Author: Jack Redden
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: November 30, 2000
The black-bearded mullah complained
that exhorting Pakistanis to reject cable television and its contaminating
Western programmes had failed, so the time was near for Muslim militants
to take matters into their own hands.
"We have been telling people to
stop watching for six months but we don't seem to have had much effect,"
said Ahsan-ul-Haq, head of the Jamiat Ulma-e-Islam party in Peshawar on
the Pakistani frontier. "The next step is to use force." "One way
is to run electricity into The cable, which will destroy all the equipment
attached to it," he said, listing his alternatives. "We have been
able so far to restrain our Taliban (students) but they could ransack the
cable offices one night."
While the threat to distributors
of foreign television signals and to private organisations promoting social
change is clear, there is no agreement in or outside Pakistan on the extent
of the danger to Pakistan's largely secular government.
Those close to the state play down
"Talibanisation" while human rights activists echo foreign warnings about
a drift to intolerance.
What is not in dispute is that militant
Muslims, reinforced by an expanding system of religious schools and inspired
by the easy victory of their colleagues in the Taliban movement in neighbouring
Afghanistan, are increasingly outspoken.
"It's Afghanistan, it's the collapse
of a state -system," was the gloomy prognosis of Afrasiab Khattak, head
of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. "We have a very grave
crisis in our country, a crisis of governance. The state here is
almost totally alienated from society.
'This crisis is creating a vacuum
and the vacuum is being filled by extremist religious forces," he said
at his home in Peshawar, capital of the North West Frontier Province.
"Mere are new fascist forces who
want to impose their values with the gun. They are against all forms
of modernity, especially in women's rights."
The ideology of the militant Islamists
parallels that in neighbouring
Afghanistan. There the Taliban
has imposed a radical version of Islam that has halted the education of
women, banned television and aims to root out anything seen as Western.
The similarity is no coincidence.
Afghanistan's Taliban sprang in 1994 from the religious school - the madrasas
- of Pakistan, sweeping from obscurity to capture the capital Kabul from
the feuding warlords in only a couple of years..
Today those schools have about a
million students studying a curriculum unchanged in 600 years. Graduates
are qualified for few jobs outside of switching from student to teacher
at the same .institutions or starting their own madrasas.
Naturally the number of institutions,
now totaling about 6,500 nationwide and offering free board and education
in a land where many cannot afford alternatives, continues to rise.
"In the last election in Pakistan,
the results showed clearly that they have no majority," said Fakhr-ul-Islam,
an expert in constitutional history at the University of Peshawar who has
been trying to get mudrasas to modernise.
But, unlike officials who cite low
vote totals to foreigners asking about "Talibanisation," he is not convinced
that means Islamic parties are weak. (Reuters)
