New Architects of Terror

Ranjan Roy / Apr 17, 2007, 00:00 IST

Text Size

Small
Medium
Large

They benefit from absence of democracy in Pakistan.

On a clear January morning, a young student of archaeology walked a group of Indian visitors through the ruins of the ancient university of Takshila, about two hours beyond Islamabad.
It was Friday, and as the day progressed the muezzins' call to prayer started to waft through the crisp winter air and then slowly filled the space around the area.
"Aren't you going for your afternoon prayers"? I asked the young man, always mindful or perhaps conditioned that Muslims have special priorities for their religion.
"Not me", he said, spitting on the clay soil that spiralled up into tiny clouds of dust as we trampled along, reading little printed tin plates mounted in front of carefully excavated squares and rectangles.

"It's either the Deobandis or some Shia group inside the mosque. Either way, the only thing that they preach is how to hate other Muslims".
It is this hatred that is threatening to bring down General Pervez Musharraf's olive-green house of cards.
In Daughter of the East, Benazir Bhutto has warned that if the West continues to mollycoddle Musharraf, a successor generation of the Taliban will come into existence in Pakistan.

A series of recent events in Pakistan appears to be a horrifying hurtle into that prophecy.
In February, an Islamist fanatic killed Punjab's social welfare minister Zile Huma Usman in an open court in her hometown Gujranwala.
The police arrested a maulvi named Muhammad Sarwar soon after he had shot the minister in the head and shoulder during a brief power cut in the open court at Pakistan Muslim League House.
It was revealing what the police had to say: "He considers it contrary to the teachings of Allah for a woman to become a minister or a ruler. That's why he committed this action".
The woman had been in the cross-hairs of extremists ever since she tried to organise a mini-marathon for men and women apart from loudly advocating her admiration for Musharraf's policies of moderation.
But it's the man who should have been in police cross-hairs too because he was accused of killing several prostitutes as part of his anti-vice vigilantism.
Recently, events mirroring this crime were seen in Islamabad. Last week, clerics at Lal Masjid, in the heart of Islamabad, issued a fatwa against federal tourism minister Nilofer Bakhtiar for getting herself photo-graphed while hugging a French paraglider — an act the mullahs described as a 'great sin'.
The clerics also had launched a site last week as part of an anti-vice campaign in which students from their nearby seminary kidnapped an alleged brothel owner and forced her to repent in public.
Religious leaders from this mosque also set up a Qazi court, a parallel judicial system a few kilometres from the Pakistan Supreme Court, which is also in a storm over the sacking of the chief justice by Musharraf.
In a statement from the mosque, clerics, who have challenged the writ of the government for the fourth time in the last two months, said 10 muftis will hear cases and adjudicate in accordance with Islamic injunctions.
This was not the first time that such a thing was happening in Pakistan. A parallel judiciary had been set up in Malakand Agency and adjoining areas by pro-Taliban leader Mufti Muhammad.
What is scary about these events is that the epicentre of the new Talibanisation is shifting to the heart of the federal capital.
It was here too that radicals from the Lal Masjid had occupied a children's library and kept some people hostage, demanding that the government immediately enforce the Shariat.
This Islamic vigilantism is likely to spread to the marketplaces and shopping centres of Islamabad and other cities.
The kiosks on dusty Islamabad sidewalks selling pirated CDs are going to be attacked, TV sets are going to be smashed and then perhaps even women not 'properly attired' would be targeted on the sidewalks and female drivers hooted on city roads.
So what's new? That Talibanisation was a process in Pakistan has been talked about. True, but most experts predicted that this trend was creeping down from the ungoverned north-west, where Musharraf's forces, with the help of US security agencies, are pummelling Taliban training camps and terror bases.
But what is now visible is a parallel process that is not related to the tribal belt. Setting off Islamist responses are city folk, who have over years of illiberalism and junta rule in Pakistan been left with no option but to move into the mosque for political space.
These will increasingly envelop teachers, doctors, engineers as they have enticed cricket players and students — groups that Musharraf would have liked to see secularised and supportive of his stand against the mullahs.
That Pakistan has become a blossoming nursery for Islamic terrorism is in part a function of seeds sown by geopolitics on the fertile ground provided by geography.
But now Pakistan is being hit by a new wave of fundamentalism that cannot be silenced by Washington-funded guns.
It could have been curbed by creating strong social and political processes that helped women get educated and children aspire for jobs.
But what Pakistan's dictators have done is to push legitimate civil society resistance to the mosque where it has got radicalised.

End of Article