Grief Links Members Of a Persecuted Muslim Sect

June 11, 2010

Author: Samuel Freedman

Source: The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/us/12religion.html?ref=religion_and_belief

The phone rang early on the morning of May 28 in Tariq Malik’s home outside Chicago, the suburban sky still night-dark. From the hour alone, Mr. Malik and his wife, Riffat Jariullah, knew something was wrong. The voice of her brother, all the way from Pakistan, told them as much with his breathless instructions.

“Go turn on the TV,” Mrs. Jariullah, 47, remembers him saying. “See what happened.”

So, still in their bed clothes, the couple switched on the Pakistani cable station, Geo. There they saw a man with a rifle firing from a minaret. It was a minaret they recognized, at a mosque in Lahore known as Dar-ul-Zakir, where so many of their friends and family members worshiped.