French hug earns fatwa from Islamabad’s new radicals

ISLAMABAD: The chief of a radical mosque in the Pakistani capital has issued a decree calling on the government to sack a woman minister after a photograph was published showing her hugging a foreign man.   

The demand, contained in a decree known as a fatwa, is the latest challenge from the pro-Taliban mosque to the government of President Pervez Musharraf. Pakistani newspapers carried a photograph last week showing Minister of Tourism Nilofar Bakhtiar hugging a man, apparently her para-jumping instructor, after completing a jump in France. Newspapers said she did the para-jump to raise money for victims of an earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan in October 2005.   

Abdul Aziz, chief cleric at Islamabad’s Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, said on Monday she should be sacked. “Her act was un-Islamic and against our social norms. She earned a bad name for Islam. She should be punished,” Aziz told Reuters. Such calls are not to be taken lightly. In February, a Muslim zealot shot dead a woman minister of the government of Punjab province because he thought women should not be in politics. The gunman was sentenced to death last month.   

Followers of the radical clerics at the Islamabad mosque have become increasingly audacious, raising fear that for all President Pervez Musharraf''s talk of “enlightened moderation” he cannot stop a trend toward the Talibanisation of Pakistan. Last Friday, Aziz announced the setting up of a Taliban-style vigilante Islamic court and vowed suicide-bomb attacks if authorities tried to crack down on the mosque and its followers.  

The behaviour of the radical clerics and their thousands of stick-wielding followers — and the government’s failure to act against them — has dismayed many Pakistanis. Musharraf has said no one would be allowed to take the law into their own hands but authorities have yet to act against the mosque, apparently through fear of inciting a broader backlash from conservatives in an election year.