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The last stand at the Lal Masjid

Nirupama Subramanian

Since January, if there was one image that dominated life in Islamabad, it was that of hundreds of stick-wielding women, clad in all-covering black veils with only a narrow slit for the eyes, standing menacingly on the balconies and roof of the Jamia Hafsa seminary, ready to do battle in the name of Islam.

On Wednesday, that image came crashing down as one of their mentors-in-chief was caught trying to flee disguised in the head-to-toe veil known as the niqab. From television footage of the dramatic capture, Abdul Aziz, the chief cleric of the mosque, cut a pathetic and absurd figure as the head piece of the veil was pulled off, leaving him clothed in the crumpled black robe.

But for five to six months, Mr. Aziz and his brother Abdul Rashid Ghazi held Islamabad hostage to their vigilantism, and their threats of suicide bombings and jihad, relayed every Friday from the minarets of Lal Masjid which they jointly ran. The Jamia Hafsa, which Ghazi ran, and the Jamia Fareedia seminary for boys, which Aziz headed, provided the shock troops for the repeated defiance of state authority, which included “anti-vice” raids in Islamabad, targeting so-called brothels and bootleggers. Women began feeling insecure and afraid to venture out by themselves in what is otherwise quite a safe city. Newspapers called it the “creeping Talibanisation” of the Pakistani capital.

Even more scary was the government’s blind eye to their activities, which was making a mockery of President Pervez Musharraf’s agenda of enlightened moderation. The mosque was a centre for Deobandis in Pakistan that provided fodder for the jihad factory in Afghanistan during the war against the Soviets. Later, it turned its attention to Kashmir. Its links with the intelligence agencies was public knowledge. The brothers were well-known Al Qaeda-Taliban sympathisers. Four years ago, Ghazi even passed a fatwa for a boycott of funeral prayers of Pakistani soldiers killed in battle with militants in Waziristan. In 2004, months after assassination attempts against President Musharraf, he was also caught with rocket launchers in the boot of his car, but the Religious Affairs Minister Ejaz ul-Haq recently revealed that he had intervened to let him off.

But the comical arrest of Aziz has taken the edge off the jihadi “don’t mess with us” front of the Lal Masjid. Left holding the fort, his brother has appeared on several television channels, appealing for safe passage, and offering to give himself up even to various television anchors if they could guarantee his safety.

President Musharraf has won praise for the crackdown on the mosque, especially as the security forces appear to be carrying out a psychological more than a military-style operation, using minimum firepower but maximum display of strength. The strategy has proved successful in bringing out more than a thousand students in the mosque and the madrassa, including nearly 400 of the black-robed women. Among those still inside, there could be several hardcore militants, but with everyone outside now sure that their time is running out they have little scare value.

All this should enable the politically embattled President Musharraf to claim a rare victory this year, besieged as he is by a crisis of his own making involving the judiciary and the legal community that has questioned his legitimacy and left him weak beyond imagination. The showdown at the mosque has already removed the ousted Chief Justice’s legal challenge against his removal from the front pages of newspapers and from the top stories on television news. Conspiracy theorists are even seeing the connection between an unprecedented order of the court against the country’s intelligence agencies on Monday, and the start of the showdown at Lal Masjid the day after. Most media outlets are commending the government for its restraint and for the smooth implementation of a good strategy.

The operation has not set off any major uprising anywhere in the country. There were a few protests but they fizzled out quickly. In Islamabad itself, there is a lot of support for the operation, with people hoping that the days of Taliban-style vigilantism led by frightening black-robed women are over. Pakistan’s ulema, who had distanced themselves from the Lal Masjid brothers much before this, have not come to their rescue. Nor has it prompted students of other madrassas to come to the Lal Masjid’s aid, as the cleric brothers had warned it would.

But it is too early to rule out retaliation by hardline elements. In Waziristan, where the Pakistani forces are battling militants as part of the American-led coalition on ‘the war on terror,’ there have been two suicide attacks targeting security forces since the beginning of this showdown though it is not clear if they were linked to Lal Masjid. The discovery of anti-aircraft guns in Rawalpindi that reportedly fired at President Musharraf’s plane at the airport has injected more concern of an Islamist backlash.

Even if that does not happen, and more so if it does, there are bound to be hard questions about l’affaire Lal Masjid. Newspapers have already begun asking that if all it took was a psy-ops to smoke out the would-be jihadis, why was the sore allowed to fester since January? The government chose not to act until a point came where it was compelled to crackdown after one of its paramilitaries, and at least 18 others, including a journalist, were killed earlier this week when the mosque-madrassa provoked a clash with security forces.

The Daily Times said the intelligence agencies either had no knowledge of the true state of affairs inside the mosque, or they were deliberately misleading the government all this while. When the stand-off began, the government appe ared to have no clear picture of the numbers of students inside. In the last four days, estimates have swung wildly from 150 to 2,000 students, but were still much lower than the 6,000 that the cleric brothers and the Jamia Hafsa students claimed throughout. For a stand-off that has lasted months, it spoke of a colossal absence of intelligence about one of the main trouble spots in a city where the ‘agencies’ are infamously everywhere, so much so that Supreme Court judges had to recently tell them to keep out of the courts, and clear judges’ homes of bugging devices.

Nor has anyone in government been able to explain how the mosque came to hoard kalashnikovs and other deadly weapons without the intelligence agencies coming to know anything about it. President Musharraf was also wide off the mark when he said an operation against the mosque was not possible as the compound harboured Al Qaeda suicide bombers and Jaish-e-Mohammed militants.

The last laugh in this entire imbroglio belongs to Nilofer Bakhtiar, the former Tourism Minister, a high-profile victim of a five-month policy of appeasement that the government adopted for Lal Masjid. Back in May, a newspaper ran photographs of the Minister hugging an instructor after she went paragliding to raise funds for earthquake victims in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. Maulana Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the mosque administrator, promptly deemed the hug “obscene” and “anti-Islamic” and passed a fatwa against her. Despite appeals to the highest in the land, Ms. Bakhtiar discovered that no one in the ruling party was willing to back her. Instead, they used the controversy to settle party rivalries and political scores. Ms. Bakhtiar was forced off her party post, which was handed over to another Minister who had eyed it for some time.

Eventually, Ms. Bakhtiar resigned from the Cabinet. Later, the feisty politician filed a civil suit against the Lal Masjid for causing damage to her career, and warned that there were many in the ruling party whose hardline religious views were damaging the country. She may not get her ministry or party post back, but she must have gained immense satisfaction from watching Abdul Aziz caught with a burqa on.

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