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note: provisional results of Pakistan's 2017 national census estimate the country's total population to be 207,774,000. country comparison to the world (CIA rank, may be based on non-current data): 5. In all these cases, judges repeatedly delayed hearings, adjourned hearings without hearing arguments, or sent appeals to other judicial benches. The young man and two coconspirators were indicted, taken into government custody, and were awaiting trial at years end. By law, decisions of the FSC may be appealed to the Supreme Courts Shariat Appellate Bench. Analysis of census data and demographic research. Shia population: 17 - 26 million Pakistan participates with a similar percentage of Shia Muslim to its neighbor India, with Shia Muslims making 10 - 15% of all Muslims in Pakistan. Pakistan's Perpetual Shia Shame - Globalpoliticsnews Major cities - population 16.459 million Karachi, 13.095 million Lahore, 3.542 million Faisalabad, 2.281 million Rawalpindi, 2.290 million Gujranwala, 1.164 million ISLAMABAD (capital) (2021) The constitution states, Subject to law, public order, and morality, every citizen shall have the right to profess, practice, and propagate his religion. It also states, A person of the Qadiani group or the Lahori group (who call themselves Ahmadis) is a non-Muslim. The courts continued to enforce blasphemy laws, punishment for which ranges up to the death penalty. On April 14, police filed a blasphemy case against Shia singer Zamin Ali in Jamshoro, Sindh. Senior Department of State officials, including the Office of International Religious Freedoms Special Advisor for Religious Minorities, the Charge dAffaires, consuls general, and other embassy officers met with government officials and senior advisors to the Prime Minister, including the Minister for Human Rights, and officials from the Ministry of Law and Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training, and Ministry of Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony to discuss blasphemy law reform; laws concerning Ahmadi Muslims; the need to better protect members of religious minority communities; sectarian relations; and religious respect. On November 23, the Sindh High Court dissolved the marriage of an underage Christian girl to a 44-year-old Muslim man. The family was in another location, however, and survived. On August 12, armed gunmen attacked the house of Ahmadi Muslim Syed Naeem Ahmad Bashir in the Sahiwal District of Punjab, firing into the courtyard at night, where they reportedly expected the family to be sleeping. According to the bill, all publishers would be required to submit to the Directorate General Public Relations, the provincial government authority with jurisdiction over printing presses and publishing houses, four copies of every edition of each title they print. Population of Pakistan Total Population of Provinces Wise In February, a crowd occupied and vandalized a 100-year-old Ahmadi mosque in Punjab. According to the provisional results of a national census conducted in 2017 (the most recent), 96 percent of the population is Sunni or Shia Muslim. India's Muslims: An Increasingly Marginalized Population On November 9, also in Peshawar, unknown gunmen killed an 82-year-old retired government worker who was a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community while he was waiting for a bus. The constitution also grants the FSC revisional jurisdiction (the power to review of its own accord) over criminal cases in the lower courts relating to certain crimes under the Hudood Ordinance, including rape and those linked to Islamic morality, such as extramarital sex, alcohol use, and gambling. 2,724,000. Pakistan Population (2023) - Worldometer Islam in Pakistan. The Sunnis, on the other hand, nurse the fear that they have decisively lost power and things . Barelvi Islam - GlobalSecurity.org The information in the following paragraph was provided in a country report on Pakistan by the . The government continued to implement the National Action Plan against terrorism, including countering sectarian hate speech and extremism as well as conducting military and law enforcement operations against violent groups. Islamic world, countries with a traditional Islamic population According to the Center for Social Justice, a national nongovernmental organization (NGO), at least 199 individuals were accused of blasphemy offenses, a significant increase over 2019 and the highest number of blasphemy cases in a single year in the countrys history. The population of Pakistan in 2019 was 223,293,280, a 1.62% increase from 2018. The NCHR was also mandated to conduct investigations of allegations of human rights abuses, but legal sources said the commission had little power to enforce its requests. However, violence is inevitable because the anger and anxiety on both sides seem to be mounting. Most Shias (between 68% and 80%) live in just four countries: Iran, Pakistan, India and Iraq. Print and broadcast media outlets continued to publish and broadcast anti-Ahmadi rhetoric. Governor Sarwar did not sign the bill, which was promoted by the PML-Q party, noting controversy about its provisions and concerns that it could be seen as anti-Shia. According to her parents, the girl had been abducted and raped after being forcibly converted to Islam in Karachi. Also in September, according to law enforcement reports, Peshawar police rescued an Ahmadi family after a large mob gathered outside their home, accusing the family of preaching Ahmadi beliefs. Non-Muslims may not appear before the FSC. The Ministry of Human Rights and the Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training held consultations with minority faith representatives during the year in a review of textbooks for derogatory material. They said Christians had difficulty finding jobs other than those involving menial labor, with some advertisements for menial jobs specifying they were open only to Christian applicants. On September 10, police saved a Hindu trader from a mob that accused him of committing blasphemy and called for his death in Kashmore, Sindh. Sunnis are generally believed to be 80-85 percent of the Muslim population, and Shia Muslims, including Hazara, Ismaili, and Bohra (a branch of Ismaili), are generally believed to make up 15-20 percent. In Islamabad, the deputy inspector general of police said as many as 15,000 police, Rangers, and Frontier Corps personnel were involved. This is probably an attempt to contain any outbreak of violence, because Shias in Pakistan are a sizeable minority. Shares of Sikhs and Buddhists in overall population increased marginally. The court may suspend or increase the sentence given by a criminal court in these cases. 3.72; Encyclopaedia Britannica 4 Oct. 2019; US 18 Dec. 2019), or "some 17-26 million people" ( Encyclopaedia Britannica 4 Oct. 2019). Over the past month, Pakistan has seen an unprecedented rise in attacks and arrests of its Shia population, who make up between 15% and 20% of the Sunni-majority country, the largest Shia community outside Iran. On July 21, the government returned a 200-year-old Sikh gurdwara to the Sikh community in Quetta. It directs the state to endeavor to secure the proper organization of Islamic tithes, religious foundations, and places of worship. Page 2 of 41 Preface. On January 30, police arrested two Shia men in Tando Mohammed Khan, southern Sindh, and charged them with blasphemy. Civil society groups continued to express concerns about the safety of religious minorities. On July 27, an antiterrorism court sentenced a member of SSP to 13 years imprisonment for facilitating terrorist activities. According to an unofficial and unverified estimate, between 700 and 5,000 Pakistan Shias from Karachi, Parachinar, and Gilgit-Baltistan, recruited by Iran, went to Syria to fight against the. According to the SATP and media reports, antiterrorism courts convicted and sentenced several individuals affiliated with terrorist organizations and involved in past sectarian attacks and targeted killings. The Sindh High Court on October 27 originally upheld the validity of the marriage, citing the marriage certificate that indicated the girl was 18 years old, and ruling that she had converted to Islam and married of her own free will. On September 30, media reported that a 17-year-old girl from a Hindu Dalit community committed suicide after having been gang-raped a year earlier by Muslim men and subsequently blackmailed by them in Tharparkar, Sindh. Pakistan's growing hatred of Shias - Kashmir Reader On July 22, Saeed Amanat, a Muslim man, abducted a 15-year-old Christian girl on her way to church in Faisalabad, Punjab. According to sources, the Shia population of Pakistan is estimated to be between 10 and 15 percent (Australia 20 Feb. 2019, para. Inflammatory anti-Ahmadi rhetoric continued to exist on social media and was at times spread by senior members of mainstream political parties. Ahmadiyya Muslim community representatives continued to state that Ahmadi families were unable to register their marriages with local administrative bodies, known as union councils, since those councils considered Ahmadis to be outside the authority of the Muslim Family Law of 1961. There were a series of additional violent incidents targeting Ahmadis following the Tahir Naseem killing in a Peshawar courtroom. The constitution states the government shall make Islamic studies compulsory for all Muslim students in state-run schools. According to the governments immigration website, the Ministry of Interior could grant visas to foreign missionaries invited by organizations registered in the country. These observers said the general refusal of lower courts to hold timely hearings or acquit those accused persisted due to fear of reprisal and vigilantism. The Religious Affairs Ministry later issued a statement saying Ahmadis would not be included on the commission, given the religious and historical sensitivity of including Ahmadis in government institutions. Pakistan 2020 population is estimated at 220,892,340 people at mid year according to UN data. In May 2000, the Shia Muslims based in the Gilgit district of the then Northern Areas began to agitate against the recently changed curriculum of government schools in the region. The government collects a mandatory, automatic 2.5 percent zakat (tax) from Sunni Muslims who hold savings accounts in banks. Following the killing of U.S. citizen Tahir Naseem in July, JUI-F leader Mufti Kifayatullah celebrated the accused killer for his act of justice. Some political figures, including the ruling PTI Partys Sindh provincial president Haleem Adil Sheikh, who is also a member of the Sindh Provincial Assembly, changed their social media profile pictures to that of Naseems killer. The traffickers told pastors and parents they would arrange marriages to Chinese men who had supposedly converted to Christianity, after which the women were taken to China, abused, and in some cases, sexually trafficked. 'Every year we dig mass graves': the slaughter of Pakistan's Hazara The five wafaqs each represent major streams of Islamic thought in the country: Barelvi, Deobandi, Shia, Ahle Hadith, and the Jamaat-i-Islami, which is considered ultraconservative. Shia Numbers are in the range of 320 Millions to 350 Millions and according to some estimates its in the range of 400 Millions. On July 13, hundreds of members of the Bheel community, including women and children, marched and demonstrated against the demolition of their homes by revenue officials whom they said were in collusion with an influential landlord of the area in Mithi, Sindh. Subsequently, Arfana Mallah, a professor at Sindh University Jamshoro who criticized Soomros arrest and the blasphemy laws, was herself accused of committing blasphemy and had to apologize publicly. Pakistan has the third largest Shia population after India and Iran. The constitution requires the President and Prime Minister to be Muslims. Similar to the previous year, some Sikh and Hindu places of worship reopened during the year. 1. Several statues were destroyed. In May, after the government announced that Ahmadis would be excluded from the National Commission for Minorities, Religious Affairs Minister Qadri said on a popular television show, Anyone supporting Ahmadis is not a Muslim. Ahmadiyya Muslim community representatives stated that the Urdu-language press frequently printed hate speech in news stories and editorials, some of which could be considered as inciting anti-Ahmadi violence. A New Era of Sectarian Violence in Pakistan | Crisis Group Christian advocates also called on the government to allow them to travel to Israel. According to the SATP, the number of sectarian attacks by armed groups continued to decrease, corresponding with an overall decline in terrorist attacks. According to 2017 census total house hold in Pakistan are 32205111. By law, madrassahs are prohibited from teaching or encouraging sectarian or religious hatred or violence. Sunni Muslims who want to distribute zakat themselves may request an exemption, and Shia Muslims are exempted by filling out a declaration of faith form. Kashmir: Curious case of demographic realities and perceptions Shia Muslims constitute 10 to 12 percent of the citizen population and an estimated 25 to 30 percent of the Eastern Province's population. Pakistan's president gives Shias an exemption, but the sectarian confrontation becomes an important political issue in the country. Shia Muslim Population in Pakistan - Shia Tent The FSCs review power applies whether the cases involve Muslims or non-Muslims. [see also: Population country ranks ] Nationality: Embassy officers continued to engage civil society leaders, local religious leaders, religious minority representatives, and legal experts in discussing ways to combat intolerance and promote interfaith cooperation to increase religious freedom. Human rights and religious freedom activists and members of minority religious groups continued to report that they exercised caution and, occasionally, self-censorship when speaking in favor of religious tolerance because of a societal climate of intolerance and fear. The statement also called on the government to reform its blasphemy laws and court system and to ensure that the suspect in Naseems killing be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Pakistan's Perpetual Shia Shame - Baltimore Post-Examiner Coordinator for the Arctic Region, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources, Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, Office of International Religious Freedom, Office of the Special Envoy To Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, Under Secretary for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, Office of the Science and Technology Adviser, Bureau of the Comptroller and Global Financial Services, Bureau of Information Resource Management, Office of Management Strategy and Solutions, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, U.S. On June 25, an antiterrorism court sentenced five al-Qaida militants to 16 years imprisonment each for terrorist financing and possession of explosives. Parents may send children to private schools, including religious schools, at the familys expense. Unfortunately, due to the history that Pakistan has had, especially with regards to security, this remains a huge problem, said Chaudhry. Following the killing of Ahmadi physician Tahir Ahmad in November, the Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom posted an official tweet calling upon authorities to ensure the safety of all Pakistanis. The Special Adviser went on to meet with federal and provincial government officials and civil society leaders in Islamabad and Lahore. The Shia population in Pakistan is estimated as being 11.8% of the country's population. On September 7, the JUI-F party held a large Khatm-e-Nabuwat conference in Peshawar, with party leaders and national and provincial parliamentarians in attendance. The population density in Pakistan is 287 per Km 2 (742 people per mi 2 ). The HRCP said forced conversions of young women of minority faiths, often lower-caste Hindu girls from rural Sindh province, continued to occur. The accused were mostly Shia (70 percent of cases) and Ahmadi Muslims (20 percent of cases). According to the CSJ, 2020 saw the highest number of blasphemy cases in a single year in the countrys history. On July 19, members of the Hindu community staged a sit-in in Khuzdar, Balochistan, to protest the July 18 killing of local Hindu trader Nanak Ram by unidentified assailants in the Wadh area of Khuzdar District. The official state religion of Iran is Shia branch of Islam. Timeline: Modern Sunni-Shia Tensions - Council on Foreign Relations In a September editorial, the largest Urdu daily, Nawa-i-Waqt, described the 1974 legislation declaring Ahmadis officially non-Muslim as a historic day in the countrys history. rate of urbanization: 2.1% annual rate of change (2020-25 est.) Political parties elected by the general electorate choose the minority individuals who hold these seats; they are not elected directly by the minority constituencies they represent. Shias in Pakistan are geographically spread across the. According to eyewitnesses, police officials in at least four police vans cordoned off the area and arrested Soomro, who initially resisted. These attacks targeted gatherings of Shia individuals. Local authorities did not allow the repair or unsealing of Ahmadi mosques damaged or demolished by rioters in previous years. Pakistan (212,300,000) India (200,000,000) Bangladesh . PDF Estimated Percentage Range of Shia by Country - Pew Research Center In 2018 the Islamabad High Court issued a judgment requiring citizens to declare an affidavit of faith to join the armed forces, judiciary, and civil services and directed parliament to amend laws to ensure Ahmadis did not use Islamic terms or have names associated with Islam. In addition to the large JUI-F conference and rallies, the Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami also held a large event in September in Peshawar; both parties criticized the PTI-led national government for failing to enforce Islamic law. The law bans the sale of Ahmadiyya religious literature. Several historians argue that the Indian Shia elite played a. She was taken to Dera Ghazi Khan, in Punjab, to avoid Sindh provincial law, which bans marriage of girls younger than 18. The directorate would be empowered to inspect printing presses, bookstores, and publishing houses and confiscate books before or after they are printed if they are judged to contain objectionable content. The Rising Threat Against Shia Muslims in Pakistan - The Wire The Shias live in a state of relief and caution: relief at Article 370 being lifted, and caution that things won't get any better for them. Civil society activists and media reported young Christian and Hindu women being abducted and raped by Muslim men. Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah Imran Ismail issued a statement condemning the attacks. In November, the government finalized its Removal and Blocking of Unlawful Online Content Rules 2020, which sought to codify the PTAs authority to regulate content the government deemed unlawful. The rules not only enhanced the PTAs ability to compel online content platforms such as Facebook, Googles YouTube, Twitter, and Wikipedia to remove content but also extended the regulators purview to include local internet service providers that could also be held liable for such content. The government continued to prohibit citizens, regardless of religious affiliation, from traveling to Israel. Representatives of the Kalash, an indigenous group in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, continued to report their youth were under pressure from Muslim schoolteachers and others to convert from their traditional beliefs. Pakistan's Shias Face Double Threat: Extremists and Their Own Some politicians acknowledged privately the bill was intended to ensure textbooks identify Mohammed as the final prophet, thereby excluding Ahmadis from the definition of Islam taught in public schools. Ahmadiyya Muslim community leaders continued to report they were affected by discriminatory and ambiguous legislation and court judgments that denied them basic rights, including a 2018 Islamabad High Court judgment that some government agencies continued to use to deny national identification cards to Ahmadi Muslims. Minority rights activists said most government employment advertisements for janitorial staff continued to list being non-Muslim as a requirement. The killings took place during protests sparked by twin suicide bombings outside two churches there. Police arrested more than 45 JUI-F followers and clerics involved in the destruction. Population of males is 106018220 and females is 101344632. Human Rights Report | Pakistan - Hindu American Foundation In the absence of specific language in the law authorizing civil or common law marriage, marriage certificates are signed by religious authorities and registered with the local marriage registrar.