Tahira Ahmad was hoping to celebrate this week the end of a 12-year wait to legally call India her home. A September 7 notification issued by the Narendra Modi government has shattered that dream. The home ministry order, for the first time in decades, allows Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Christians and Parsis from Pakistan and Bangladesh, who are now in India, to stay in the country indefinitely without worrying about either passports or visas.
The Times, September 25, 1974 The adoption earlier this month by Pakistan’s national assembly of a Bill conferring non-Muslim status on the Ahmadiyya sect, was a depressing victory for religious bigotry. The assembly’s decision must greatly strengthen the hand of the more rigidly orthodox “Ulema” (professional theologians) and the Muslim fundamentalists of Maulana Maudoodi’s politically active Jamaat-i-Islami a group Mr Bhutto once described to me as ” antediluvian and obscurantist “.
The leader of a Muslim community has called for a global solution for the refugee crisis in Europe, saying Arab countries should ‘first and foremost’ provide refuge for migrants.And, he warned the world to be ever vigilant to the threat of terror saying proper checks should be in place to ensure extremists did not pose as refugees. Rafiq Hayat, the Amir (National President) of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in UK, said: “The sympathies of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community are with …
Islamic extremists linked to the “Khatme Nabuwat” movement are set to hold a “Khatme Nabuwat conference” at the illegally constructed Jamia Usmania in the “Muslim Colony”. The conference is being held to celebrate Pakistan National Assembly’s decision which declared Ahmadis as non-Muslim 41 years ago on 7th September 1974. The conference will be attended by several local islamists including Amir Hamza, a leading member of the banned terrorist outfit Jammat ud Dawa, JUD’s Chief Hafiz Saeed has a $10 million US government bounty …
Wajid Shamsul Hassan’s speech at Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s annual convention in UK. Legislators from both ruling and opposition benches in Pakistan’s Punjab Assembly on Thursday severely criticised the statement of former Pakistani diplomat to UK Wajid Shamsul Hasan in which he said that the decision to declare Ahmadiyya Muslims a minority in Pakistan was wrong.
More than 30,000 Muslims gathered in Hampshire this weekend to hear Barrie Schwortz, an Orthodox Jew, discuss the significance of the Shroud of Turin, a Christian artefact. The Jalsa Salana UK Convention is run by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which believes the Shroud of Turin bears the image of Jesus, alive in the tomb after his crucifixion. A life-sized replica of the Shroud of Turin was one of many exhibits on human rights and the Koran on display at the …
The leader of the Muslim Ahmadiyya community has called for the authorities in the UK to monitor what happens in mosques and madrassas or Islamic religious schools, to help counter radicalisation. Ahmadiyya Muslims number many million across the world, and are a movement that started in India more than 100 years ago. However, they are considered apostates by other sects within Islam, and have suffered persecution in countries such as Pakistan where they are banned. Their annual gathering of more …
AMRITSAR: Along with the rakhis, this year, Tahira Zahur, a Pakistani woman married in India, has shared her rakhi wish her brothers across the border: to stop encouraging terrorists operating from their soil to play havoc across in India. The terror attack in Dinanagar moved her so much that she has requested them to find a permanent solution for the peaceful existence of their sisters living in India. Tahira is married to Chaudhary Maqbool Ahmad and settled in Qadian, 40km …
Literary icon and former Professor Chaudhry Mohammad Ali passed away on Friday, 14th August at his home in Rabwah. He was 98. Ali was born in “Maseetan” a small village in the Firozpur district of Punjab in 1917.He did his M.A. from Government College Lahore and went on to teach at Punjab University where he was a member of the University Senate and Academic Council. He also taught at F.C. College Lahore and served as the President of the Philosophy …
The brightest 15-year-old in the world can’t find a place at university because she’s too young. Sitara Brooj Akbar moved from Rabwah, Pakistan to the UAE last year after breaking international records in passing examinations. She is the youngest pupil to reach the top level, Band 9, in the International English Language Testing System. IELTS Band 9 qualifies her as an “expert user” of English, with “full operational command of the language: appropriate, accurate and fluent with complete understanding”.
Whistle-blowing website Wikileaks has published more than 60,000 secret documents from Saudi Arabia and said that it had more than half a million additional documents that it will be releasing in the upcoming weeks as part of the “Saudi Cables”. The secretive organization, headed by 43-year-old Australian Julian Assange, was launched in December 2006. The organization facilitates the anonymous leaking of secret information through its website to expose the wrongdoing of governments and corporations.
CHAKWAL: On a first visit, one only notices the calm which engulfs the sleepy village of Pichnand, located some 90 kilometres from the district capital, in Talagang tehsil. Most of its 24,000 residents earn their livelihood from agriculture and cattle farming. And walking through the quiet winding streets of the village, it is hard to tell that underneath the calm, simmer religious tensions with extremism on the rise in the Talagang tehsil, 45 kilometres from Chakwal. New blasphemy cases are …