Crows Come Home to Roost, Extremist Roots in Islamabad

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All across the muslim world we are seeing muslim vs muslim violence and it will continue. This is the ancient power struggle of the Islamic world, and the payback that Islamic leaders, both secular and religious, gained by nurturing extremism: The crows always come home to roost. -Thanos

That was from a post earlier today, and above is an example. In Islamabad, followers of extremist mullahs at the Lal Masjid Mosque (an illegal mosque, named for it’s red brick facade following the Deoband/Wahabi path of evil,) have taken to the streets. Encouraged by success in previous encounters with the police when they occupied a library, they are imposing their vision of Shariah law on any passer by. Perhaps we should send Rosie O’Donnell to negotiate with these women?

UPDATE: Please stop by Little Green Footballs to view the BBC video on this Madressah.

Seriously, this is bad as extremist views and means take root in the heart of Islamabad – and the mullahs and their adherants push the window further every day.
They have threatened passers-by, CD store owners, and cable operators. The organization supports the MMA, and the Taliban, and they recently abducted a woman and her daughters. They beat her, held her hostage, made her confess with a scripted statement to running a brothel.Dawn prints the real story.

ISLAMABAD, March 29: A confrontation between the government and hard-line religious leaders in the federal capital eased to some extent on Thursday when students of Madressah Hafsa released three kidnapped women and a six-month-old baby with a threat that they could be picked up again if their demand for release of a former Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) official and five other activists was not met within 15 days.

Police took the women in protection after their release when the head of the family, Shamim Akhtar, disowned her statement made at a news conference at the madressah, in which she admitted that she had been involved in immoral activities and announced that she would not continue such acts in future. Soon after her release, Ms Akhtar said she had given the statement under pressure from the militant students of the madressah who had kidnapped her with three other family members from her residence on Tuesday evening.

She alleged that she had been victimised by the militant students because she did not belong to their sect and that during the confinement she and her family members had been asked to change their sect.

There are many who oppose extremism in Islamabad, and those who do cry out for government help in fighting this lunacy. To forestall you from thinking that there are no moderates in Islamabad, here are a couple of examples and it’s instructive to read the comments thread at the first blog:

Metroblogging Islamabad

Sunni Path

Using women to protect them from authorities will not last too much longer for Jamia Hafsa I think, the citizens of Islamabad are growing impatient with this standoff.  The Mullahs are now threatening the government, and it appears they are seeking confrontation. From Pakistan Observer:

Lal Masjid Imam gives govt one week to enforce Shariat
Ishtiaq Rao

Islamabad—The hard-line cleric of Lal Masjid, Maulana Abdul Aziz has given the government one-week’s ultimatum to enforce Shariat [Islamic laws] in Pakistan, otherwise he threatened to do it forcibly by using army of the seminary students. Addressing the Friday prayer congregation, khateeb of Lal Masjid and also the chief administrator of Jamia Hafsa, said that even after the passage of 60 years, the government has failed to implement Islam, so now it was obligation of religious scholars to establish the writ of God in the country.
He alleged that only in Sector G-6 of the Federal Capital, there are about two dozen brothels dragging the society to the hell of immoral activities since many years. He went on to say that thousands of such places are across the country where numerous females are raped a day, but he added that the government pays a deaf ear to the deteriorating situation.

UPDATE: 

When I first read about this, I was thinking to myself that this was like going back in time to the Salem Witch Trials or The Spanish Inquistion, and now we have an update from the News in Pakistan:

The chilling events of recent days in the federal capital are reminiscent of the notorious Salem witch trials of late seventeenth century America in which several women and men were burnt at the stake and imprisoned for indulging in witchcraft and being in league with the devil. There trials, if they could be called that, were conducted by magistrates and the method of ‘investigation’ was to basically coerce them into a confession or sometimes on apparitions seen by the afflicted persons, who claimed to have seen a shape or figure resembling the ‘witch’. Apparently, Islamabad itself seems to have caught on to this witch-hunt, though almost four centuries late.

Perhaps the only slightly positive aspect to this whole Jamia Hafsa affair is that the police have registered FIRs against some students of the Jamia Hafsa in Islamabad and their patrons in Lal Masjid on charges of abduction and kidnapping three women, a minor and two policemen and for forcibly trying to close down shops.

So the authorities finally seem to be doing something about the problem, but it’s a weak response considering all.

More at The Fourth Rail