A shocking e-mail on Monday informed me of a Philadelphian murdered in Pakistan.
Habib Peer, 60, was a hardworking Pakistani American who had raised three children and run two businesses in the city. He considered himself a devout Muslim and was a leader in his Ahmadiyya Muslim community. Last week, he was shot dead by masked men in the southern Pakistani city of Sanghar, where he was helping the family of his brother - who had been murdered four years before.
Both brothers were killed by militants who believe the Ahmadis are apostates. Since 1974, Pakistan's constitution has labeled its two to four million Ahmadis "non-Muslim" because their beliefs contradict traditional Islam. (They follow a 19th-century mystic they believe was the messiah predicted by the prophet Muhammad.) In no Muslim country is the repression of Ahmadis so severe or so officially sanctioned as in Pakistan.
Peer's death, however, exposes a crisis affecting all Pakistanis. It reflects a struggle for the soul of the country as daunting as the physical struggle to survive this month's devastating floods.
Pakistan faces a Herculean challenge in coping with flood damage, and Muslim militants are eager to take advantage. As Pakistan's leaders now recognize, these militants present a huge threat to their (nuclear-armed) state.
A recent security assessment by Pakistan's military spy agency concluded, for the first time, that the biggest threat to national security comes from Islamic militants, not India. Some of these militants are probably providing shelter for al-Qaeda's leadership, including Osama bin Laden, and the Pakistani army is targeting some groups.
Yet there are other jihadis dedicated to sectarian murder that are not on the military's hit list. Some of these militants were originally trained by Pakistani security services to fight against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir.
Sipah-e-Sahaba, for example, openly calls for the slaying of Shiite Muslims, who make up about 10 to 15 percent of the population; it continues to operate freely. The Pakistani elite largely stays silent, and sectarian violence grows.
In April, I visited a Shiite friend in Karachi who was nearly killed in December, when a suicide bomber blew up 43 people during the Shiite religious celebration of Ashura. Her back and thighs were penetrated by large shards of metal from the bomb, which went off five feet from her; her brother and sister-in-law were killed.
