RECENTLY an old man sitting next to me on a metro train in Sydney asked me where I was from. On hearing the name ‘Pakistan’, he started a monologue, and it was not pleasant to be at the receiving end, I tell you.

His opening salvo was enough to put me to shame. “A Sri Lankan kid whom I met on the same train this morning told me how someone of his nationality was brutally killed and his body was set on fire a few days ago in a country … now I remember, it was in Pakistan, right?”

This identity was enough to silence any notion of patriotic defence I had in mind about the motherland. Yet he felt the need to add before getting off the train: “Now don’t complain if someone pulls off your scarf.” A chill went down my spine.

But the man surely made me think. How can we, the Pakistani Muslims, living overseas, complain of increasing Islamophobic attacks across the globe when those living on the soil of Pakistan are flag-bearers of the same bias, hatred and extremism? Whether it was physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was sentenced to imprisonment by the Church on charges of heresy, or any of the many who have been assaulted and assassinated for alleged blasphemy, including Priyantha Kumara, the latest of such victims, those who executed such ‘misdeeds’ were fuelled by nothing but bigotry.

This bigotry is housed not exclusively in the hearts of those who, say, massacred around 50 Muslims on a Friday in a mosque in New Zealand. It also flows in the veins of those who killed a non-Muslim on a Friday at his workplace in Pakistan.

The man on the metro train had a valid argument, it seems. Why should we complain of religious extremism in the rest of the world when religion happens to be the biggest element dividing the masses within our own country?

Aminah Mohsin
Sydney, Australia

Published in Dawn, December 9th, 2021