Spiralling Vigilantism
- Fatwa against tourism minister Nilofer Bakhtiar for hugging a paraglider
- Punjab minister Zille Huma assassinated merely for working as minister
- Rampant sectarian killings in tribal areas
- Girls of an Islamabad seminary take over a public library to protest proposed demolition of mosques on public land
- They raid a house claiming it to be a brothel, abduct its inmates, kidnap policemen
- Music shops in Islamabad, barber shops in NWFP raided
- Co-ed educational students threatened, at places girls asked not to go to school
- Single women targeted
Under the enlightened moderation of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, the photograph of tourism minister Nilofer Bakhtiarhugging a French paraglider shouldn’t have merited a second glance. But these are, ironically, also the days of Pakistan experiencing a free fall into the precipice of Islamic obscurantism and extremism. So, what do you get? An ineffectual government helplessly watching clerics issue a fatwa against Nilofer for "conduct unbecoming" of a Muslim woman—all because she hugged a man.
Nilofer was recently in France to raise funds for earthquake survivors. As part of her publicity drive she was to paraglide out of an airborne plane—an adventure she hadn’t experienced before. In the thrill of touching ground after paragliding from hundreds of feet, Nilofer spontaneously hugged her French instructor, a photographic moment the assembled lensmen promptly captured. The split-second image dominated the frontpages of Pakistani newspapers the following day.
What editors considered a delighful visual the chief cleric of Islamabad’s Lal Masjid, Abdul Rashid Ghazi, saw as un-Islamic. He thundered, "The minister for tourism has damaged the image of Islam and should be punished for embracing a total stranger. She should also apologise and we will take action under the Shariah for her recklessness."
Lal Masjid is no ordinary mosque; it has been, over the last two months, carving out an Islamic agenda for the nation: only recently it set up a Shariah court for citizens who feel they haven’t received justice from the state. Earlier, in February, burqa-clad girls from the Jamia Hafsa seminary, attached to the mosque, took over a children’s library to protest the government’s plan to demolish mosques encroaching on public land. An eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation saw the authorities relent; the control of the library still remains with the girls. Emboldened, they raided a neighbourhood house which, they claimed, was a brothel, confined its women occupants in the seminary, compelled them to repent publicly, and took two policemen hostage so that authorities don’t take punitive action
against them.
Perhaps the motive behind issuing a fatwa against Nilofer goes beyond her ‘un-Islamic’ embrace. She played a prominent role in lobbying within the ruling Pakistan Muslim League for adopting the Women’s Rights Bill to soften the impact of the harsh, anti-woman Hudood ordinance of the Zia-ul-Haq era. Never one to be cowed down, Nilofer retaliated against cleric Ghazi’s fulminations thus, "I have done nothing wrong in the eyes of God...I do not need to bother about such statements coming from people who have no right under the law to criticise me."
The Nilofer episode brings into sharp relief the increasing stridency of religious extremists—and the government’s eagerness tomollycoddle them. Explains political analyst Mahir Ali: "The complaint against the minister is particularly menacing in view of Punjab provincial minister Zille Huma’s murder by a religious fanatic in February. That particular homicidal misogynist, unpunished for a previous string of murders (perhaps because the victims were alleged to be prostitutes), may have had nothing to do with the Lal Masjid and madrassas associated with it, but women in public life attract a broadly similar hostility across the narrow fundamentalist spectrum."
There are other glaring examples of extremism. Barber shops in the NWFP have been raided to dissuade men from trimming their beards, music shops, even in Islamabad, have been torched, TV sets smashed, women teachers have been murdered, co-ed schools threatened, girls prevented from going to school—the list is endless. Sample this terror technique: in Islamabad’s poshE-7 sector, madrassa students take down the numbers of cars driven by women without male companions.
They are not just anti-women; they are the kind who fervently believe power flows from the barrel of the gun. Last week, Karachi watched in horror as leaders of the Sunni Tehreek, a militant sectarian group, brandished their swords and declared openly, "We will take the law into our own hands. We warn that there will be arrests, bullets will fly, bodies will fall to the ground." The Sunni Tehreek leaders had gathered in Karachi to observe the first anniversary of a terrorist bombing at its rally in 2006.
Add to this the response of the Lal Masjid’s deputy cleric, Abdul Aziz, to a question on the possibility of the state using force to counter them: "Lal Masjid has guns to defend itself. If it comes to a do-and-die situation we will use our right to self-defence." He also threatened to launch suicide attacks. With all this, the ordinary citizen can’t but have nightmares of Pakistan breeding its own Taliban.
The government’s inaction against looming threats of extremism prompted Betty McCollum, a member of the US House of Representatives who was in Islamabad last week, to declare openly, "We would like to see President Musharraf countering the threat of extremism from the tribal areas to the streets of Islamabad. He is not taking the leadership role we’d like to see."
The state’s dithering has dismayed even those close to the establishment, such as Dr Shireen Mazari, DG of the Institute of Strategic Studies. "The Jamia Hafsa saga of terrorising civil society has the nation in a state of disbelief and horror. Disbelief at the inability/reluctance of the state to exercise its writ; and horror at the prospect of civil society becoming hostage to the tyranny of the minority of extremists in our midst," she said. The News wrote an editorial expressing disquiet over the state’s refusal to move against the moral brigade housed in the Lal Masjid and Jamia Hafsa. "It also seems inconceivable that an entity no less than the government of Pakistan is unable to establish its writ and negotiate from a position of strength against a bunch of self-styled guardians of morality and vigilantes."
No doubt, willy-nilly, Musharraf has bolstered the obscurantist forces at the expense of liberal and democratic forces. Is it because he feels he can cut a deal with religious groups in this crucial year? His strategy is perilous for Pakistan. Dr Ruth Pfau, the revered German who came to Pakistan in 1960 to work among leprosy patients, wrote recently about sectarian killings in Parachinar in the tribal areas: "I know how Germany slipped into Hitler rule. The silence of the people to the first wrongdoings had helped Hitler to establish his government committed to crimes. What are we doing to stop thiscarnage?"
