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Pakistani Paradise

Pakistan and Afghanistan, neighbours where Islamic values inform the culture to a pathological degree, and Sharia law, which imprisons the faithful within the confines of mind-capturing rigidity, represent virtual cultural peas-in-a-pod. And both are afflicted with the ruinous rampages of the Taliban, tribal militias whose minds are frozen in the shadowy mists of a brutal, earlier era, making of the present an inferno of atrocities against human freedom.

In inflicting misery and wretched threats against human rights on millions of impoverished people living in the rural hill countries of the Hindu Kush mountain range separating the two countries, where tribal chiefs have traditionally refused to be governed by their nations' administrative bodies and security and justice systems, they impose their rigid mind-starving and oppressive doctrine on all those whom they are able to threaten.

Remember the girls of the Red Mosque - out terrorising the city with sticks - to instill Islamic law in Islamabad Pakistan's capital and the arsenal of the mosque

When President Pervez Musharraf was still in power in Pakistan he finally ordered his security police to empty the Red Mosque of its fanatics, fed up with their constant forays into the streets of Islamabad, beating people who were judged by their adherents to be inadequately and modestly dressed, unlike the women who frequented the Red Mosque, and in surrender to complaints by the owners of small video and music shops which Red Mosque members would raid to destroy the forbidden objects.

He is now being held for trial on charges of having been responsible for the deaths of people in the mosque who refused the authorities' demands that they exit the mosque and surrender to police. The siege of the mosque and its aftermath, with the death of those who preferred to die for their extreme fascist beliefs rather than surrender to authorities brought down on his administration the umbrage of the Islamist hill tribes, since morphed into the Pakistan Taliban.

Peshawar has now been targeted for reasons similar to the destruction of video shops in Islamabad back then. The city's last open  film theatre where men -- labourers and soldiers -- would go to smoke cannabis and view pornographic films was attacked with three grenades. One of the grenades blew in the front entrance and the other two exploded within the theatre where 80 people were viewing a film, called Yarna (friendship in Pashto).

The surprise really is that such an establishment would insist on remaining in a country like Pakistan, always rigid in its social constructs dedicated to fundamentalist Islam, and lately groaning under a backlash of Islamist venom against anything forbidden by the religion of peace. In the attack seats were torn from the explosive force of the grenades. "Terrorists threw three Chinese-made hand grenades into the cinema hall at 3:40 p.m. when the show was in progress" advised Peshawar's police chief.

This -- though no one has yet claimed responsibility for the deaths of the thirteen who succumbed from the force of the explosion -- while the government of Pakistan is engaged in peace negotiations with the Taliban. Hoping to end the violence that has been responsible for over 40,000 deaths in recent years. This is the Taliban that kills humanitarian aid and medical workers for attempting to inoculate Pakistani children against poliomyelitis.

In Pakistan, Sharia law is integrated into everyday experience; it is the law that authorizes the banning of alcohol, and restricts women to their homes, and ensures they may not appear in public without their smothering, dark burqas covering their bodies completely with no flesh showing at ankles or wrists, and faces well hidden but for eye slits.

Peshawar is on the main route from Pakistan through the fabled Khyber Pass to Afghanistan, where militants roam the mountainous tribal areas surrounding the city.  Last year leaflets were distributed to cellphone stores ordering an end to sales of ring tones and video clips. There was once a thriving film industry in Peshawar, but no more; now the films people view are mostly made in Lahore and even mainstream films feature vulgarity with young women in tight-fitting clothes dancing with older males.

In a society where women are kept as cloistered handmaids to the men who own them, those same men relish viewing young scantily and tightly-clad women, not to be considered chaste and pure and hidden like their own. A film director and cultural expert, Jehan Shah, explained that the Pashto-language cinema never had reflected the considered societal norms or culture prevalent in northwestern Pakistan.

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"Maybe the state allowed it as a safety valve, a way to keep the masses busy with something that titillates them". As though in validation of that insight, a man who was present at the cinema was asked his opinion and he responded that he could see no contradiction in the screening of pornographic films in an area acknowledged for its conservative values.

"These are not Pashtun women. These are Punjabi."

Labels: Culture, Islamism, Pakistan, Sexism, Taliban, Terrorism

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, February 13, 2014