DAR AL ISLAM - PAKISTAN: ISLAMBAD'S SHARI'AH GANGS

Sharia gangs roam streets of capital city to enforce their law with threats Jeremy Page in Islamabad

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.”

Radical clerics have made similar calls in vain in the past but never before have they been backed up by vigilante raids in the capital. The seminary’s students have also been seen carrying Kalashnikovs and other weapons around their compound.

Mr Aziz denied having violent intentions but said his 10,000 men and women students, most from tribal areas near the Afghan border, were ready to die for their cause.

“If the police and Army come here we will sacrifice our bodies and will not allow anyone to be arrested,” he said.

...



Pertinent Links:

1) Sharia gangs roam streets of capital city to enforce their law with threats