Safer World

Creeping `Talibanisation': The Jamia Hafsa is well known for its radical Islamic stand.

AABPARA MARKET, in an Islamabad neighbourhood of junior government employees, is known as the place where you can get everything at half the price of those in the city's posh shopping squares, plus stuff you won't find anywhere else. In its busy inner lanes are about a dozen or so shops selling DVDs, VCDs and music cassettes. Beginning February, the shops started getting unusual visitors who made it clear the very first time they were not out on a shopping trip.

"They came three or four times, some 10 or 15 of them at a time. Their faces were covered and they were holding sticks, and they said to me, `your business is against Islam. You are spreading vice. Why don't you switch to some other business?'" remembered one shop owner, who didn't want his name published.

Pro-Taliban leaning

The boys said they were from the mosque. The Lal Masjid runs two madrassas — the Jamia Fareedia for men and the Jamia Hafsa for women. The mosque and the madrassas are well known for their pro-Taliban sympathies and for the dissemination of militancy.

At first, none of the shopkeepers took the visits seriously. Then, one night in March, some 40 Jamia Hafsa girls, accompanied by an equal number of boys from the Lal Masjid, entered a home in the neighbourhood and dragged out the three women inside, accusing them of running a brothel. Tied up in white sheets, the women were dragged through the neighbourhood and into the Jamia Hafsa, where they were imprisoned for two days. They also took two policemen hostage, in retaliation for the arrests of two teachers suspected of involvement in the kidnap.

A few days later, on a Friday afternoon, the owner of a music shop in Aabpara heaped up his videos and DVDs and CDs on the road outside the mosque. After noon prayers at the Lal Masjid, under the eyes of the mosque administrators and madrassa students, Bilal, the shop owner, set fire to the heap. As the flames ate the movies, he told reporters that he had given up his business voluntarily. He realised it was anti-Islamic. He would start anew with something else.

Abdul Aziz Ghazi, the Lal Masjid prayer leader, announced that if the Government did not close down all brothels and shops in Islamabad selling movies and music within a month, the students would start taking action on their own. He threatened fidayeen suicide attacks if the Government tried to stop them.

The Aabpara market tradesmen fear they are first in the line of fire. "It isn't easy to close down a business. It's taken me years to establish this shop. I can't just abandon this overnight and start something else. And there's no guarantee that I will make money in the new venture," said the shopkeeper. He ruled out closing down. Like him, other music/movie storeowners in the market said they were "watching the situation and praying for the best".

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"Talibanisation" is the term used to describe what is happening in the out-of-control northwest frontier. Even though some say the word is used "loosely" the growing assertiveness of extremist Islamists in the tribal regions of Pakistan is undeniable. In that remote area, pro-Taliban militants and clerics have all but taken over public space.

Spreading influence

Barbers in areas of the northwest such as Dir, Bajuar and Mardan have been ordered to stop shaving customers. School-going girls and women teachers are directed to wear the veil. Clerics oppose a polio vaccination campaign saying it is a western conspiracy to make men infertile. Militants even killed a doctor in charge of the government's anti-polio programme in Bajaur.

The influence of these "local" Taliban has been spreading into neighbouring "settled" areas. In Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province, co-education schools remained closed for several days after receiving bomb threats. In Tank, a district in NWFP bordering tribal South Waziristan, militants battled security forces last month to avenge the police shooting of two men who were trying to recruit school students for jihad.

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Aabpara is not the wild northwest. Neither is it some far-flung suburb of Islamabad. Constitution Avenue, with the President's Aiwan-e-Sadr office, the National Assembly, the Supreme Court, the Prime Minister's office, the secretariat and all the important ministries including Foreign Affairs and Finance and the Diplomatic Enclave, is less than two km away. But Abdul Aziz and his brother Abdul Rashid, who run the Lal Masjid complex together, are undaunted. Together, they can take the credit for pushing before the world another face of militant Islam — women, covered head to toe in black niqaab, wielding sticks, talking tough on what Muslims must do and not do, and throwing one challenge after another to the government since January.

Challenging the government


When Islamabad's Capital Development Authority began demolishing the first of over 80 mosques that it said were encroachments on public land, the Jamia Hafsa girls seized a children's library next door to their madrassa in protest and continue to occupy it. They led the raid on the alleged brothel. And according to the two brothers, the girls are the ones spearheading the entire exercise to "cleanse" Pakistan.

The activities of the Jamia Hafsa and the Lal Masjid have hammered home the reality that religious extremism is a countrywide reality, not restricted to some remote corner of Pakistan, but present right in the heart of the capital. The mosque has now set up a Shari'a court in its premises, appointing to it 10 senior clerics who can issue fatwas. The first fatwa went out against Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar, who went paragliding in France recently, and was shown in photographs hugging her male French instructor after her endeavour.

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Where is the Government? This is the question everybody is asking — from music shop owners in Aabpara to newspaper editors. Why is this being allowed to happen right under its nose?

Government's reactions


President Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, and the entire cabinet have "condemned" the Lal Masjid activities. They say the Government will not allow anyone to take the law into their hands, and that those who violate it will be "dealt with according to the law". But nothing has been done.

Instead a sense of helplessness prevails. The President says any attempt to use force against the Lal Masjid complex could end in bloodshed. Musharraf has instead appealed to civil society to "educate" the misguided "kids" at the Lal Masjid complex, pleaded with them for "tolerance" and "open minds". He wants to "negotiate" with the girls and the mosque's clerics.

Eijaz ul-Haq, the minister of religious affairs, said that Pakistan had been trying to tell the world that its madrassas were centres of learning, not extremism, but the activities of the Lal Masjid had forced the Government "to hang its head in shame".

Yet the minister participated in a negotiated surrender to the Jamia Hafsa girls on the illegal mosque demolition issue. On TV and in photographs, he was seen laying bricks for reconstruction of the mosques demolished by the CDA. That was the first taste of victory for Lal Masjid, and since then, it has been a one-sided match.

Later, the Government negotiated for the release of the two policemen being held hostage in the mosque. It agreeing to release in return the two teachers arrested for the "brothel" raid. The kidnapped "prostitutes" were left to the Hafsa students, who released them only after extracting a public "confession" of their "sins" and a vow to turn over new leaves.

Genuine dilemma


Not a single policeman was in sight when thousands of madrassa students gathered for a bonfire of videos. Nor have the police stopped the students from threatening shopkeepers in the neighbourhood.

Government supporters say there is a genuine dilemma — action against the Lal Masjid could really set off more suicide attacks. And how to use force against teenage girls? But Opposition parties attribute other motives to the Government's inaction. They argue that in this crucial year of parliamentary and presidential elections, his position weakened by the crisis over the sacking of the chief justice, Musharraf is under pressure even from the U.S. to hold free and fair elections and give up his position as army chief. They see the Lal Masjid crisis as Musharraf's design to first stay on as President, in uniform and second and to divert attention from the lawyers' agitation.

The People's Party of Pakistan says the Government is encouraging the Lal Masjid "drama" to create "the misperception that Talibanisation has spread to the federal capital so as to lift pressure for holding free and fair elections". The Benazir Bhutto-led party accuses the Government of creating such an impression "with a view to deceiving the international community... that the choice in Pakistan is between military dictatorship and religious fanatics".

Why this sudden lightness of touch on the government's part, opponents ask? After all, it bombed a madrassa in Bajaur killing 80 people and killed Baloch tribal leader Akbar Bugti.

Some commentators have also asked if the Government's inaction is a reflection of infighting within the establishment, with some sections still nursing a soft corner for the Islamists. And the Islamist religious-political parties such as the Jamaat-e-Islmai and the Jamaat-e-ulema Islami ask if it is a conspiracy by the ISI to defame madrassas.

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From the jihad in Kashmir to the one in Afghanistan to the madrassas that still disseminate these ideas, the well springs of religious extremism in Pakistan hav been well documented. They have all come together after 9/11 flowing into the same river of intolerance, militancy, violence, and medieval obscurantism. But the river is now flowing backwards with a vengeance. Not a day passes without extremism rearing its head in some lethal way in Pakistan, whether it is to enforce "morality", wage war against the state, or against another Islamic sect.

Bitterness and fear


Fear of radicalised individuals acting on their own to "cleanse" society grew after a man recently shot a woman minister of the Punjab province because he believed it was against Islam for a woman to hold public office. He had allegedly killed several women before but was released each time for "lack of evidence". This time, the courts moved quickly and gave him a death sentence.

But taking one life for another gives no solace. Among liberal and moderate Pakistanis, who want their country to be "normal", there is a real fear of "creeping Talibanisation". Those who have already tasted its wrath are bitter. Ask Shameem, the woman who was dragged through the streets of Islamabad by the girls and boys from the Lal Masjid complex for being a "prostitute". She told reporters after her two-day ordeal of imprisonment in the Jamia Hafsa, "If this is what Islam is about, I would rather convert to Christianity".

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17, 2007 at 1:36 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.