• Listen to this segment

GUESTS: Zia Mian, with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Professor of Physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad

At least 21 people have been killed since last Tuesday in violence between Pakistani government forces and religious leaders and students in a mosque in Islamabad. The Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, is housed inside a compound along with the Jamia Hafsa religious school, where the Pakistani government says 200 to 500 followers of a rebel cleric’s Taliban-style movement have gathered for a siege. On Sunday evening the mosque inhabitants were given a final warning. The Government has said it intends to break the siege with a military assault. News media are reporting that about 50 to 60 hard-core militants are leading the fighting, but most of the others are women and children. Officials say the militants have distributed suicide-bomb vests and even shot students trying to flee the mosque. According to Reuters, “Lal Masjid has been a hotbed of militancy for years, known for its support for Afghanistan’s Taliban and opposition to [President] Musharraf’s backing for the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism.” Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the ostensible leader of the Mosque rebels, announced that he hoped that the deaths of him and his fighters would spark an Islamic revolution in Pakistan.

Rough Transcript:

Kolhatkar: Pervez, I would like to begin with you. You are based in Islamabad although you are currently visiting the United States. Tell us first about the Lal Masjid itself. What exactly does this mosque represent within Islamabad?

Pervez Hoodbhoy: The Lal Masjid is located in the heart of the city and it is fairly large. On Fridays, a few thousand people gather over there for prayers. It has become the center of militancy ever since the Afghan war. The head cleric, who is the father of the two clerics heading the mosque presently and who was put in there by General Zia, was a very fundamentalist, fiery preacher. He was killed because of his sectarian policies which led to a lot of bloodshed. They expanded illegally and they built up a huge infrastructure over there. So currently, there is capacity for something like 3,000 to 4,000 students. There is a madrassa, which is a religious seminary that has its girls. And now, they had gone on a rampage and they were kidnapping and doing all kinds of vigilantism like destroying CD shops and video shops and this got pretty much out of hand beginning this February. The government could have done a lot and it was complicit in allowing them to smuggle in guns and fuel and ammunition. Now, the issue has come to a climax and they have had to take military action and this was only after they kidnapped Chinese nationals who were allegedly involved in prostitution.

Kolhatkar: And when you say “they kidnapped”, you are talking about the militants inside the mosque kidnapped Chinese workers?

Pervez Hoodbhoy: Yes, they terrorized the entire city. In fact, they issued a threat against women in my university. They said that any woman student at Quaid-e-Azam University who does not cover her face is liable to have acid thrown upon her. So terrified were people in the administration of my university and in the university in general that there wasn’t even a protest from my administration or from the chancellor of the university, who is General Pervez Musharraf. So we had, in fact, a meeting to condemn this statement in the physics department and about 200 students turned up. You might think that there would be unequivocal condemnation of this threat, but although we did eventually issue a condemnation and said that these clerics ought to be removed from this government-funded mosque, but opinion was somewhat split on this, because a lot of students have become extremely conservative and orthodox and they said “Yeah, but you need to do something to see that women do cover their faces.” And so, let’s not just think of this as a fringe phenomenon. It’s something that is reflective of deeper currents within Pakistani society.

Kolhatkar: Following up on that, Zia, I would like to bring you into the conversation. What Pervez just said about the increasing conservatism, at least among students, what do you attribute that to, primarily. Is it primarily US actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, or is it also Pervez Musharraf’s own complicity with the US government that is sparking this kind of movement?

Zia Mian: I think those two factors that you’ve identified certainly contribute to this, but I think this is a more enduring problem. And it can be traced to a generational transition that has been taking place in Pakistan, starting in the late 1970ies and early 1980ies, when the last military dictatorship before General Musharraf ruled Pakistan for ten years and introduced Islam into the curriculum and the text books and into public life in an unprecedented way. And they brought Islam into the school system with the view to creating a new, much more conservative Islamic sensibility. What we are seeing now is the young people are the ones who have been through this education system, this brainwashing for their entire lives. They have been taught over and over again that Pakistan was created for Islam and a particular kind of conservative, militant Islam. So this is the world view the state inculcated in them and when we had the years of democracy, flawed though it was, under Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in the 90s, they made no significant attempt to try and push back on these changes in the curriculum and text books and so on that had been made by General Zia. And so, you know, this is a generation of people in their twenties and thirties that have been told their entire lives that the best thing they could aspire to as citizens, as people, is to be radical committed Islamic believers; to shape their society and state in that direction.

Kolhatkar: Now what is the motivation, Zia, for various governments in Pakistan to encourage this fundamentalism, particularly when it tends to turn against the government itself?

Zia Mian: That’s a very good question and I think that there are several factors that contribute. The principal among them is that the Pakistani elite has been terribly insecure about its legitimacy. It knows that it has done a terrible job at actually doing the kinds of things that a state is supposed to do in terms of providing basic social services, helping the economy and helping people develop better lives. Instead, they are being corrupt and venal and undemocratic and they have got no real base in society. And so they have had to find ways in which they can create some kind of identity among people that is not directly threatening to them. So they have turned over and over and over again to Islam, going back many decades. And this has become a pattern now that the first thing they will try to do is appease the mullahs so that at least that is not a threat to them.

Kolhatkar: Turning back to you, Pervez, and this particular standoff at the Lal Masjid in Islamabad. What is your assessment of the government response to this situation? I know you said the government really waited to act, but there have been reports of parents extremely worried about their children, many parents are not very happy with the way in which the government has responded with force. Do you think that this situation could have had a less violent outcome?

Pervez Hoodbhoy: Oh, absolutely. The government could have stopped it much earlier. The militants went on a rampage in February and it is July now. And that means there was six months in which they could have acted. In this intervening period they allowed the militants to build up stocks of fuel, of ammunition and so forth. And the chief negotiator appointed by General Musharraf, with whom I had a rather bitter quarrel, I must say, publicly, had gone to the militants and essentially given in to all their demands. He agreed to their demand that the Sharia law be imposed throughout Pakistan. He agreed to rebuilding illegal mosques which had been destroyed by the civil administration. He cowed out to them. I had the opportunity of telling him that he was a disgrace to Pakistan and I asked him: “Who gave you the authority to negotiate on behalf of the citizens of Pakistan?” and he said “The President himself.” This is the kind of shameful appeasement that made them grow bolder and bolder by the day. So these militants, the burkaed women from this Jami’ah Hafsa, they would go throughout the city with big sticks and followed by men with Kalashnikovs, automatic weapons, and they would destroy video shops, they would kidnap people at will, they terrified the citizens. All of this was happening in full view of the police and of the authorities. They could have stopped it, they didn’t. And so, a lot of people believe that all this is a setup, that this is a drama concocted so that General Musharraf can tide over his present political problems. Well, there might be an element of truth in that, but, as I said earlier, it is reflective of a much more dangerous and deep situation in Pakistani society.

Kolhatkar: Now, Pervez, is there any exaggeration that you are seeing in the media, as well as in government statements, of the description of these militants? I mean it is very, very hard-core language describing them as Taliban style militants and from what you are saying that seems to fit the picture of what government reports and media reports are describing. Is there any exaggeration or demonization or are these reports accurate?

Pervez Hoodbhoy: No, I think these reports are accurate. In fact, it had been reported in the press that …., the extreme hard core militant organizations and they are also affiliated with Al Qaeda, that these militants had joined up with the Lal Masjid mullahs and that they were now bringing equipment and arms into the mosque. So, everybody knew that this was happening and these months before this situation exploded, I don’t think there is an exaggeration of it here. I also think that these mullahs of Lal Masjid are not acting by themselves. They have support among madrassas in Islamabad. In fact they have eight associated madrassas, but they are not just in Islamabad, they are throughout the country. So in fact, what we are seeing now is Pakistani army soldiers and officers being attacked with suicide bombers and with improvised explosive devices and so forth and they have been taking heavy casualties. Just in the last three or four days, several of them have been killed.

Kolhatkar: And in fact, on that note, briefly, Pervez, do you think there is a direct connection between these different groups of mullahs and last week’s attempt to shoot a plane carrying President Musharraf?

Pervez Hoodbhoy: There could well be. This was on the flight part in Rawalpindi and there was an anti aircraft gun stationed on a roof of a house over there. The people, after firing at Musharraf’s plane, fled shouting “Allahu akbar” and they were seen by people in the neighborhood. And what we hear is that two hours prior to the incident, that somebody had called up Abdul Rashi Ghazi, one of the mullahs in the Lal Masjid, and said that “you have to wait, don’t take any action, in 2 hours, we are going to see action.” So, there might even be truth in that. I’m inclined to believe that these people are sufficiently well organized, that they do have access to information, to weapons and so forth, so it could be true, and I think this is a dangerous situation.

Kolhatkar: Turning back to you, Zia, the questioned I posed you earlier was, what was the motivation of various governments to support fundamentalism? Let me turn that around and ask you, what would be the main motivation for these fundamentalist groupings to turn on the government? Is their main issue with Pervez Musharraf his cooperation with the United States?

Zia Mian: Oh, that’s certainly been part of it, but the agenda that these people have predates General Musharaf and predates the particular relationship that Musharraf has built with the Americans. That has just strengthened the resonance that their message has with larger sections of the population in Pakistan. I think that the agenda that these mullahs have is the same one that they have had for many decades, which is to try and seize state power and turn Pakistan into the kind of conservative, Saudi Arabian-style, and now increasingly Taliban-style, state and society that they belief is the model of a perfect Muslim society. I mean, they made no bones about the fact that they would like to introduce Sharia law wherever they can, like these mullahs from the Lal Masjid that we are talking about, that they have been willing to take the law into their own hands and impose their own notion of what is a crime and what should be the proper process for dealing with it, and what should be the punishments. And this is something that is not just confined to the Lal Masjid, and I think this is important to understand. That while all the attention is on the Lal Masjid in Islamabad, this is part of a huge rise in this kind of Islamic vigilantism that has started to take place in the frontier areas of Pakistan and started to spread into the North West Frontier and parts of Balochistan and has just erupted most dramatically in Islamabad, but this is a much larger problem and it needs to be seen in that context, both in terms of time and space across Pakistan. So, any solution of where we need to go from here has to go much beyond just thinking about what to do with these people in the Lal Masjid. What do we do with this extreme violent Islamic movement that has sprung up and seems to have taken root in Pakistan, which is committed to a violent seizure of state power wherever it can? And secondly, the huge madrasah population, from which it recruits its followers and its fighters. And that’s the kind of analysis we need to have, these are the kinds of policies we need to think about.

Kolhatkar: Finally Zia, just going back historically, I’m wondering if you can very briefly describe for our listeners a little bit of the history of secularism in Pakistan and the origins of the country of Pakistan. You said earlier that the main goal of these militants is to say that Pakistan was created for Islam, and is that really true?

Zia Mian: The problem in one sense does root itself in the origin and the movement for the creation of Pakistan from the Muslim areas of British India. And when Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who led the movement for the creation of Pakistan, talked about what kind of society he wanted to see, what kind of state model he was thinking about, it was confused, it was ambiguous, it was open to multiple interpretations because he was trying to build the largest possible political constituency that he could. So where he thought it could win him support, he talked about it being an Islamic society, where he thought that he needed to show himself to be forward-looking and progressive and liberal, he would make dramatic speeches as he did in the constituent assembly soon after the founding of Pakistan, in which he said religion would not be any business of the state in Pakistan and people should practice whatever religion they wanted and that it had nothing to do with the government. Like it is with founding fathers everywhere, if you look back you can find them justifying almost anything you want, if you bring that particular lens to it. Now, the Islamic militants trace themselves back in part to groups that at that time actually opposed the creation of Pakistan. They thought that the creation of a Muslim society separate from India was actually something that was an unislamic cause, and those are now people who claim that they are the ones who will lead Pakistan to its rightful place as a pure Muslim society. So, you can find these kinds of ambiguities and contradictions throughout the history of Pakistan from the very beginning. But this is fairly typical. I mean, the United States was founded by people who kept slaves and yet talked about all men being created equal.

Kolhatkar: Absolutely. Well, I want to thank the two of you very much for joining us today and for shedding some light on this important news story as it is unfolding. Zia Mian and Pervez Hoodbhoy, thank you so much.