Moderate Muslims in Pakistan stir silent majority against Taleban

[Jeddawi]

Moderate Muslims in Pakistan stir silent majority against Taleban

 

 

 

 

The new Islamic alliance is trying for the first time to give moderates a voice

Jeremy Page and Zahid Hussain in Lahore

 

As classes begin at the Jamia Naeemia madrassa, an Islamic college in Lahore, the courtyard echoes to the sound of 125 students reciting the Koran. Mostly from poor families in Punjab and North West Frontier Province, the youngsters are prime targets for the Taleban and other militant groups preaching the fundamentalist forms of Islam in Pakistan.

 

Here, however, they are learning a different doctrine that is music to the ears of Pakistani, US and British officials. “The Taleban is a stigma on Islam,” says Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi, a Sunni cleric who heads the madrassa. “That is why we will support our Government and our army and their right to destroy the Taleban. We will save Pakistan,” he told The Times.

 

Until recently it was unusual to hear a cleric denounce the Taleban in the country that helped to create the movement and has long resisted Western pressure to engage it militarily.

 

That changed on Friday when Dr Naeemi took the unprecedented step of founding an alliance of 22 Islamic groups and political parties with the explicit goal of opposing the Taleban.

 

The Sunni Itehad Council claims to represent about 85 million Pakistani followers of the moderate Sunni Barelvi school of Sunni Islam, which incorporates saints and their Holy shrines.

 

The Council is now joining secular Pakistani political parties in an effort to shore up public support for the army’s campaign against the Taleban in the Swat Valley. It has organised anti-Taleban protests and is planning to hold a conference of 5,000 moderate clerics in Islamabad, the capital.

 

Some members are even offering to take up arms. “We are ready to send volunteers to fight with the military against Taleban,” said Maulana Sarwat Qadri, the chief of Sunni Tehrik, an Islamic party that joined the alliance.

 

Such sentiment is far from universal: Pakistan’s biggest Islamic party has opposed the Swat campaign, as has Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician. Analysts say, however, that the alliance still marks the first time that the silent majority of moderate Pakistanis have found a voice.

 

“The Taleban are few but because they have turned to Jihad they are seen more,” said Dr Naeemi. “If there are 100 people in this room and one is waving a gun, then you see the one with the gun.” There are no precise statistics but experts believe that at least half of Pakistan’s 173 million people are Sunni Barelvi, and about 20-25 per cent Deobandi. Another 20 per cent are Shia — and most of them fiercely oppose the Taleban.

 

The Taleban are mostly products of Deobandi madrassas set up with Saudi money in the 1980s to train volunteers to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and to counter Shia influence from Iran. They follow an extreme version of Deobandi Islam which is heavily influenced by the Wahhabi ideology of al-Qaeda and advocates using violence against Shias and Barelvis.

 

Sectarian tensions have intensified in recent months because the Taleban have been attacking Shias and destroying Sunni Barelvi shrines across the northwest. Sunni Barelvi and Shia clerics were outraged when the Taleban negotiated a peace deal with the Government in Swat in February only to advance into neighbouring regions last month.

Edited 29 مئی 2009 by Jeddawi