Murder of 3 maulvis chills reformist clergy

Rafiq Ahmed, 29 and Siraj Ahmed, 30, were gunned down right outside Jama Masjid on January 18 after the zohr (afternoon) namaz. Both men, from the Deobandi school, had no criminal record and were known for their resistance to the rise in fundamentalism in the city.

According to the First Information Report with the LT Marg police station, soon after the prayers during the taqreer (a brief sermon after the prayers), the two maulvis got into an argument with a group of men over their pacifist preachings which issaid to have hurt the feelings of “the other side”. Among the other reasons for the argument was also the fact that the two clerics had distributed pamphlets in the area that day, justifying their interaction with Bal Thackeray. Just as they emerged from the mosque and turned towards the Abdur Rehman street, five men whipped out revolvers and shot the maulvis in cold blood. Subsequently, all five were arrested.

Initial consternation among the Muslims at the spilling of blood in the fight between the hawks and doves turned into raw fear when on June 3, another maulvi by the name of Hafizi, was found dead at his home in Agripada. Once again, Hafizi was a known pacifist who preached the Quran from door to door. Hafizi’s body was found with his throat slit and a suspicious suicide note by his side.

But Agripada police, investigating the death have ruled out suicide. “It is almost impossible for a man to slit his throat the way Hafizi’s was,” says one officer. The other reason that rules out suicide isthat the Quran frowns on anyone taking his own life and Hafizi was a very religious man.

“There was no way that he would have gone against the diktat of the Quran,” says the policeman.

He suspects that Hafizi, too, was a victim of the ongoing war between the various political parties fighting for space in the Muslim dominated areas of the city.

Whatever the motives, the incidents have come as a warning to the reformists among the community who, according to information available with the Central Bureau of Investigation, have been routinely threatened through a section of the Urdu press.

However, a top ranking police official told Express Newsline on condition of anonymity that the charge that the police were hushing up the cases was baseless and that the Muslim moderates had failed to provide adequate evidence that there was anything amiss.

But by the police’s own admission an environment of fear had overtaken large sections of the Muslim population and was affecting the stance of themoderate clergy. “Take for instance, the dispute over the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday. Normally there is no controversy over the birth date but this year when the extremist group insisted on separate celebrations, they were not opposed,” says the police officer.

For similar reasons, the community played down the attack on Dr Mehmoodur Rehman, the Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, as he led a procession through the Muslim areas of the city on the Prophet’s birthday. To compound matters, Waris Jamal, the general secretary of the All India Tablig-e-Seerat, who condemned the attack on Dr Rehman, is now himself under siege, with extremists baying for his blood for his pacifist stand.

It took more than ten days for other moderates to summon up the courage to speak out in his favour. And no sooner had they voiced their opposition to the rising extremism — on Sunday — than a group of fundamentalists allegedly launched an abortive bid for the take-over of Khilafat House on Monday,fiercely resisted by its executives. Minutes before the arrival of police, they vanished, and are now declared as “unidentified” by the authorities. Khilafat House is leading the reformist movement in the country and its promoters are now genuinely worried.

“We had already informed the police officials that we expect the building to become the target of such an attack. But nothing is being done,” Khilafat House chairperson Dr Rafiq Zakaria said. “This is typical of the police callousness shown in the regard of the threat to Muslim reformists. Even during the procession, police had intelligence about a possible attack on it. But they made no bundobast, not even caring to remove the road blocks put up in Bhendi Bazaar and switch on the lights after a deliberate blackout to stop our progress. We are genuinely worried,” he added. But the biggest cause for worry is elsewhere. The five killers of the maulvis killed outside Jama Masjid — Anees Abdul Zakaria, Mazhar Khan Pathan, Akeel Mansoori, Javed Kaliaand Farooq Mutija — have been known to operate at the behest of Dawood Ibrahim. A frightening indication that for the first time, the underworld might be getting involved in the fight of the doves and hawks.