The MMA rode to victory in October’s NWFP provincial election on the strength of a campaign that was virulently anti-American and that promised to uphold Islamic values. Like the stridently religious Hindu nationalists in neighboring India, the pro-Taliban coalition of six conservative parties says it is doing exactly what the voters asked it to do. “People elected us to destroy culture that is alien to Islamic values,” says Bakht Jan, the MMA’s Provincial Assembly speaker. In its drive to Islamicize the strategic province, the MMA is targeting a widening sphere of Pakistani cultural life. “Sadly,” laments Afrasiab Khattak, chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, “we’re witnessing the Talibanization of the NWFP.”
In mounting their cultural dragnet, the MMA-controlled provincial police are not acting on new laws but on the fatwas proclaimed by leading mullahs. In November the inspector general of police personally organized the first attack in Peshawar, leading his fellow cops and Islamic activists in tearing down huge, colorful, hand-painted billboards depicting scantily clad actresses outside local cinemas. Periodically, the police hold public bonfires of confiscated videos, CDs, film and music posters and even cosmetics. The coalition is moving to close down movie theaters and ban cable TV. But the harshest assault has been on offending writers. In January, Fazli Wahab, a noted Pakistani novelist, was shot to death in a local tea shop after a number of mullahs condemned his books, which lambaste the clerics’ involvement in politics.
Many NWFP voters realize they have gotten more than they bargained for. Most controversial is the MMA’s drive to end coeducation in the province’s colleges and universities. In a rare bid to counter the mullahs, Peshawar’s City Council adopted a unanimous resolution this month asking the MMA government not to set back women’s education.
That will be a tough fight. The mullahs’ growing clout is tied to their influential friends in Islamabad, and many Pakistanis like Khattak believe high-ranking officers in Pakistan’s powerful Army and police are sympathetic to the MMA’s hard line. “If the generals weren’t supportive, they wouldn’t allow the mullahs to implement their Islamization plans,” he says. If that’s true, what is now a provincial experiment could well become a national nightmare.
