Pakistani clerics want minister sacked for hug

Pakistani clerics want minister sacked for hug

Pakistani newspapers carried a photograph last week showing Minister of Tourism Nilofar Bakhtiar hugging a man, apparently her para-jumping instructor, after completing a jump in France.

Newspapers said she did the para-jump to raise money for victims of an earthquake that killed 73,000 people in Pakistan in October 2005.

Abdul Aziz, chief cleric at Islamabad's Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, said on Monday she should be sacked.

"Her act was un-Islamic and against our social norms. She earned a bad name for Islam. She should be punished," Aziz told Reuters.

Such calls are not to be taken lightly. In February, a Muslim zealot shot dead a woman minister of the government of Punjab province because he thought women should not be in politics. The gunman was sentenced to death last month.

Followers of the radical clerics at the Islamabad mosque have become increasingly audacious, raising fear that for all President Pervez Musharraf's talk of "enlightened moderation" he cannot stop a trend toward the Talibanisation of Pakistan.

Last Friday, Aziz announced the setting up of a Taliban-style vigilante Islamic court and vowed suicide-bomb attacks if authorities tried to crack down on the mosque and its followers.

The behaviour of the radical clerics and their thousands of stick-wielding followers -- and the government's failure to act against them -- has dismayed many Pakistanis.

Musharraf has said no one would be allowed to take the law into their own hands but authorities have yet to act against the mosque, apparently through fear of inciting a broader backlash from conservatives in an election year.

"Reaction to Western norms"

Last month, women students from the mosque's religious school abducted three women they accused of running a brothel as part of a private anti-vice drive. They later detained two policemen.

All of those detained were eventually released but the Islamists have vowed to press on with their campaign against "obscenity and un-Islamic activities".

"It is a reaction to what Musharraf is doing, trying to enforce Western norms in our Muslim society," said Aziz's deputy and brother, Abdul Rashid Ghazi.

In the first high-level contact between the government and the clerics, the leader of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League, Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, held talks with them at the mosque at the weekend.

Ghazi said Hussain had come to seek the clerics' views.

"We are struggling for a cause... We'll not wind it up," he said, referring to the vigilante court.

In January, women from the mosque's school occupied a library next to the mosque to protest against efforts by city authorities to demolish illegally built mosques.

The mosque compound has taken on the air of a rebel camp, with young men with sticks posted at gates and at look-out points along banner-strewn walls. Two or three men have been seen with guns which the clerics say are properly licensed.