There is relief in the international community at
the decision finally made in Islamabad to
confront the clerics of Lal Masjid and hold them
accountable under the law for their offences
against the innocent citizens of the capital
city. China and the UK, both threatened by mullah
power in Pakistan in different ways, were the
first to congratulate President General Pervez
Musharraf for grasping the nettle before it could
lead to more clerical rebellion. Significantly,
the Indian prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh,
said that forward movement on the bilateral
Indo-Pak peace process was hampered by Pakistan’s
“internal trouble”, an indirect way of saying
that if you sort out the jihadis and mullahs then
we can be in business again.

As the decision-making process in Islamabad
ground on slowly at the outset of the crisis,
some parts of Pakistan ruled by the clergy began
to show signs of agitation. Lahore’s Jamia
Ashrafiya took out its myriad acolytes and
blocked the roads and inflicted some vandalism on
public property as a way of showing their loyalty
to the Aziz-Rashid duo of Lal Masjid. In Karachi,
many Deobandi seminaries took similar action,
including the mother of all seminaries, the Jamia
Banuria, where the founder of Lal Masjid, Maulana
Abdullah had been educated. Mr Abdullah, as well
as the head of Banuria, Mufti Shamzai, were
killed because of their involvement in the
sectarian war in Pakistan.

The third seminary - which is actually a small
movement now - that took action was the Tehreek
Nifaz Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) of Malakand-Swat.
Led by a relative of Sufi Muhammad - in jail
because of his local Taliban mobilisation against
the Americans in Afghanistan - the movement is
virtually in control of a chunk of the
Provincially Administered Tribal Areas (PATA).
The leader Maulana Fazlullah has money and
ammunition to confront the state. But he too has
been ignored long enough - somewhat like the
Aziz-Rashid brothers of Islamabad - to enable him
consolidate his rule in the Malakand-Swat-Dir
region in the NWFP. The latest crisis in the
entire province came when he used his illegal FM
radio network to tell his listeners that the
polio vaccination drive in the province was "a
conspiracy of the Jews and Christians to stunt
the population growth of Muslims". He accused the
polio vaccinators of attempting to “un-sex” the
population of Pakistan through disabling
hormones. Since the local people know no other
authority but his, they boycotted the vaccination
drive.

There are other areas that have also "broken
free" of Pakistan. In the Khyber Agency, warlords
and mullahs collect revenue and hand down
punishments like stoning to death and fining for
not keeping beards. But it is Maulana Fazlullah
who should be carefully observed. He began by
destroying the music shops after “compensating”
them with money accumulated through donations of
jewellery from the women of Peshawar under MMA
rule. His “collection” - quoted at $2 million -
was so big that he now plans to build a grand
seminary to dwarf Lal Masjid.

General Musharraf must also take a close look at
what various governments in the past have allowed
to happen to the capital city. Today, there are
88 seminaries imparting religious education to
more than 16,000 students. It is not for nothing
that every third male in Islamabad keeps a jihadi
beard and looks scary to foreigners. Research has
revealed that the number of students of the
Deobandi seminaries, including the Jamia Hafsa
and the Jamia Faridia, doubled during last year.
The students to these seminaries - many of them
residential - have flocked from all parts of the
NWFP and the tribal areas. The breakdown is as
follows: Deobandi (5,400 students); Barelvi
(3,000 students in 46 seminaries), Ahle-Hadith
(200 students in two seminaries); Shia (700
students in eight seminaries) and
Jamaat-e-Islami-led Rabitaul Madaris (1,500
students in 18 seminaries).

According to a newspaper investigative report,
"the present number of 10,700 seminarians in
Islamabad alone is almost equal to the combined
strength of the seminary students from
Balochistan (6,374 students) and Azad Jammu and
Kashmir (2,835 students)". Who has tried to
change the character of Islamabad through a
proliferation of extremist seminaries? One could
quickly claim that President Musharraf could not
have been involved in this proliferation because
of his exhortations against extremism. But that
would be incorrect: During the rule of General
Zia-ul-Haq (from July 1977 to August 1988), 7 new
seminaries were established in the federal
capital; under President Musharraf, the number
went up to 14!

The main political parties in Pakistan are hardly
aware of the danger these seminaries on the
fringes of law pose to their rule when they come
to the helm of governance in the future. Many
politicians actually have their sons trained in
these seminaries as a token of their devotion.
But they are mistaken if they think the
seminaries will relent in their fundamental
mission of "insulation, indoctrination and
rejection" to let then govern under democracy.
Unless General Musharraf fashions a solid policy
to reverse this tide decisively, it is only a
matter of time before the next big “Islamic”
crisis occurs to challenge the "writ of the
state" and poses a bigger threat than Jamia Hafsa
ever did. *