A firebrand and saucy speaker, she recently emerged as a voice of the Shia community. She is media savvy, with regular appearances on talk shows challenging her detractors.
“My mother was really worried after I received serious threats to my life. I made this decision with a heavy heart. I am leaving and I don’t know when I will return,” Khanum said.
Last Moharram, she escaped an assassination attempt. After that, she had to keep her movement secret, and whenever she had to travel, the people in charge of her security made sure there was no loophole in the arrangements.
Khanum is one of the highest paid religious speakers of the country. Perhaps, therefore, she can afford to live in the United States. She already set up a small facility to deliver religious sermons without fearing someone awaiting her outside the Imambargah to silence her.
Recently, the Interior Ministry told the Senate that more than 2,000 people had lost their lives in sectarian violence in the last five years.
In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), 867 people were killed on sectarian grounds. The troubled province of Balochistan came second on the list with 737 people dead, mostly in attacks targeting the Shia Hazara community in Quetta, and the buses of Shia pilgrims going to or coming from Iran. In Sindh, the target killing of doctors, professors and religious leaders continued in the last five years. More than 252 of them were killed over sectarian differences. In Punjab, which also witnessed worst sectarian riots last Moharram, more than 100 people were killed in sectarian violence. More than 100 people were killed in sectarian violence in Gilgit-Baltistan, where attacks on Shias have risen in the recent years. There were only 22 sectarian related casualties in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Five people were killed over their faith in Islamabad.
When the report was presented in the upper house of Parliament, some senators contested the figures. They argued that the actual number of casualties was much higher than what the government had claimed.
While some commenters claim the Shia-Sunni conflict dates back 1,400 years and cannot be resolved, there is evidence that inter-sect harmony was at its peak in undivided British India and sectarian violence only grew after the so-called Islamization process initiated military ruler Gen Ziaul Haq.
The Zia era and entire decade of the 1990s tainted the history of so-called religious harmony in Pakistan. It all began with the assassination of a prominent Shia scholar Alama Arif Hussaini, in August 1988. Years before he died, he formed Tehrik-e-Jafaria Pakistan (TJP) to respond to attacks by Deobandi outfits.
In February 1990, a known Debandi cleric Haq Nawaz Jhangvi was assassinated. Jhangvi was the founder of Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) which targeted Shias.
Later, two known operatives of SSP broke away from their mother organization and went on to form their separate group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ). One of those operatives was Riaz Basra, who after dodging law enforcers for years, reportedly died in a shootout in May 2002. The co-founder of LeJ was Malik Ishaq.
Former president Gen (r) Pervez Musharraf banned most sectarian outfits during the early years of his tenure, but the groups continued operating under different names.
Lt Gen (r) Talat Masood argues that some ‘brotherly’ Islamic countries are fighting proxy wars in Pakistan. He said Iran, Saudi Arabia and some other states gave money to sectarian outfits of their choice.
Fareed Paracha, a Jamaat-e-Islami leader, says such foreign funding is aggravating the situation. He holds the government responsible for failing to stop this flow of money into the country.
The government has planned to form a body of clerics from all schools of thought, to be called the “Ulema and Mashaikh Council”, to serve as a platform to bridge sectarian differences. But similar efforts in the past have failed.
Not very long ago, another noted scholar Javed Ahmed Ghamidi had to leave Pakistan. He now lives in Malaysia and appears in a TV show on a Pakistani channel. Ghamidi also received threats and feared he might not survive if he lived in Pakistan.
Unlike Khanum Tayyaba Bukhari and Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, not all religious leaders can afford to leave the country. While some of them still prefer to stay in Pakistan, others have no options.
Shahzad Raza is a journalist based in Islamabad
Twitter: @shahzadrez