Author: Ben Barber
Publication: The Washington
Times
Date: July 20, 2000
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -
Muslim militants scored a victory this week when military ruler Gen.
Pervez Musharraf backed off from public threats to rein in Islamists and
instead granted them interviews, photo opportunities and new privileges.
Newspapers across Pakistan
on Tuesday showed Gen. Musharraf holding talks with two of the country's
most powerful conservative Islamic leaders.
One of them, Samiul Haq
of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam party, is the chief of the largest Islamic
school in the country - an institution accused of training its students
for jihad, or holy war, in Kashmir, Afghanistan and other flash points.
Gen. Musharraf
did not disclose what he told Islamic leaders Monday. However Mr.
Haq told reporters that the general had adopted a pro-Islamic stance.
"The general has assured
me that the Islamic identity of the country would not be changed as he
does not support secularism," news reports quoted Mr. Haq as saying.
Since Gen. Musharraf
seized power in October, he has pledged to halt religious killings, disarm
Islamic militias and rein in a drift toward religious extremism and intolerance
flowing across the border from Afghanistan, where a fundamentalist Islamic
regime is in power.
A senior Western diplomat
dismissed Gen. Musharraf's effort at conciliation with potential
rivals as "throwing the Islamists a bone" to keep them content while he
completes reforms that would force merchants to pay taxes to revive the
dying economy.
"I believe the government
sees [the confrontation coming], but it may be the time has not come for
the battle" with the Islamists, said the diplomat, who spoke on condition
he not be identified.
Gen. Musharraf
and others in the military government have pressed religious schools known
as "madrassas" to add science, math and other modern subjects.
The schools' curriculum
for hundreds of thousands of Pakistani youths teaches hatred of the West,
of India and of Israel.
"We are here to produce
Islamic scholars, not doctors or engineers who do not know much about Islamic
education," Mr. Haq said.
But Mr. Haq denied
that the madrassas teach terrorism, and said, "No interference in the religious
schools would be tolerated."
Many parents send their
children to the madrassas because Pakistan's education system is bankrupt
and corrupt.
In 1995, UNESCO said
that 62 percent of adults were illiterate, and that among women, illiteracy
was 75 percent.
In Pakistan's remote
Northwest Frontier province this week, Islamists declared religious law,
or Shariah, would now prevail over Pakistani law.
There is little likelihood
of mass Islamist takeovers in the Punjab in central Pakistan, where about
70 million of the country's 130 million people live. More moderate
Islamic traditions prevail in Punjab than along the Afghan border.
Gen. Musharraf,
in his meetings this week, backed away from a plan to require accusations
of blasphemy, a serious charge under Islamic law, to go through civil courts
before police can make arrests. Islamists had threatened mass protests
if the plan went ahead.
Gen. Musharraf,
a devout Muslim who is widely believed to be moderate and tolerant, also
gave the Islamists a victory recently when he included strict Islamic guidelines
in the provisional constitution that will carry Pakistan toward planned
elections in two years.
A U.S. diplomat
said yesterday that he is worried about Islamic extremism growing stronger
as the economy stagnates.
"There is a drift I worry
about, promoted by the bad economy -young men with no jobs," said the diplomat.
"The kids go to the madrassas and come out ready for jihad."
The Western diplomat
however, expressed hope that down the road, when Gen. Musharraf has
cleared his desk of the current struggle to make merchants declare their
income and pay taxes, the military government will take on the Islamists.
