Attack on mystic: at the core of the conflict

By Praveen Swami - The Hindu - India
Sunday, June 25, 2006

SOPORE: Eyewitnesses to Thursday's terrorist bombing of a religious congregation in northern Kashmir have identified the attacker as Lashkar-e-Taiba operative Qayoom Nassar. Two persons were killed and nine injured in the attack.

Sources told The Hindu that several witnesses to the attack on the prominent Sufi mystic Ahad Sa'ab Sopore recognised Nassar. A resident of the Batpora area here, Nassar joined the Lashkar five years ago, when he was just 16. An eighth-grade dropout, he is believed to have been responsible for the string of recent attacks against both civilians and security force personnel in Sopore.

Nassar's recent terror acts include the murder of two Sopore residents in May for gambling, which the Lashkar says is un-Islamic. Earlier this month, he is believed to have carried out the assassination of two police officers, a street vendor and a phone booth owner. Neither of the last two murders appears to have been motivated by ideological or operational considerations.

Islamists here have long opposed the influence of Ahad Sa'ab Sopore, a one-time policeman who left his job and became a mystic after undergoing what he describes as a spiritual experience three decades ago. As early as 1991, the Hizb ul-Mujahideen carried out a near-successful assassination attempt on the mystic. However, he escaped unhurt.

While mystics like Ahad Sa'ab Sopore have enormous religious and temporal power — their followers include several prominent politicians, bureaucrats and police and military officers — Islamists have repeatedly attacked their authority. Ahad Sa'ab Sopore, notably, has been criticised for appearing naked in public, a practice the mystic defends by asserting that the world, not he, needs to feel ashamed for its behaviour.

Battle over faith
At the core of the conflict are ideological disputes between folk religion and Islamist groups, which believe that practices such as veneration of holy relics and belief in intercession between humans and god through mystics are heretical. Both the Jamaat-e-Islami, from which the Hizb ul-Mujahideen emerged, and the Jamaat Ahl-e-Hadith, the Lashkar's patron, have long been locked in battle with Sufis for the best part of a century.

Terrorist groups in Jammu and Kashmir have long targeted Sufi shrines, which they assert are antithetical to Islam. As early as June 1994, Lashkar terrorists stormed the historic Baba Reshi shrine at Tangmarg and fired on pilgrims.

Dozens of similar attacks took place through the Kashmir valley as part of an Islamist campaign to stamp out folk Islam.

Perhaps, the most prominent incident in the campaign was the October 1995 siege of the Hazratbal shrine in Srinagar, which houses a relic claimed to be a hair of Prophet Mohammad.

The terrorists threatened to blow up the shrine unless troops, who had surrounded them, were withdrawn.

A similar siege at Chrar-e-Sharif in May 1996 led to the destruction of the town's famous 700-year-old shrine.

While the scale of such attacks has diminished in recent years, they none the less continue. In 2000, Lashkar terrorists destroyed sacramental tapestries Bafliaz residents had offered at the shrine of Sayyed Noor, one of the most venerated Sufi saints in the region.

Last year, in June, Lashkar operative Bilal Magray threw a grenade at a Sufi congregation in Bijbehara, injuring 15 persons.

Lashkar cadres are also thought to be responsible for a May 2005 arson that led to the destruction of the 14th century shrine of saint Zainuddin Wali at Ashmuqam in south Kashmir. It was set on fire after the armed men chased away guards. Earlier Ashmuqam was subjected to several grenade attacks, leading to disruption of festive days there for several years.