By Umer Farooq

The return of Lal Masjid’s Maulana Abdul Aziz to Islamabad appears to have been the result of prolonged and intense negotiations

Maulana Abdul Aziz, the Lal Masjid cleric, whose burqa-clad appearance on state-owned television is etched in memory, is now back in Islamabad, preaching and teaching in the heart of the capital city. The way to his release was paved when the prosecuting lawyer failed to appear before the Supreme Court in four of the most crucial cases of murder and kidnapping the firebrand cleric was facing. Less than a week later, on April 16, 2009, Aziz was granted bail for a less serious crime that was the last hurdle between him and freedom. However, it is evident that this release was the result of prolonged and intense negotiations.
 

Special report: Whose Turf is it Anyway?


By Mansoor Khan

A power struggle is at the root of the recent violence in Karachi

Khuda Ki Basti, Taiser Town, was till recently the true land of God. Home to both the Christian and Pakhtun communities, it had never witnessed clashes between its multi-faith inhabitants. But all this changed when, on April 22, residents woke up to find pro-Taliban graffiti on their walls. The offensive statements, which also found their way onto a church wall, provoked the normally peaceful Christian residents into staging a demonstration. They chanted slogans against the Taliban and burnt tires. Firing near the protestors led to the death of two children and rioting in which property was damaged and destroyed.

A spontaneous combustion in which a series of incidents and coincidences led to unrest? This stands true only when the event is viewed from a distance. A closer study raises many questions. It is not clear what prompted the Christians to start the protest or who was behind the graffiti.
 

The Business of Politics
 

A growing extortion racket might be leading to ethnic tension in the city. A newly-strengthened ethnic group, under the cover of its main political party, has been distributing parchies among the city’s shopkeepers and other businessmen. These slips of paper communicate the amount demanded by the group. The amount can range from five thousand to a million rupees depending on the size of the business. If the recipient does not pay up, the consequences can be violent.

Two businessmen in different commercial areas of the city, were reportedly killed when they refused to pay and spoke up against the extortionists. The police remained silent, portraying both the murders as cases of personal enmity. Qari Saleem, a Bahadurabad shopkeeper, says that the miscreants distributed 25,000-rupee parchies among shops in the area. When the Herald contacted senior officials of the relevant political party, they declined to claim these miscreants as their activists.
 

I had lost track of the number of times that I had put my notebook under my seat during the trip from Sukkur to Jacobabad. It was my most precious belonging as it contained all the notes I had made so far. The hi-roof van I was travelling in had 20 other passengers. They too held on to their belongings. Our watchful eyes skirted the road and its periphery as our driver sped, trying to make it to our destination before nightfall. It was an ordinary day and the faces around me were no less ordinary — but no one could say that we were travelling in ordinary circumstances. But then this is how anyone, ordinary or special, travels in interior Sindh on any given day.  
 

Guest Column: Lost in Transition
Mohammad A. Qadeer

Even as Pakistan’s urban centres grow in size and numbers and the lifestyles undergo a radical transformation, our social life and moral order remains steeped in rural traditions of the past
 

Almost everybody in Pakistan has been drawn into the urban way of life. With the exception of those living in the remote parts of the country, all others including those who ostensibly live in villages have been swept into the monetary economy, the division of labour, specialisation of occupations, mobility and access to radio as well as television. Our way of life has been more or less urbanised. This is how our “lived” life has become but in our conceptions and in our moral notions (ideas of right and wrong) we remain, by and large, agrarian and tribal. It is particularly true of those demanding Islamic laws in general and the Taliban in particular. This contradiction in our lived versus imagined life is a source of many of our problems, not least in our politics.