Tehelka - Yasin Malik’s friend had rejected religion-based politics and was not pro-Pakistan
Zahid Rafiq
Srinagar
In a small lane inside Maisuma, hundreds of people walked over glass smithereens to the mosque’s back entrance. It was a Friday afternoon and almost as many people would walk the way to pray at Kashmir’s oldest Ahl-e-Hadith mosque every Friday. Now, though, everyone stopped just at the entrance, jostling for a look at a frame of a bicycle and pieces of broken, tinted glass.
At 12.15 pm, the president of Jamiat-e-Ahl-e-Hadith and well-known Kashmir scholar Moulvi Showkat Ahmad Shah was assassinated by an IED blast planted in a bag on a bicycle. It was a low-intensity bomb, intended to kill Shah alone. But with his death, the blast resounded across the political landscape far from this Maisuma neighborhood.
Shah was a moderate cleric heading the Salafi order of Islam in Kashmir. He was in the seventh year in his third term as president of the Jamiat.
Shah led the prayers every Friday at the Maisuma Ahl-e-Hadith mosque and always used the rear entrance. On his last day alive, leaving behind his mother, nephew and two security guards in the car, he walked a few paces towards the mosque. “His one foot was in the mosque when the blast happened. I don’t remember clearly what happened after that. He was lying there in blood,” says an eyewitness Yasmeena, who watched it from the window of her house.
Shah’s khutba (sermon) for the week on the Prophet’s humility remained unread in his pocket, and a friend carried his broken glasses and cell phone around. The doctors said he was brought dead to the hospital, from where he was brought back to the Maisuma mosque, his office and the stronghold of his friend and ally Yasin Malik, the chief of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).
Shah was killed few lanes away from Malik’s home. Malik walked the lanes as a hurt and bruised man at the death of a friend. Every Eid, Malik prayed behind Shah and during the Lal Chowk rally last Eid, they stood next to each other.
It did not take long for the news to reach the Jamiat district headquarters and the lanes in Maisuma, already full with people, began swelling with more people entering to look at Shah’s body, pay homage and join the angry sloganeering in favour of independence. The police and the paramilitary force personnel stood at the opening of the lane, but the angry slogans seemed to be directed somewhere else this time.
Jamiat-e-Ahl Hadith has more than 15 lakh members in the Valley and it is the only religious organisation whose members are spread all around: in the mainstream parties, like the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party, the state police and bureaucracy, the judiciary and almost everywhere. The Jamiat has 814 mosques in the Valley and 1,200 in the whole state, which gives it a huge presence and an immense power to organise people and events.
Shah supported independence for Kashmir. His open support for the cause won him many powerful enemies.
When Malik and Mirwaiz Umar Farooq addressed the mourners, India was not mentioned. Instead, both the Mirwaiz and Malik said how Shah’s killer had lost the right to be called a Muslim. “Can anyone who kills a scholar at the doorsteps of a mosque be called a Muslim? This is cowardice. This is savagery. Is this kind of act allowed by Islam, even if you are doing jehad?” Malik said in an emotional speech at the funeral.
Shah was called by many as a sufi heading a Wahabi group, working for peace and unity. He was seen as a non-secetarian religious leader, mourning with the Shias during Muharram and making efforts to unite the separatist leadership.
The two leaders acknowledged this and called it an attack on Kashmir’s freedom movement. “We will not remain silent. Shah Saheb has always worked for sectarian and political unity. Since 1990, there have been conspiracies hatched against Kashmiris,” the Mirwaiz told the gathering.
“There have been deliberate attempts to deprive our nation of intellectuals, doctors and professors. There is a conspiracy to render the movement leaderless,” the Mirwaiz added.
Malik pledged that he would expose the identity of Shah’s killers. “His death has broken our back. The Kashmiri people will not remain silent spectators to the killing.”
Shah was a controversial figure, especially after he denounced stone-pelting and cited Quranic references to justify his stand. Other religious leaders accused him of quoting the Quran out of context and some even accused him of speaking for the government. Shah was seen as being close to certain quarters in the government. There have been factions within the Jamiat which have had an acrimonious past. But most of all, it was the slogan of azadi that was not liked by many people and not certainly by those who saw a strong religious organisation not speaking for Pakistan as detrimental to their interests.
“Pakistan killed him. They got him killed. No one else did that,” said a close friend of Shah, who knew him for years and stood by him each time he was attacked. Shah was attacked two times earlier. In 2008, there was a grenade attack on his home and on a different occasion there was a gun attack on his car.
Shah preached a radical middle ground and was not connected with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), whose cadres come from the Salafi order. Shah was the first Jamiat chief who was political. Before him, the organisation refrained from engaging in open politics, concentrating only on propogating the teaching of the Salafi order. He was not only political, he also supported secular politics and freedom for Kashmir and not the religion-based merger of Kashmir to Pakistan.
After his death, condemnations poured in from all around, including from Chief Minister Omar Abdullah and the LeT. Malik, the Mirwaiz and senior Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani have called for a strike.
Meanwhile, the Jamiat has got a new president in Ghulam Rasool Malik, who thinks like Shah did.
