Taliban influence spreads in Pakistan

Times:

Shiraz Ahmed was tending his music store in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, when a group of 15 bearded young men walked in bearing bamboo poles and a chilling message.

Politely but firmly, they instructed him to take down the colourful array of Bollywood and bhangradance tunes on display and to restrict his business to Islamic music.

“They told me I had to change my business,” said Mr Ahmed, 25, whose family has run the store for 15 years. “I am so confused. I don’t know what to do.”

Until last week he might not have worried about these men from Islamabad’s Lal Masjid (Red Mosque). After all, his shop is legal and within walking distance of Pervez Musharraf’s presidential palace.

But this was just one of several signs in the past ten days that a creeping campaign to “Talebanise” Pakistan has spread from tribal areas on the Afghan border right to the heart of the capital. And to judge from the Government’s response, even here it is reluctant to confront the radical clerics who openly preach jihad (holy war) and defy the writ of the state.

Last week hundreds of women students from the Jamia Hafsa seminary, which is attached to the Lal Masjid, raided a nearby house that they said was a brothel. Wearing black burqas and wielding bamboo poles, they dragged the alleged madam, identified only as Aunty Shamim, to the seminary along with her daughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

When police arrested two women teachers from the seminary, its students responded by abducting two policemen along with their vehicles. A tense stand-off only ended when Aunty Shamim was released with her relatives after reading a signed confession in public.

Pakistani police have promised to arrest Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the seminary’s vice-principal, and to prevent more vigilante raids. Maulana Abdul Aziz, the seminary’s principal, has refused to give up Mr Ghazi, who is his brother, and has vowed to cleanse Islamabad of brothels, liquor stores and other “unIslamic” activity.

He also gave the Government until today to introduce Sharia (Islamic law) across Pakistan. Otherwise, he said, his students would do it themselves, starting with the surrounding G-6 neighbourhood in central Islamabad.

“It’s like if you have garbage outside your house and the city authorities fail to clear it — you have to do it yourself,” he said. “We’re urging the whole country to rise up and make the country clean and pure.”

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Anyone who thinks Shari'a law is appropriate is seriously mind warped. It is a brutal inhumane product of the dark ages that should be banned. Pakistan needs to get control of this movement before it leads the country to destruction. The Government has already lost control in the tribal areas to the religious bigots and now they are spreading their poison into the capitol. It is time for a major crackdown.