Mufti Mahmud, during his brief stint as the Chief Minister of the NWFP in 1973-74, was instrumental in securing the support of the late Maulana Safdar Hussain of Peshawar – a leading Shiite cleric of the era who commanded nationwide respect.
The Shiite motives for joining this alliance were twofold. First and more obviously, they wanted to cosy up to the holy fathers of the revivalist Sunni variety and in return earn a doctrinal legitimacy for themselves.
More sublime is the key doctrinal difference between the Shiite and the Ahmadiyyas regarding the arrival of Al-Mahdi - the promised Messiah. In declaring Mirza Ghulam Ahmed of Qadian as the promised Messiah, the Ahmadiyyas are at serious odds with the Shiite in that the latter hold as a cardinal belief that the promised Messiah is their twelfth Imam, Muhammad Mahdi, who - currently in occultation – would return to lead the Muslims at the ‘end of times’.
W
hat started in the early 1950s eventually came to the boil in 1974 and a constellation of factors stacked the deck against the Ahmadiyya. ZA Bhutto had already developed a trust deficit with them, suspecting that they might be switching political loyalties to Air Marshal Asghar Khan’s Tehrik e Istaqlal.
The Islamic Summit Conference in February 1974 at Lahore galvanized the religious parties to demand their pound of flesh and the Ahmadi issue was raised anew.
At the same time ZA Bhutto, pumped-up with real and perceived successes at home was eager to appear on the world stage as a champion of the Third World. However, realizing that in the presence of Tito, Castro and Indira Gandhi, there was little room for him to play the lead role, he made the deal with the devil himself. Bhutto deferred the divine stewardship of the Muslim world to King Faisal of Saudi Arabia while assigning himself the temporal political leadership.
Indian nuclear explosion in May 1974 and concerns within the security establishment of Pakistan, only helped to consolidate the relationship between Bhutto and King Faisal. In addition, the public attention needed to be diverted from the Indian success to more topical issues and hence the moving of the Ahmadi issue to the front burner.