The fundamentalist views of Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) chief Maulana Sufi Mohammad, whose demand of enforcing Islamic Sharia in full tilt in the Malakand region of NWFP was accepted by the Pakistan government last week, can be summed up with the following excerpt from an interview he granted this month to a western news agency.
He said: ?From the very beginning, I have viewed democracy as a system imposed on us by the infidels. Islam does not allow democracy or elections…. I believe the Taliban government (in Afghanistan) formed a complete Islamic state, which was an ideal example for other Muslim countries. Had this government remained intact, it could have led to the establishment of similar Islamic governments in many other countries.?
The latest regulation imposed in the Malakand division, a far stricter one called the Nizam-i-Adl Regulation 2009, replaces the Sharia law officially in place already. The region includes the once-peaceful Swat valley where the local Taliban led by Sufi?s son-in-law Maulana Fazlullah have stalemated the Pakistani security forces since 2007.
Like other Taliban, the father-in-law/son-in-law duo is both dangerously intolerant and naive at once. Maulana Sufi once declared that those opposing Sharia in Pakistan were wajib-ul-qatal (deserving death for apostasy). Among his decrees, there is one prohibiting driving vehicles on the left in the Malakand division, because the right side is deemed more ?Islamic?.
The maulana became a laughing stock of the whole nation in October 2001 when he led truckloads of extremists from Pakistan to Afghanistan to fight the high-tech US military with no more than sticks and stones. Not surprisingly, thousands of his men perished, but the maulana managed to return to Pakistan with his dear life. On his arrival in Pakistan, he was put in jail where he remained until last year.
Maulana Fazlullah would not have been the Taliban leader that he is today but for the illegal FM radio station he operates from Imam Dheri in the Swat valley to deliver jihadi sermons. His brand of Islamic teachings struck a chord with radical extremists when he interpreted the ravaging October 8, 2005 earthquake as an ultimatum from Allah to establish an Islamic state based on the Sharia law.
In his on-air lectures, apart from inciting the Taliban predilection for gutting and gelding all that he deemed un-Islamic, he ordered the destruction of a priceless remains of the Gandhara civilisation ? the 7th century statue of the famed Buddha of Jehanabad. In 2007, two bomb attacks on the imposing statue smashed the face of the Buddha.
As the state authority retreated to counter-insurgency operations in FATA, it became easier for Maulana Fazlullah to expand his sway over the region. As the Taliban threat grew ominous, the Pakistani military started in December 2007 its operations in Swat, which have gone nowhere. Apparently, the predominant thinking in the army GHQ in Rawalpindi is that it can?t firefight the Tehrik-i-Taliban on multiple fronts. The Sharia gamble, pushed by the state from a position of weakness, is likely to meet the same fate as Gen Pervez Musharraf?s Waziristan ?peace? deal with the Taliban of 2006, which didn?t survive for long.
Their crass propaganda notwithstanding, justice Taliban-style has an uncanny talent to self-destruct. Read Maulana Sufi Mohammad?s words again: How confidently he croaks about the grandiose plan of creating Sharia states in many places on earth. That is part of the Al-Qaeda brand of megalomania ? Afghanistan under the Taliban control as the staging post for waging global jihad.
The Taliban?s idea of an Islamic state is suffused with the same streak of megalomania. Beginning from Malakand, the masterplan is to launch a project of global Sharia. But no matter how hard they try, they would never outgrow their dangerous fixation with bombing schools, burning music shops, stoning and beheading spectacles, killing barbers, outlawing polio-vaccination campaigns, and driving on the ?wrong? side of the road. So, it?s incredible that the Pakistan state agreed to compromise with such fundamentalists.
The Pakistan government, however, insists that the agreement to enforce Sharia laws was signed to restore peace and for the benefit of the people of Swat. This is a claim that takes an austere view of the democratic values of liberty and freedom that mainstream parties of the PPP and ANP espouse. But it conforms to a pattern of giving in to the forces of extremism.
It was Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the founder of PPP and that champion of the liberal values, who declared Ahmadis a non-Muslim community in 1974 to appease the clergy. The second Benazir Bhutto government shaped the Taliban and shepherded the medieval militia to power in Kabul. Unwittingly following in the footsteps of her own tormentor, the self-styled ?Soldier of Islam? Gen Ziaul Haq, Benazir Bhutto had accelerated the Talibanisation of Pakistan when she agreed to the TNSM?s first set of demands in 1994.
And now it?s the secular PPP government led by President Asif Ali Zardari, which has surrendered to the fundamentalists, the same lot of people who were likely responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. The capitulation in Swat, all said, is symptomatic of a fast-weakening state authority in Pakistan.
rajiv.jayaram@expressindia.com