Pakistan: Controlling 'Evil'

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By Sami Yousafzai

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For the past 40 years, 50-year-old Shaukat Khan has made a modest income singing and dancing at weddings, family celebrations and private gala parties. Now he is being run out of show business along with hundreds of other entertainers in Pakistan's North-West Frontier province. They are among the first casualties of the aggressive, "anti-obscenity" crackdown on the performing arts being orchestrated by the Islamist United Action Council, or MMA in its Urdu acronym. "The mullahs hate us," says Khan. "They only want us to study the holy Qur'an." In its zealous drive to Islamicize the strategic province, the pro-Taliban coalition of six conservative religious parties, which swept last November's NWFP provincial election, has ordered police to tear down suggestive advertising, remove CDs from store windows, seize "obscene" material and even arrest store owners. Under the MMA's watch, police have held public bonfires of confiscated videos, CDs, posters and cosmetics. "Sadly, we are witnessing the Talibanization of NWFP," says Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan's Peshawar chapter. But the MMA says it is doing exactly what it campaigned to do. The coalition rode to victory in NWFP on a campaign that was virulently anti-U.S. and that promised to uphold Islamic values. "Gradually, we will banish all such evil things," vows 80-year-old Maulana Mujahid Khan Al Husaini, an MMA provincial assembly member. The next "evils" the MMA seeks to eliminate? Cable TV, movie theaters and coeducation.

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