the early period of Pakistan's history, ignorance of the schism - or amnesia induced by the Raj interregnum - allowed this bias to go unnoticed," it says.
Ahmed conducted the first of its kind study during the last nine months as a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre here.