Both are Muslims. Both are chaplains. Both are in the military. But one is French and one is American. That alone ensured there would be enough to talk about when Mohamed-Ali Bouharb and Abu- hena Saifulislam met in Paris to discuss their work with chaplains and academics from the United States.

(Photo: Bouharb (l) and Saifulislam with CIEE’s Hannah Taieb. Note the Islamic crescents on Bouharb’s cap and Saifulislam’s sleeves, 7 June 2009/Tom Heneghan)

Muslim chaplaincies are relatively new additions to the armed forces in Europe and North America. Establishing their place alongside the traditional Catholic, Protestant and Jewish offices of religious services has not always been easy, even though both imams reported the top brass in their countries strongly supported the effort. While they tend to the spiritual needs of their co-religionists in the ranks, as other chaplains do, these imams also spend much time explaining their religion and its practices to their non-Muslim superiors.

Both spoke of the obvious issues such as getting halal food or having time and space for Muslim prayers. Both had encountered questions from both within the forces and outside in the Muslim community asking why they had agreed to work as imams in the military. Their presentations were part of a seminar entitled “Religious Diversity in Everyday Life in France” organised by the U.S.-based Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) and the Institute for the Study of Islam and the Societies of the Muslim World in Paris.

Bouharb, 32, is a French-born Muslim with Tunisian roots who studied Islam at a private Muslim institute in Paris and graduated from a special training course for imams at the Catholic Institute here. He is chaplain to the National Gendarmerie, which comes under the Defence Ministry. France only launched its Muslim chaplain corps in 2005 and it is still finding its way. “I first got a two-year contract. It’s just been extended by four years. Nothing is certain. We’ll see the results in 20 years,” he told the meeting on Sunday. Bouhard stressed how tricky the issues he faces can be as he discussed the delicate bridge function he has to play with the example of five French Muslim soldiers who refused to go to Afghanistan:

“If a Muslim soldier doesn’t want to go to Afghanistan for religious reasons, that’s his right. My role is not to convince him. But if he doesn’t want to go, he shouldn’t be in the army. That’s not a religious opinion. Sometimes the Muslim chaplain has to put aside his religious role and deconstruct what is religious and what is not. What I do is go see the soldier and ask him about his vision of Islam. I can help him to understand things better, but not to make a decision… If a soldier’s not clear in his mind (about shooting at Taliban), he might hesitate for a moment. That could endanger the troops around him…

“To the commanders, I say I’m not the representative of a Muslim soldiers’ trade union. When those five refused to go, people said the Muslim chaplains weren’t doing their jobs. It was all over the media. But the chaplain’s duty is not to ensure the cohesion of the troops. (The doubting soldier) could endanger others. My religious duty is not to put those others in danger… We Muslim chaplains asked for a right to reply to the media but the Defence Ministry press office said it was not worth the effort… They were right. A few weeks later, all was forgotten.”

Another issue was whether Muslim soldiers due for commando training had to fast if the session occurred during Ramadan. “They get up at 3 a.m. and march for 25 kms with backpacks weighing 25 kilos. It’s very difficult to fast,” he said. Muslim soldiers asked him what to do. “I told them that, if you signed up to do this training, you have to respect that contract. You can stop your fast and catch up on those days after Ramadan is over.” Ten Qatari soldiers in France for advanced training could not understand why the session was not rescheduled, as it would be in their majority Muslim society, but Bouharb said it could not be and the Muslim soldiers had to adjust. “There is only one Islam, but there are many ways of expressing it,” he said.

Saifulislam, who emigrated to the U.S. from Bangladesh in 1989 and became a U.S. Navy imam 10 years later, had a slightly different approach. “If there is special training during Ramadan, I ask the commander if it can be moved to another date,” he said, stressing he was giving his personal opinion and not speaking in an official capacity. “I tell the Muslims that they’re away from home while on training so they can not fast and make it up later. It’s his or her call. I provide the counsel.”

(Photo: Bouharb and Saifulislam, 7 June 2009/Tom Heneghan)

He said there were about a dozen imams in the U.S. armed forces, which appointed their first Muslim chaplain in 1993. That compares to over 800 Christian and Jewish chaplains in the Navy alone, he said. “They don’t necessarily need us for the number of Muslim soldiers but to advise them on religious inclusiveness, like about how Islamic practices can affect a mission, before they deploy to Iraq or Afghanistan. They get training in cultural sensitivity.”

Possibly because imams have served in the U.S. military for longer than in the French, the American Muslim chaplains seemed more integrated into the overall chaplain corps. Saifulislam said:

“Ninety-nine percent of the people who come to me for counselling are from another faith. They come to you with issues, it could be about family, stress or violence. People can get more religious in boot camp, also in prison. I’ve also been trained in suicide prevention, PTSD recognition and crisis management. We also do grief counselling, regardless of the religion. Of course, we don’t perform services for other religions. You’re not going to see me baptise a baby! But we facilitate things. If someone comes to me as a Wiccan and asks for a place to pray, I help them. The Department of Defense recognises over 290 different religions and denominations. If a Muslim asks one of the other chaplains to help him get a copy of the Koran, he has to help him.”

When President Barack Obama delivers his long-awaited speech in Cairo on Thursday, will he address the Muslim world or the Arab world? In the pre-speech build-up, it’s being called a speech “to the Muslim world” or “to the world’s 1.x billion Muslims” (the estimated total mentioned in different articles fluctuates between 1and 1.5 billion). But the venue he’s chosen — Cairo — and all the focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict make it sound like a speech to and about the Middle East.

(Photo: President Barack Obama, 21 May 2009/Kevin Lamarque)

The Middle East is the heartland of Islam, but Arabs make up only about 20 percent of the world’s Muslims. Not all Arabs are Muslims. And non-Arab Iran is a major part of the Middle Eastern political scene. So is it correct to call this a speech to the Muslim world? Would it be better to call it a speech to the Middle East?

There is such an important overlap between the Arab and the Muslim worlds that it is hard to disentangle them. The Palestinian issue concerns Muslims around the world, but with varying intensity depending partly on whether it figures in regional politics or stands as a more distant symbol of oppression against Muslims. Politics can also poison Muslim relations with Jews, which can range from bitter enmity to interfaith cooperation depending on where, when and how one looks. The U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq may be justified in Washington as operations against international terrorism, but in Muslim countries they are often seen as attacks on Muslims and Islam.

When this speech was first announced as an address to the Muslim world, I blogged here and here that he should deliver it in Turkey or Indonesia because they were doing more to reconcile Islam and modern democracy than any Arab state. “As a politician from a country where church-state relations are a lively issue, one could expect him to ask what message his choice will send concerning the political relationship with religion in the state he chooses,” I wrote.

(Photo: Cairo at dusk, 14 April 2009/Tarek Mostafa)

The pressing question of how Islam relates to politics and society in the 21st century has an important religious component, because any adaptation or development would have to come from within a tradition that looks to religious authority to bless important changes. A speech addressing this would necessarily have to deal with religion, which is after all what Muslim countries have in common regardless of their geography, ethnicity, languages, traditions or politics.

Articles looking ahead to the speech focus mostly on the political, i.e. the Middle East peace process. Reuters has run a long curtainraiser today entitled “Obama to address tough issues in speech to Muslims” that touches on the Middle East, oil and international terrorism (BTW “speech to Muslims” is a neat way to get around the problem under discussion here). Washington also ran “Q+A: Why is Obama speech to Muslim world important?” and an earlier analysis on May 31 entitled “PREVIEW-Obama speech to Muslims key to new U.S. strategy.” That analysis mixed the Middle East and the wider Muslim world, saying “President Barack Obama will try to repair America’s tarnished image in the Muslim world on Thursday, as he looks to mobilize support for restarting Middle East peacemaking and thwarting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.”

Another article by our Middle East Special Correspondent Alistair Lyon, “Muslims want more than fine talk from Obama,” shows how complex all this is. Surveying opinion across the Muslim world, he found the Palestinian issue stood out as their main concern. But wider issues also emerged, for example a general desire to feel the U.S. president respects Muslims and Islam — a message Obama has already been sending. As for the venue, it seems that Arabs found the choice of Cairo very appropriate while a Malaysian and an Iranian Lyon quoted thought it was a bad choice.

(Photo: Fireworks at Malaysia’s Putra Mosque near Kuala Lumpur, 31 Aug 2003/Bazuki Muhammad)

In one of its pre-speech articles, the New York Times wrote that “when President Obama delivers a much-anticipated speech in Cairo, he will be addressing so many audiences, and seeking to advance so many agendas, that even his oratorical gifts are likely to be taxed.”

How do you think Obama should pitch his speech? Is it possible to juggle both the immediate political concerns of the Middle East with wider issues concerning the whole Muslim world? Or is it impossible not to?

U.S. President Barack Obama may face a new minefield on the battlefields of Afghanistan — one that combines a potent mix of religion and culture.

Explosive allegations have emerged that U.S. soldiers have been attempting to convert Afghanis to Christianity, a scenario sure to stir passions and even anger in the overwhelming Islamic country. You can see our story on the issue here by my colleague Peter Graff in Kabul.

The U.S. military denied Monday it has allowed soldiers to try to convert Afghans to Christianity, after a television network showed pictures of soldiers with bibles translated into local languages.

Qatar-based Al Jazeera television showed footage of a church service at Bagram, the main U.S. base north of the Afghan capital Kabul, in which soldiers had a stack of Bibles in the local languages, Pashtu and Dari.

A military chaplain was shown delivering a sermon to other soldiers, saying: “The special forces guys — they hunt men basically. We do the same things as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. We do, we hunt them down.”

Critics have long contended that parts of the U.S. military have been unduly influenced by a powerful evangelical Christian wing which has pressured men and women in uniform to convert or conform.

Many U.S. military events often feature public prayers which some also say blur the line they say should be drawn between church and state. We have blogged on this issue before.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation has for years tried to raise public awareness about this issue and has in the past accused the military of sanctioning missionary activity in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Headed by former U.S. air force judge advocate Mikey Weinstein, it said on Monday that: “His (Weinstein’s) calls for action have been met with a full assault of denials, baseless and anti-Semitic accusations, and most recently imprecatory prayers against him and his family. But now there is VIDEO PROOF that Mikey has been right all along.”

The U.S. military has said that the comments from the sermon shown in the video were taken out of context and that it firmly prohibits soldiers from proseltyzing while on duty.

Whether this is true or not, there is no question that at least some damage has been done.

Here’s the Al Jazeera video:

(Photo: U.S. Marines bow their heads in prayer before the arrival of President Barack Obama at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, February 27, 2009. REUTERS/Jim Young (UNITED STATES))

Our Jerusalem bureau has sent a very interesting report about criticism within the Israeli army of the Gaza offensive in January. What caught my eye was that it brings up the issue of a religious war, a term usually used in relation to Muslims.

(Photo: Israeli air strike near Gaza-Egypt border in southern Gaza Strip, 26 Feb 2009/Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

The story starts off as follows:

Rabbis in the Israeli army told battlefield troops in January’s Gaza offensive that they were fighting a “religious war” against gentiles, according to one army commander’s account published on Friday.

“Their message was very clear: we are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land,” he said.

The account by Ram, a pseudonym to shield the soldier’s identity, was published by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper on the second day of revelations about the Gaza offensive that have rocked the Israeli military. (www.haaretz.com “Shooting and Crying, 2009″)…

The officer felt there was a “huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out”.

The corps distributed pamphlets about the history of Israel’s fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present, he said.  But the rabbinate’s message imparted to many soldiers the sense that “this operation was a religious war”.

Read the whole article here.

It’s hard to know when to use terms like “religious war” for violence such as what we’ve seen in the Middle East, Northern Ireland or Afghanistan. The opposing sides in these conflicts have different religious labels, so there is — at least superficially — a religious angle there. But there is also an underlying political struggle which often plays a far bigger role than those labels. Northern Ireland, for example, is not about religion but has often been presented mostly as a struggle between Catholics and Protestants. By contrast, the unrest in Sri Lanka pits secessionist Tamils (Hindus) against majority Sinhalese (Buddhists), but nobody calls that a religious war. Some seem to evolve — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has taken on more religious overtones over time while the Taliban are now seen more as insurgents than the Koran students their name signals.

What do you think? When is a conflict a religious war and when is it more a political struggle going on behind those labels? Or is it impossible to disentangle the two?

Here is our video report on the story and the script (including translations).

The bombing of the mausoleum of a renowned Pashto mystic poet outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar has darkened the mood further in a nation already numbed by the attack on cricket, its favourite sport, when the Sri Lankan team were targeted in Lahore.

Taliban militants are suspected of being behind the attack on the shrine of Abdul Rehman at the foot of the Khyber pass, where for centuries musicians and poets have gathered in honour of the 17th century messenger of peace and love.

The militants were angry that women had been visiting the shrine of the Rehman Baba as he was popularly known and so they planted explosives around the pillars of the tomb, to pull down the mausoleum in an echo of the Taliban bombing of the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan back in 2001. The structure was damaged and the grave blown up, Dawn reported.

"Is there any limit to this insanity ?' asks Owais Mughal in a post on All Things Pakistan.  The militants had burnt girls schools to the ground in northwest Pakistan, forced traffic to drive on the right hand side instead of left in the Malakand region, dug up graves of a minority sect and even hung the bodies in the public square in Swat region, he says. And now they were blowing up the resting place of the dead.

"Believe it or not; probably like some of our readers, I am now reluctant to open a newspaper to avoid reading any bad news about Pakistan. It hurts. It simply hurts," he wrote.

William Dalrymple writing in The Sunday Observer said  the attack was a reminder that Wahhabi radicals were determined to destroy a gentler, kinder Islam that had dominated South Asia for centuries.

He quotes Rehman Baba:"I am a lover, and I deal in love. Sow flowers, So your surroundings become a garden Don't sow thorns; for they will prick your feet. We are all one body,  Whoever tortures another, wounds himself."

Rehman Baba believed passionately in the importance of music, poetry and dancing as a path for reaching God, as a way of opening the gates of Paradise, Dalrymple says. But this use of poetry and music in ritual is one of the many aspects of Sufi practice that has attracted the wrath of the Islamists. And this differing understanding  of Islam is really at the heart of the conflict that is raging in Pakistan, he says.

Wahhabi fundamentalism has advanced so quickly in Pakistan that madrasas have taught an entire generation to abhor the region's gentle, syncretic Sufi Islam and to embrace instead an imported form of Saudi Wahhabism.

"The trend towards anti-culture extremism, however, is seen across the Islamic world, much aided in the 1990s by Saudi investment in the spread of the Wahhabi faith," writes Pakistan's The Daily Times.  With the latest attack, miltants had put the Pakistan state on notice about their intent against Pakistani culture, the paper said. It worried that the Taliban were also likely to attack the Sindhis whose mysticism-based culture is still intact in the interior of the province.

Sufism is anathema to the Taliban and they have long sought to uproot it. When the Taliban seized power in neighbouring Afghanistan in 1996, they locked Sufi shrines. In Pakistan's Mohmand tribal region, the local Taliban captured the shrine of a revered freedom movement hero, Haji Sahib of Turangzai, and turned it into their headquarters as this BBC story says.

So are parts of Pakistan increasingly looking like  a clone of Taliban Afghanistan ?

[Reuters picture of Abdur Rehman's mausoleum near Peshawar and Taliban militants standing guard in Swat]

Ten days have passed since Pakistan cut a deal with Islamists to enforce sharia in the turbulent Swat region in return for a ceasefire, and we still don’t know many details about what was agreed.  The deal made international headlines. It prompted political and security concerns in NATO and Washington and warnings about possible violations of human rights and religious freedom.

(Photo: Supporters of Maulana Sufi Mohammad gather for prayers in Mingora, 21 Feb 2009/Adil Khan)

In the blogosphere, Terry Mattingly over at GetReligion has asked in two posts (here and here) why reporters there aren’t supplying more details about exactly how sharia will be implemented or what the  doctrinal differences between Muslims in the region are. Like other news organisations, Reuters has been reporting extensively on the political side of this so-called peace deal but not had much on the religion details. As Reuters religion editor and a former chief correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I’m very interested in this. I blogged about the deal when it was struck and wanted to revisit the issue now to see what more we know about it.

After consulting with our Islamabad bureau, reading other news organisations’ reports and scouring the web, I have the feeling — familiar to anyone who has reported from that part of the world — that the more you look at this deal, the less you see besides the fact of the deal itself. The devil isn’t hiding in the details because there aren’t many there. He’s playing a bigger political game.

First, look at the deal that made all the headlines. On February 16, the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) government agreed with the local Swat Islamist leader Maulana Sufi Mohammad what was essentially a sharia-for-peace swap. The short text was all of two paragraphs in the original, as reported in the Urdu daily Roznama Express (Daily Express, below). The MEMRI Blog has the Urdu original (click here) and a translation that says they agreed that:

“…all non-Shari’a laws, i.e. those which are against the Koran and the Hadith, will stand ineffectual and cancelled, in other words, terminated …

“…Shariat-e-Muhammadi [Prophet Muhammad’s Shari’a] will be expediently implemented whose details are present in the books of Islamic jurisprudence and which is derived from four sources: Allah’s book [the Koran], Sunnat-e-Rasool [Prophet’s deeds], Ijma [Consensus], Qiyas [Reasoning].  No decision against it will be acceptable. In the event of revision, i.e. appeal, a house of justice, in other words a Shari’a court, will be created… whose decision will be final…

” …A sharia court system “will be implemented in totality with mutual consultation following the establishment of peace in the Malakand Division.”

The wording is so broad that it’s open to all sorts of interpretations. It was so vague that even the Pakistani media didn’t quote it much when reporting on the deal. After the overall fact of the deal itself, the news nugget here is the promise of a sharia appeals court for the area. A federal sharia appeals court already exists in Islamabad, so this seems to be more a practical local issue than a larger doctrinal one.

With that deal done, the government needs to issue a regulation establishing it in law. None has been signed so far, none has been published and journalists in Islamabad say none has been issued there. The Pashtun Post website has posted a text it describes as the proposed resolution, but it is actually a text drawn up last year when the NWFP government first considered reestablishing sharia in Swat. It’s a good bet that the final wording will be quite close to this long legal text, which basically sets out the composition of the more sharia-compliant courts to be established in the region.

How does it stipulate sharia should to be applied? In the relevant paragraph, it simply says:

“A Qazi (Islamic judge) shall seek guidance from Quran Majeed (Noble Koran) and Sunna-e-Nabvi (way of the Prophet) … for the purposes of procedure and proceedings of conduct, resolution and decision, of cases and shall decide the same in accordance with Shariah. While expounding and interpreting the Quran Majeed and Sunna e Nabvi … the Qazi shall follow the established principles of expounding and interpreting Quran Majeed and Sunna-e-Nabvi … and, for this purpose, shall consider the expositions and opinions of recognized Fuqaha’a (jurists) of Islam.”

(Photo: Swat girls return to school after peace deal, 23 Feb 2009/Adil Khan)

In other words, we still have no specifics. And it’s looking like we won’t get many more even when President Asif Ali Zardari signs and issues the final text. Sharia looks secondary here to the ceasefire the deal ushered in. The final sentence of the Feb. 16 agreement summed it up:‘‘We request Maulana Sufi Mohammad bin al-Hazrat Hasan to end his peaceful protest [for implementation of Sharia] and help the government in establishing peace in all the areas of Malakand Division.’’

That sentence also contains the deal’s Achilles heel. Maulana Sufi Mohammad is only one player on the Islamist scene in Swat. “Help the government in estabilishing peace” means convincing his son-in law Maulana Fazlullah, who has forged ties with other Pakistani Taliban factions and al Qaeda, to give up the fight.  His group did announce a ceasefire this week, but he might just be using that to refresh his forces for the next round of fighting. As our report noted: “Authorities have struck peace deals with militants in several parts of the northwest over recent years, including one in Swat last May, but none has succeeded in eliminating militant sanctuaries.”

We’re not the only ones saying that. For example, Najmuddin Shaikh, Pakistan’s former foreign secretary and its former ambassador to Washington, explained in the Daily Times why the deal is getting such short shrift:

“It is a sad but almost foregone conclusion that this agreement will be no more effective than the ones concluded in the past, and that while there will be a welcome albeit temporary respite from the daily bloodletting in Swat, the strife will soon resume.”

Another question is why Pakistan should agree to a local sharia regime if it already has sharia law. Well, it does and it doesn’t. The constitution says no law can be repugnant to Islam and there are some specifically Islamic laws, such as the one on hudood offenses such as blasphemy, fornication, apostasy and blasphemy. But the court system is based on the secular model established during the British colonial period. Courts are overloaded with cases and some are shamelessly corrupt. So a traditional sharia court where the qazis handed down verdicts with more speed and less fuss than the civil courts can appeal to Pakistanis frustrated with the secular system, regardless of the school of Islam they follow.

The Swat deal would set deadlines of up to six months to decide cases and would also set up an appellate court for the region. But they will not be “qazi courts” run by Islamic scholars and the judges will not even need to be experts in Islamic law. The 2008 text says hiring preference would be given to “those judicial officers who have completed a Sharia course of four months duration from a recognised institution.”

(Photo: Swat residents inspect a school blown up by Taliban, 19 Jan 2009/Abdul Rehman)

These details are interesting, but they hardly mean much to an outside reader. And they pale in the wider context of the major political struggle going on in the region, which is what Reuters and other main news organisations are focusing on. In his column in The News, Islamabad political analyst Ayaz Amir warned against “missing the essence of Talibanism”:

“I think we are not getting it. Talibanism in Afghanistan is a revolt against the American occupation … Pakistani Talibanism … is a slightly different phenomenon …  It is a revolt against the Pakistani state. Or rather a revolt against the dysfunctional nature of this state.

“If this were Nepal this would be a Maoist uprising. If this were a Latin American country it would be a peasant or a Guevarist uprising. Since it is Pakistan, the revolt assaulting the bastions of the established order comes with an Islamic colouring, Islam reduced to its most literal and unimaginative interpretations at the hands of those leading the Taliban revolt.

“…This revolt is spreading. Hitherto it was confined to the Frontier Province. But on February 7 we saw this revolt cross the River Indus for the first time when a police check post in Mianwali (Qudratabad near Wan Bachran) was attacked by Taliban fighters. On Feb 11 another police outpost near Essa Khail came under attack.”

If Pakistan were considering a more sharia-compliant justice system in relatively calm areas such as Islamabad or Lahore, it would presumably hold lengthy discussions and produce detailed guidelines to be followed by law-abiding citizens. That would be interesting to drill down into. But Swat and neighbouring areas of NWFP are in the grip of an armed insurgency. The Taliban militants have unleashed a reign of terror on the region, killing and beheading politicians, singers, soldiers and opponents and destroying nearly 200 girls’ schools. They’re the men with guns who will ultimately decide how this vague deal is implemented. Or if it is implemented at all.

Pakistan has agreed to restore Islamic law in the turbulent Swat valley and neighbouring areas of the North-West Frontier Province. What does that mean? Sharia is understood and applied in such varied ways across the Muslim world that it is difficult to say exactly what it is. Will we soon see Saudi or Taliban-style hand-chopping for thieves and stonings for adulterers? Would it be open to appeal and overturn harsh verdicts, as the Federal Sharia Court in Islamabad has sometimes done? Or could it be that these details are secondary because sharia is more a political than a religious strategy here?

(Photo: Swat Islamic leaders in Peshawar to negotiate sharia accord/16 Feb 2009/Ali Imam)

As is often the case in Pakistan, this issue has two sides — theory and practice. In theory, this looks like it should be a strict but not Taliban-style legal regime. As Zeeshan Haider in our Islamabad bureau put in in a Question&Answer list on sharia in Swat:

WHAT KIND OF ISLAMIC JUDICIAL SYSTEM IS SWAT GETTING?

Under Nizam-e-Adl or Islamic system of justice, all judicial laws contrary to Islamic teachings stand cancelled and the courts will decide the cases in line with Islamic injunctions.

These laws were largely in use before Swat was absorbed into Pakistan in 1969, and governments in the 1990s had promised to implement them to placate militants, but never fully did.

Unlike the Taliban courts, which have been summarily handing out severe punishments like chopping off hands of thieves and stoning to death adulterers and rapists, there will be a system of appeal on the decisions handed out by courts in Swat and neighbouring districts.

Ordinary judges, with a knowledge of Islam, will officiate rather than a Qazi. Analysts said the courts are unlikely to hand down Taliban-like sentences.

(UPDATE: Haider followed this up on Tuesday with an analysis “Pakistan takes risk with Islamic Law.”)

According to the Karachi daily Dawn, the draft regulation to implement Islamic law, which was already under debate in the provincial capital of Peshawar, has been made more restrictive than a text drawn up last October. That regulation gave sharia courts wide powers with no recourse for appeal. This latest draft says the Federal Sharia Court in Islamabad  will be the final court of appeal. Ordinary judges, not qazis (Islamic judges), will officiate. All that makes it sound like sharia in Swat will be less harsh than the summary sharia judgments the Taliban may impose in other areas.

(Photo: Swat school bombed by Taliban, 19 Jan 2009/Abdul Rehman)

So far, so good. But that’s just on the theory side. As for the practical issues, the Daily Times in Lahore focuses on the local politics behind the sharia drive. It says implementation will depend on local Islamist leaders such as Maulana Sufi Mohammad and adds:

“A chilling feeling is that the Sufi and his warlord son-in-law will preside over the establishment of the sharia law and will also interfere in the day to day implementation of it. The power of the Sufi will derive from the gun of the Taliban and he will not for long allow a sharia which is different from the one enforced by the Taliban elsewhere. This is very important because sharia is the order that will ensure longevity to the governance of the Taliban in the various territories they hold. Finally, if the Taliban win the war in Afghanistan and the Americans leave the region, it is the sharia that will ensure that the territories conquered in Pakistan stay with them.”

So once again, as mentioned here in our last post about Swat, religion and politics form an unpredictable and combustible mixture with the Taliban. If previous blogosphere debates about sharia are anything to go by, we’ll probably hear a lot about how sharia is imposed, how the system compares to Saudi Arabia and whether this reflects true Islam. That will be interesting, of course, but won’t go far enough to understand what’s happening in Swat. There will also be a heavy dose of local politics involved, much of it opaque to outsiders. But it’s in this practical sphere that the real issue will lie. The Daily Times gives the context for this political struggle that points to a wider strategy in which sharia is a tool. It’s worth repeating: “…if the Taliban win the war in Afghanistan and the Americans leave the region, it is the sharia that will ensure that the territories conquered in Pakistan stay with them.”

Pakistan has agreed to introduce sharia law in the Swat valley and neighbouring areas of the north-west in a peace deal with Taliban militants. Religious conservatives in Swat have long fought for sharia to replace Pakistan's secular laws, which came into force after the former princely state was absorbed into the Pakistani federation in 1969. The government apparently hopes that by signing a peace deal in Swat it can drive a wedge between conservative hardliners and Islamist militants whose influence has been spreading from the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan into Pakistan proper.

Critics are already saying the deal will encourage Taliban militants fighting elsewhere in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and could threaten the integrity of the country itself. Britain's Guardian newspaper quotes Khadim Hussain of the Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a think-tank in Islamabad, as calling the peace deal a surrender to the Taliban. It also quotes Javed Iqbal, a retired judge, as saying, "It means that there is not one law in the country. It will disintegrate this way. If you concede to this, you will go on conceding."

News of the peace deal followed an acknowledgement by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari that the Taliban had "a presence in huge amounts of land" in Pakistan and were trying to take over the country. In an interview with CBS, he said Pakistan was fighting to survive.

The militants in Swat had been pushing for the enforcement of a hardline version of Islamic law. They had already banned female education, outlawed music and dancing, and carried out summary executions.

According to Pakistan's Daily Times the peace deal envisages a more moderate interpretation of sharia, seen by many of the people in Swat as more efficient than the country's bureaucratic secular judiciary, and also includes a commitment to reopen girls' schools. But it questions whether this moderate interpretation will survive. 

"The people of Swat want quick justice, the kind enforced by the Wali of Swat, as if in a city-state utopia, but they are bound to get more than they have bargained for by rejecting the dilatory system obtaining in the rest of Pakistan," it says. "They will get the “munkir” (forbidden) part of the sharia dealing with forbidden acts plus the “maruf” (approved) part dealing with acts of piety. The “praiseworthy” acts of piety such as the saying of the nimaz five times a day in the mosque will be greatly approved, but those who don’t observe the ritual will suffer physical and financial pain. And the list of the “maruf” stretches endlessly, which means that you can be thrashed for a number of things you thought were not “penal”. It is probable that the scared people of Swat simply don’t know what they are in for."

So will this peace deal help take the steam out of the Taliban insurgency, using time-honoured tactics of divide and rule, and give the government some breathing space for bigger battles ahead? Or is it the beginning of a slide into the Talibanisation of Pakistan?

(Reuters file photos of people fleeing fighting in the Swat valley)

It’s hard to write about the Taliban on a religion blog without giving the impression that this militant movement in Afghanistan and Pakistan is basically religious. It’s certainly Islamist, i.e. it uses Islam for political ends. But it’s hard to find much religion in what they’re doing, while there’s a lot of power politics, Pashtun nationalism and insurrection against the Kabul and Islamabad governments there.

(Photo: Pakistani pro-Taliban militants in Swat Valley, 2 Nov 2007/Sherin Zada Kanju)

It’s often difficult to separate religion and politics in groups like this, but President Barack Obama gave a basic rule of thumb in his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last week:

“Far too often, we have seen faith wielded as a tool to divide us from one another – as an excuse for prejudice and intolerance. Wars have been waged. Innocents have been slaughtered. For centuries, entire religions have been persecuted, all in the name of perceived righteousness…

“No matter what we choose to believe, let us remember that there is no religion whose central tenet is hate. There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being. This much we know.”

Zeeshan Haider, senior correspondent in our Islamabad bureau, clearly makes these distinctions in his feature “Militants killing laughter and music in Pakistan region” about the intimidation of musicians and comedians in Peshawar. The blame lies not with “Muslim militants” or “medieval Islam” — broad terms often heard when the Taliban first emerged as a force in nearby Afghanistan in the 1990s — but “Islamist vigilantes hell-bent on imposing Taliban-style values.”

(Photo: Polish geologist Piotr Stanczak before his beheading by militants demanding the release of Taliban prisoners, 9 Feb 2009/Reuters TV)

Haider also makes a distinction between the Islamist political parties in Pakistan, who banned music on public buses and movie posters featuring women, and the militants who went further and used murder and bombings to intimidate the population.

Read the whole feature here.

Taliban militants have banned female education in the northwest Pakistan valley of Swat, depriving more than 40,000 girls of schooling. Last month, the Taliban warned parents against sending their daughters to school, saying female education was "unIslamic".  The warning was reiterated by a close aide to militant leader Mullah Fazlullah in a message broadcast through an illegal FM radio station on Friday night. Government schools have been shut down and some 300 private schools due to reopen next month after the winter break will probably remain closed, a senior official said.

The development highlights the extent to which the Taliban have extended their influence from the tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan into Pakistan itself, and their willingness to challenge Pakistanis' way of life.

In the same vein, the blog All Things Pakistan, in a post headlined "Pakistan at War: No Women Allowed" runs a photo of a banner in Mingora, the main city in Swat, which it says reads: "Women are not allowed in the market."  It says the Taliban has banned the entry of women in markets and ordered the killing of women who violate the ban. "From the picture, this is clearly a textile and cloth market -- the type of market where, in Pakistan, you would expect most customers to be women," it says. It also says that most shop owners have sold or shut down their business because of falling sales.

So what's going on here? Is this only about the Taliban enforcing their religious views even at the risk of alienating the local population? Neither the parents whose daughters have been banned from school nor the shop owners appear to welcome the development.  Or is it more about them showing their power to intimidate as part of a longer-term strategy?

Other conservative Muslim countries do not have bans on female education -- for example in Saudi Arabia female students make up a little over half of those enrolled in schools and universities, although they are strictly segregated. 

The Saudis and the Taliban come from different religious traditions. But according  to the website of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, "education is a requirement for every Muslim, both male and female. The Holy Qur’an and the Hadith [teachings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad] repeatedly emphasize the importance of learning," it says.

(Photo: Residents outside a damaged school in Qambar, in Swat valley)