"Invisible walls were also rising among communities, between neighbors, and even within families. The seeds of intolerance had been there at the outset of Pakistan’s creation, though they’d been kept mostly buried. Now, Zia was watering them generously, and the Saudis were adding fertilizer. Mehtab had grown up with Hindu neighbors; they visited each other and played together. Soon, some Sunni Pakistanis refused to even have a Hindu cook in their house, because they considered the food impure. As more Pakistanis started to adhere to the puritanical ideas spread under Zia, tensions grew within families. Sons criticized their mothers, grandchildren chided their grandparents and refused to join the centuries-old tradition of religious celebrations infused with local folkloric customs, like visits to shrines of saints, or the Shab-e-Barat, known in Arabic as Laylat al Bara’a, the night of salvation, when prayers are believed to be especially fruitful. Children had always set off firecrackers at dusk on the occasion, and candles stayed lit for the nightlong prayers. This was now heresy for those who were being wooed by hundreds of ultraconservative orthodox clerics, fanning across the country, newly empowered by Zia. They were a mix of local revivalists, like the Jamaat-trained clerics and preachers from the Deobandi school of thought, the subcontinent equivalent of Wahhabism. And there were, of course, constant winds blowing from Saudi Arabia."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (2020)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Islamization_in_Pakistan
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Islamization in Pakistan
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