Pakistan’s North-West frontier is trying to push a bill that would introduce a Taliban-style morality code and the creation of a morality police to enforce it. The Supreme Court promptly threw it out on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.
Most media reports compare the frontier’s planned morality police with the Taliban’s infamous Department of Vice and Virtue, but this is hardly accurate. The morality police- really a vigilante force with opaque and sweeping powers of arrest, punishment and even execution- was not a Taliban invention. Rather, it has its inspiration from Saudi Arabia’s Mutaween, whose milestones include allowing school girls to be burned alive because they couldn’t put on their burqas in time.
Worryingly, in the surest sign that extremist ideology is growing, such vigilante forces are cropping up all over the Muslim world. Malaysia’s Islamic Affairs Department was recently reprimanded by the government for raiding public and private premises without warrants. In one raid of a disco, vigilantes were alleged to have harressed and humiliated women and forced them to pose for photographs.
“We do not want to see Malaysia turning into Afghanistan during the Taliban rule,” commented Nazri Abdul Aziz, a Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department.
Governments, Muslim and non-Muslim, should be on their guard. These so-called moral initiatives, usually emerging at the grassroots level, are pre-cursors to other more insidious movements that would try to undermine state authority. The true aim of these movements and its ideology is to accede to political power, and not merely to do charitable works or establish madrassas to propagate its message.
Its entry to any society or country may well be, and usually is, the establishment of madrassas and the propagation of charitable works; however the hidden, underlying aim is the acquisition of political power.
Political power, once attained, will be used to impose extreme doctrine upon the people, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan. There will be no freedoms guaranteed to the people under such an abberration, rather they will be subjected to a regime of coercion. The Taliban regime in Afghanistan presents the clearest example of this type of government, and this is the grim prospect facing Muslim countries, if they do not firmly curtail the radicals in their midst.
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