Eggs Laid by Tigers
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Swat, Chitral, and a failed experiment with the Taliban
We have our religious bigots, and sometimes our folks drag someone to death behind a pickup or leave someone to die,tied to a barbed wire fence, and a lot of us believe in the literal truth of the Bible, or think we do until asked to think, and a lot of us are intolerant toward gays, or fundamentalists, or anyone different from us;BUT
at our very worst, we have nothing like the religious problem facing Pakistan, and now, most acutely in SWAT, the same district as my beloved Chitral.Today's Washington Post has a pretty clear explanation of Pakistan's dual secular and religious courts -- similar in a way to the secular royal courts and the ecclesiastical courts of Merry Old England, which remain, as shadows, in our distinction between equity and law principles.
This dual court system prevails not only in Pakistan but in all Muslim countries, whether Sunni, Shiite, or some other sect. The religious courts apply sharia, derived from the Koran and the sayings of the Prophet. Some apply sharia literally -- as would some of us, had they the power to do it -- and some figuratively, as, say, a Lutheran theologian might apply the Old Testament stricture against eating shellfish, or its preference for enslaving neighbors rather than our own people.
The Wahhabis, out of Saudi Arabia, have an unusually literal and strict application of sharia. That Kingdom set up religious schools all over Pakistan to preach its fundamentalist and anti-Western doctrines, and to support the religious courts that apply their strictures.
The most strict of the strict are what we call the Taliban. I don't know what they call themselves.
A while ago the Pakistan government agreed that the Taliban could set up strict sharia courts in Swat, and provided that appeals could be taken to the civil courts. The people of the district are said to have welcomed the Taliban because the civil courts were slow and corrupt.
That welcome is over, if the Post is to be believed. Thousands of the residents of Swat have fled and there is general condemnation for the brutal way the Taliban apply sharia.
But getting rid of them seems to be a hard thing to do, and there has been a general, growing fear of the more fundamentalist Muslims.
The Post article cites an essay by Kamila Hyat, published in the International News, entitled The Talibanisation of Minds, which holds that the impact of fundamentalist thinking is growing in all of Pakistani society.
That is not good news for our efforts to keep The Bomb out of the hands of our enemies. It is also very bad news for women in Pakistan, but bad news for women carries less weight with our people than fear of The Bomb, unless you are an enlightened part of "our people". I recommend the article to you.
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Swat, like Chitral, was called "the Switzerland of Central Asia" before the Taliban incursion. It is now The Sough of Despond.
Here's how it was:
The Web used to carry lots of ads for hotels and tours in Swat, Dir, and Chitral. It would be as if Waikiki suddenly went out of business. Certainly a few radicals would rejoice, for a while, until the pinch of economic reality set in.
May the Christian Right he held forever at bay, in our homeland.
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