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]

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.”

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)

Many Italians were shocked to find pictures in their daily newspapers recently of Muslims kneeling in prayer on the piazzas in front of the cathedrals in Milan and Bologna during demonstrations in support of Palestinians in Gaza.
Predictably, politicians in the centre-right government criticised the protests with some, including the ministers for defence and European affairs, calling them a blasphemous provocation.

(Photo: Il Giornale says Milan square “transformed into a mosque”)

The government ministers noted that it would be impossible for Christians to pray in Mecca and one called on the Roman Catholic Church to take a harder stand and be less tolerant.

Critics of the demonstrations have found an unlikely ally in Yahya Pallavicini, the vice-president of CO.RE.IS, Italy’s Islamic Religiuos Community. The demonstrations were organised by another Islamic group, the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy (UCOII) and Pallavicini thinks they went over the top.

“We pray in our mosques and in our in mosques and our homes but using prayer during demonstrations in such a theatrical way after burning U.S. and Israeli flags creates disorder and leads to the stereotyping of Islam in Italy,” he told me in a phone conversation. “This is a manouevre to try to help fundamentalist positions.”

“This is a very misleading use of religion, this is the strategy of Hamas,” he said.

After some Catholics expressed outrage over the prayers in front of Milan’s cathedral, some Muslims apologised to the city’s archbishop, Cardinal Dionisio Tettamanzi. But Pallavicini urged the prelate not to accept their apology and to take a hard line instead against Muslims who abuse religion for political purposes.

Do you think Muslims crossed a red line by praying in front of these cathedrals or do you think they have a right to do so?

(Photo: Milan cathedral, 13 Jan 2001/Stefano Rellandini)

Here is an Italian video discussing the Muslim prayer protest in Milan. Footage of the protest runs from 0:54 to 1:26:

(Photo: Pilgrims on the plains of Arafat, 7 Dec 2008/Saudi Press Agency)

Muslims taking part in the annual haj pilgrimage often say they have no words to describe the spiritual experience they have. Their practical struggles with the logistics are another thing altogether.

Many multi-billion-dollar improvements have been carried out over the past few years to improve safety for  pilgrims, expand the Grand Mosque and build tent cities in several areas where pilgrims have to stay for a day or more. The logistics of the haj are the main challenge that both pilgrims and the organizers face during the few days in which pilgrims are required to travel back and forth to several places to perform the rituals. There have been stampedes, fires and other accidents in the past as Muslims from around the world answered the call made by the Prophet Mohammad more than 1,400 years ago.

The benefits were clear at this year’s haj, in which over two million pilgrims have taken part without any major incident. There is still room for improvement, though, and my preference is for a train system to help pilgrims get around to perform the rituals tracking the Prophet’s steps.

So many pilgrims walk between the buses and trucks carrying fellow pilgrims to the different sites that both those on foot and those on wheels end up spending the same time to reach their destinations. Trains could solve such problems and also reduce the chance of accidents like those that often take place on the routes connecting cities around Mecca.

(Photo: Pilgrims outside Mecca, 7 Dec 2008/Ahmed Jadallah)

Several developers, construction and logistics firms around the Gulf spring to mind when one imagines improvements that could also include more organised spaces to park buses and other vehicles once they offload their passengers at tent cities.

Housing could also be improved. Many pilgrims walk long distances and then sleep rough on the road side or on the plains, in mostly hot desert weather. The problem becomes worse in the summer when  temperatures reach up to 50 degrees Celsius.

Various transport projects have been mooted in the Saudi press. To my mind there is enough time to achieve a lot so pilgrims won’t have to hike around so much in the August heat. The dates of haj are based on the lunar calendar and shift forward by about 10 days a year, so the Saudis have about a decade to get all this done.

One person who would probably welcome better transport is our Cairo bureau chief Jonathan Wright, who wrote one vivid post from the haj last year entitled “On the haj, be fit and bring sturdy sandals.”

Have you been on the haj or are you online from the Mecca area right now? What improvements would you suggest?

Here are some of our videos from the haj:

Pilgrims pray for forgiveness:

Pilgrims stone the devil:

A Saudi offer to build a large mosque in Moscow has prompted Russian Orthodox organisations to ask for permission to build an Orthodox church in Saudi Arabia. Several western Christian churches have asked for or suggested such reciprocity with Saudi Arabia, which funds mosques abroad but bans any religion but Islam at home. It’s an issue that can only become more pressing if King Abdullah continues to preach interfaith dialogue and tolerance around the globe while not practicing it at home.

The Russian Muftis Council announced the Saudi offer to fund a mosque last week, promting an open letter to King Abdullah a few days later by what Interfax news agency called Orthodox public organisations. It didn’t come from the Russian Orthodox Church itself, but watch this space. The Russians have become increasingly active on the world religious scene as they emerge from the communist era and it would not be surprising to see them take a position on this question as well. There is probably also a domestic angle to this. Islam is the second largest religion in Russia and growing, so the Orthodox Church might feel a bit of competition.

(Photo: St. Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square, 27 Jan 2007/Denis Sinyakov)

“You often say that Islam is a religion of justice. However, if Saudi Arabia builds mosques in dozens of Christian countries, isn’t it just to build a church for Christians living in Your Kingdom!” says the letter quoted by Interfax. “It would be just to create the same conditions for Saudi Christians as Muslims have in Russia … It is the only way to make interreligious dialogue honest and just.”

Read the full text of the letter in English here. It says Moscow already has two mosques but IslamOnline speaks of six.

Do you think it’s important to see churches built in Saudi Arabia? Should this be a litmus test for assessing Abdullah’s dialogue campaign?

The price of oil may have dropped by more than half in recent weeks but the Saudi petrodollar appears to have lost none of its allure, judging by the procession of very important visitors to the New York Palace Hotel this week and to the U.N. General Assembly. With President George W. Bush in the lead, they have all come to present their compliments to King Abdullah, the Saudi ruler, who has turned the Manhattan hotel and the world body into an extension of his court, complete, it would seem, with a Majlis to receive petitioners.

Naturally, all the VIPs visiting him are eager to congratulate his majesty on his interfaith initiative, a gathering of religious and political leaders which took place  this week under the auspices of the United Nations. The meeting has attracted extravagant praise from, among others, Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minister,  and Shimon Peres,  the veteran Israeli president.

It is a fact that the king's initiative is unprecedented and bold, taking place despite the displeasure of many influential religious clerics at home. It is also a fact that he is the first Saudi leader to have travelled to the Vatican, opening dialogue between the two largest religions.

But some commentators have pointed out the oddity that the king, who at home shares power with clerics of the puritanical Wahhabi Islam -- which forbids any expression of other religious belief inside the kingdom, even of less austere forms of Muslim belief -- should be so keen on interfaith dialogue abroad. Even Mr Blair admits coyly, in a newspaper article to coincide with the conference, that the king is also "the leader of a nation that critics say has been slow to modernise, with fraught consequences for the rest of the world".

Critics also point out that the 15 Saudi hijackers who were among the 19 young Arab men who carried out the Sept 11, 2001 attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in the United States were partly influenced by the Wahhabi ideology.

But amid the financial turmoil sweeping international markets, the galaxy of world leaders chose to set aside their misgivings about Saudi Arabia's domestic policies and freedom record. In their sight, they had one goal:

They are hoping Saudis will stump up cash to help the International Monetary Fund bail out emerging and developed countries in crisis.

Diplomats at the United Nations uncomfortably (and privately) acknowledge that Saudi Arabia's wealth and its growing importance as a major contributor to the U.N. aid programmes -- it recently gave $500 million to the World Food Programme -- were behind the high turnout at the forum and lack of criticism of Saudi domestic policies.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, which the U.S. State Department lists as a “country of particular concern” because of its severe restrictions on religious freedom, is sponsoring talks at the United Nations in New York today and tomorrow on improving interfaith dialogue. Is this a credible exercise?

(Photo: King Abdullah with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at U.N. in New York, Nov 12, 2008)

Analysis leading up to the meeting has been full of reservations. Our Riyadh bureau chief Andrew Hammond noted that the influential religious establishment in Saudi Arabia shows scant support for the king’s initiative. Our Middle East news editor Samia Nakhoul quotes Saudi delegation member Jamal Khajoggi as saying “The king can change positions, he can hire and fire people but he cannot change the mind-set of people or the clerical establishment quickly. It has to be gradual.”

The most brutal assessment came from Ali al-Ahmed, a Washington-based Shiite Muslim dissident from Saudi Arabia quoted by the New York Times: “It’s like apartheid South Africa having a conference at the U.N. on racial harmony.”

King Abdullah has taken some pioneering steps for a Saudi monarch. At the same time, his country still restricts all religious activity except Wahhabi Islam severely.

Do you think King Abdullah is a credible sponsor for a conference on interfaith understanding?

Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, has made statements in the past that made him sound quite sceptical about the value of a theological dialogue with Muslims.

(Photo: Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran)

That wasn’t what I found when I interviewed him last Saturday at his office on Via della Conciliazione, just down the road from St. Peter’s Basilica. The subject was the Catholic-Muslim Forum he had just hosted on Nov 4-6 between a Muslim delegation from the Common Word group and Catholic delegation of Vatican officials, Catholic Islam scholars and bishops from western and Muslim countries.

The Common Word group, he said, could become a “favoured channel” for Vatican contacts with Muslims, even while it retains other channels of dialogue. While he still had some reservations about the group’s approach because of differences he sees in ways of reading scriptures, he was quite positive about the actual dialogue itself. “In discussing the love of God, we were doing theology unintentionally,” he said. That jibed with a point that Muslim delegates made during the session itself. “I thought they didn’t want to discuss theology but we’ve been doing that from the start,” University of Cambridge Islamic studies lecturer Tim Winter remarked halfway though the conference.

The cardinal said he felt the most important part of the final communique was item number 5: “Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.” The public part is the key, since that could help Christian minorities in Muslim countries. It could also help Muslim minorities in western countries, which is why Muslim delegation head Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric persuaded the doubters in his ranks to accept it. Several Muslim delegates told me they most appreciated the next item, which reads: “Religious minorities are entitled to be respected in their own religious convictions and practices. They are also entitled to their own places of worship, and their founding figures and symbols they consider sacred should not be subject to any form of mockery or ridicule.” Tauran had more to say about this in the interview.

Tauran also said there were now too many different Christian-Muslim dialogues and he saw a risk that they could start tripping over each other. Here’s my news story on the interview.

Edited Q&A of Tauran interview: Due to some software glitches, you need to do the following to get to the second page of this post — click on the headline, then click on the page number “2″ below.  Page 2 includes Tauran’s closing remarks at the end of the conference.

Pages: 1

Saudi Arabia’s ban on churches on its territory is a thorny issue that loomed over the Catholic-Muslim Forum meeting this week in Rome. Some Catholics say the question of religious freedom for minority faiths in Muslim countries is so important that the Vatican should insist on strict reciprocity in such interfaith talks. 

(In photo: St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church opens in Doha on 15 March 2008/Fadi Al-Assaad)

However, more believe it is not a good idea to make the dialogue hostage to a single issue, so it did not become a dealbreaker here. It did get discussed in the closed-door talks, which delegates said were quite lively at times, and it was referred to in the final declaration. Cynics may say nothing was resolved, but there are interesting nuances that could lead to change.

The final declaration had this to say: “Genuine love of neighbour implies respect of the person and her or his choices in matters of conscience and religion. It includes the right of individuals and communities to practice their religion in private and public.” Having Muslim delegates sign up to a statement that non-Muslims should be able to worship publicly in Muslim majority countries, i.e. have their own churches, is an important step. This is clearly aimed at Saudi Arabia, where the rights of other faiths are most clearly limited. A Catholic delegate told me some Muslims did not like the final part about practising religion in private and public but their delegation head, Bosnian Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric, reminded them that this passage could also help minority Muslims who want to build mosques in Western countries. This is an interesting example of how the globalisation of Islam is starting to influence the traditional Muslim world.

Bishop Paul Hinder, the Abu Dhabi-based apostolic vicar of Arabia, said he sensed some change on the churches issues as well. Saudi Arabia bans the public practice of any other religion on its territory, arguing that it is holy land for Islam because the Prophet Mohammad was born there and the two most important mosques are located there. However, there are about one million Catholics in Saudi Arabia, mostly labourers from the Philippines, India and Sri Lanka, and they have no church. After the public session of the Catholic-Muslim Forum on Thursday, several journalists gathered around Hinder to ask his view of the meeting, the declaration and the outlook for Christians in Saudi Arabia. Here are some quotes:

(In photo, Bishop Hinder at left, Grand Mufti Mustafa Ceric in white turban at right, 11 Nov 2008/Alessandro Bianchi)

“There is hope that things can change and even get better. It’s not the case that we have nothing on the Arabian peninsula now. We have possibilities (to worship) in many (Gulf) countries, even if they are limited. There is one country where that’s not the case, but there are signs that that could change. I think that such declarations can give a boost and a motivation. I know there are Muslim colleagues in all countries are working to make this situation change, from my point of view for the better.”

The Swiss-born bishop, who has been in Abu Dhabi for almost five years, said he told Muslims at the conference about the difficult conditions the foreign workers live in — and not just Christians.

“I had comments from Muslims who said it touched them to hear what we said about the workers of Philippine, Indian or Sri Lankan origin there. It’s not only a question of religion, it’s one of social justice. You have to go look and see for yourself. They live in labour camps. They are almost kept as slaves. They’re in a situation almost like animals. That hurts us, not only for our Christians. I’d like to see more justice and human dignity for everyone. The question of practising any religion is important. I have asked leaders in our region why, if you think of building cinemas, theatres, sports facilities, mosques and shops inside these labour camps, haven’t you yet had the idea that maybe the others — the Christians of different denominations, the Hindus or Buddhists — have a spiritual need to worship together and that one should prepare the necessary places? I have said this and I think it has been understood. Obviously, I don’t think that when I get back there in a week, they will be building chapels in labour camps in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. But we now have this final document that helps and motivates. There are people who take what we say seriously. Things are moving, even in Saudi Arabia. Sometimes it’s better not make too much noise. Telling people what to do in a loud voice prompts resistance right away. If we negotiate patiently, there is much more comprehension for what one thinks.”