On September 5, the Pakistanis living in Agios Nikolaos of Crete marched through the city’s main streets.
The sight was undoubtedly shocking for Cretans, with Pakistanis parading around with loudspeakers blaring their music and chanting “Allah is Great”.
The police accompanied the march.
It is recalled that a day after the brutal murder of a tailor in Udaipur in northern India in 2022, Rajasthan Police said that Ghouse Mohammad, one of the two accused in the case, had gone to Karachi in Pakistan in 2014 and had links with Dawat-e-Islami.
“One of the accused, Ghouse Mohammad, has links with the Karachi-based Islamist organisation Dawat-e-Islami. He had visited Karachi in 2014. So far, we have detained five people, including the two prime accused,” Rajasthan DGP ML Lather was quoted as saying.
While Dawat-e-Islami claims to be a non-political and non-violent religious group inspired by Sufi tradition, and so far there’s no evidence of its direct involvement as a group in any terrorist act, this isn’t the first time the group’s name has come up in a terrorism investigation, India Today reported.
In fact, there have been multiple incidents in the past where its followers went on to carry out terrorist attacks.
The last time Dawat-e-Islami’s name came up during an investigation into a terrorist attack was back in 2020, when a Pakistani terrorist named Zaheer Hassan Mehmood carried out a stabbing attack on September 25th outside the former headquarters of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Two people were wounded in the stabbing attack and the terrorist was arrested.
During the investigation of the attack, French authorities discovered that Zaheer claimed that his religious guide was Maulana Ilyas Qadri, the leader of Dawat-e-Islami.
At the time, Zaheer’s father said in an interview to Pakistani media said that he is “proud” of his son who has “done a great job” and he is “very happy” about the attack. He said that Zaheer “was a good son” who prayed regularly and attended Milad twice a year. His father also confirmed that he was a follower of Maulana Qadri, the leader and founder of the Dawat-e-Islami organisation.
Zaheer’s father had appealed to the then government of Imran Khan as well as to other Islamic countries to help bring his son home. “He has done service in the cause of Islam and we are a Muslim country,” he was quoted as saying.
Mumtaz Qadri, the murderer of Pakistani governor Salman Taseer, was also a follower of Dawat-e-Islami and its leader Ilyas Qadri, who declared Mumtaz Qadri a ‘ghazi’.
Ilyas Qadri has declared that “all Muslim scholars agree that a blasphemer must be killed but it is up to an Islamic government to execute the punishment. However, if a lover of the Prophet kills a blasphemer extra-judicially, as per Islamic jurisprudence, the killer is not executed”.
A 2016 murder of a British-Pakistani Ahmaddiya Muslim man named Asad Shah in Glasgow also produced links with Dawat-e-Islami. The murderer, a British-Pakistani Barelvi Muslim named Tanveer Ahmed, was affiliated with Dawat-e-Islami and was revealed to be an admirer of Mumtaz Qadri. Ahmed was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 27 years.