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Beyond Swat, a conflict rages in people's minds
Washington Post - May 11, 2009
Despite the Taliban horror stories, sharia has its appeal, writes Pamela Constable in Islamabad.
When black-turbaned Taliban fighters demanded in January that Islamic law be imposed in Pakistan's Swat Valley, few alarm bells went off. Sharia, after all, is the legal framework that guides the lives of all Muslims.
Officials said people in Swat were fed up with the slow and corrupt state courts, scholars said the sharia system would bring swift justice, and commentators said critics in the West had no right to interfere.
Today, with hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Swat and Pakistani troops staging an offensive to drive out the Taliban forces, the pendulum of public opinion has swung dramatically. The threat of "Talibanisation" is being denounced in parliament and on opinion pages, and the original defenders of an agreement that authorised sharia in Swat are in sheepish retreat.
The refugees are the "victims of ignorant cavemen masquerading as fighters of Islam", a columnist, Shafqat Mahmood, charged in the newspaper The News International on Friday. He said that the "barbarian horde" that invaded Swat never intended to implement a sharia-based judicial system and that they just used it as cover. "This is a fight for power, not Islam," he wrote.
Such widely expressed views make a clear and careful distinction between the Taliban version of Islam – often described as narrow-minded, intolerant and punitive – and what might be called the mainstream Pakistani version, which is generally described as moderate and flexible.
"Islam is our identity and our system of life, but variety and choice are part of it," said Khurshid Ahmad, an Islamic scholar and national legislator. "People should dress modestly, but women don't have to cover their faces and men don't have to grow long beards.
"The Koran is very clear that there should be no coercion in religion. You cannot cram it down people's throats. This is where the Taliban destroyed their own case."
Yet the demand for sharia courts in Swat was not a Taliban fiction. It was the result of deep dissatisfaction with a secular court system criticised across the country as slow and corrupt, with cases dragging on for decades and influential people often able to buy off police and win cases over poor adversaries. Islamic courts are generally smaller, faster and cheaper.
Under Pakistan's constitution, both types of courts function, but sharia courts have limited jurisdiction over certain crimes such as extramarital sex and murder.
In theory, said Raja Zafar ul-Haq, an Islamic scholar and political activist, there was no contradiction between Islam and democracy in Pakistan. The constitution says no law may contradict the Koran or the teachings of the prophet Muhammad. But, in practice, the state justice system is so slow and biased that people are fed up.
"Unless there are major reforms, the demand for sharia may spread all over the country," Mr ul-Haq said.
There is a growing movement in mosques and seminaries throughout Pakistan today to abolish the modern justice system and make sharia the supreme law of the land. Radical Islamic clerics in big cities give emotional weekly sermons, urging their followers to turn from decadent Western ways and spread vigorous moral purity.
At the same time, newspapers are filled with letters from readers expressing outrage at the perversion of Islam being perpetrated in the Swat Valley and warning that the Taliban are trying to force a modern country back to medieval times.
And yet some observers have noticed a more insidious trend. It is not only the fire-breathing sermons by radical mullahs calling for a "sharia nation" or the rantings of Taliban leaders who accuse the entire Muslim government of being "infidel".
These observers describe a creeping social and intellectual chill that several have called "the Talibanisation of the mind".
It is a growing tendency for women to cover their faces, for hosts to cancel musical events, for journalists to use phrases that do not offend powerful Islamist groups, for strangers to demand that shopkeepers turn off radios.
"With each passing month a deeper silence prevails," a columnist, Kamila Hyat, wrote recently in a widely circulated article. The public is afraid, uncertain and retreating into religion because the country's leaders are failing to deal with its problems.
"Just as we fight to regain territory" from the Taliban, Hyat wrote, "we must struggle to regain the liberties we are losing".
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