The Anti-Taliban Pakistan

Women in short skirts and men with gelled hair bump and grind on a dance floor as a disc jockey pumps up the volume. The air is thick with illicit smoke and shots of hard liquor are being passed around. Couples cuddle and kiss in a lounge.

This is not Saturday night at a club in New York, London or Paris. It is the secret side of Pakistan, a Muslim nation often described in the West as a land of bearded, Islamic hardmen and repressed, veiled women.

Pakistan was created out of Muslim-majority areas in colonial India 65 years ago, and for decades portrayed itself as a progressive Islamic nation. Starting in the 1980s, however, it has been drifting towards a more conservative interpretation of Islam that has reshaped the political landscape, fuelled militancy and cowed champions of tolerance into silence.

But the country remains home to a large wealthy and Westernised elite that, in private, lives very differently.

Every weekend, fashion designers, photographers, medical students and businessmen gather at dozens of parties in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore to push social boundaries in discreet surroundings that would horrify, and enrage, advocates of the stricter brand of Islam.

“This is just epic,” said Numair Shahzada, bobbing his head to the beat at a party in a farmhouse outside Islamabad as fitness instructors moonlighting as bouncers looked on. “The light and smoke show is phenomenal.”

Young men and women mix freely, dancing, talking or drinking. Some curl up together in quiet areas.

Although alcohol is prohibited in the country, many have brought their own liquor. Whisky is carried in paper bags and vodka is disguised in water bottles arranged along the dance floor.

The party-goers form only a tiny minority of the country’s 180 million people, but overall, Pakistan is not repressive. Women can drive, are enrolled in universities and have played prominent roles in politics. Unmarried men and women can interact without risking the wrath of religious police.

People from its most populous province, Punjab, are renowned for their exuberance.

But a conservative form of Islam is chipping away at the tolerance.

A few hours drive from Islamabad’s party circuit, parts of remote tribal regions have fallen under the sway of hardline Taliban militants, who dream of toppling the U.S.-backed government and creating a society where revellers would face flogging, or worse.

“Men and women who dance together are damned by God. Whenever we see such displays of vulgarity we will definitely make them a target,” said a senior Taliban commander.

News reports have said a tribal council in a village near the Afghanistan border ordered four women killed earlier this year for clapping and singing as men danced at a wedding. The Supreme Court has ordered an investigation, but there have been no further details.

CREEPING CONSERVATISM

While the vast majority of Pakistanis abhor the Taliban’s violence, there are many who share their belief that Islam should be Pakistan’s guiding force. Religious parties, which do poorly at the polls but exert considerable sway over public debate, believe Islam should govern all spheres of life.

“It’s so messed up,” said Myra, a 23-year-old Pakistani who has dyed her hair reddish-brown.

“You see the servants and the drivers at the parties watching you and you wonder what kind of a person they think you are.”

To avoid prying eyes, the kind of alcohol-fuelled blow-outs enjoyed by Myra and her friends are held in lonely farm-houses in the outskirts of Islamabad and other cities, or in affluent neighbourhoods behind high walls. Organisers charge on average a $60 entry fee, an amount most Pakistanis earn in a month.

Rafia, petite with long, black hair and wearing tight jeans and a low-cut black blouse, is a regular on the party scene.

She frowns on women who carry secret cell phones unmonitored by their parents and wear revealing outfits under conservative dress that come off before getting on the dance floor.

“You can either be God-fearing or you can party,” she said, taking a drag on a marijuana joint at a recent rave.

“I don’t pray regularly and I usually stick to my fast. But at the end of the day, I don’t say I am a very religious person.”

Not everyone agrees.

Bina Sultan, 40, an attractive fashion designer, showcases nude paintings and topless male models in shows. She also wears a silver pendant engraved with a verse from the Koran.

“People think I am shameless but I am actually very religious,” she said at her studio, peppering her sentences with “jaani”, Urdu for darling, while chain smoking.

“My faith is very strong. But everything I do is between my God and me.”

LONELY LIBERALS

Conservatism began sweeping through Pakistan during the military dictatorship of General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980s under a drive to Islamize the state.

Zia’s policies are widely blamed for a creeping culture of intolerance that has further isolated liberals.

In an incident that traumatised the elite, the governor of Punjab province, Salman Taseer, was assassinated by his own bodyguard last year for opposing harsh anti-blasphemy laws.

The reaction was almost more shocking to liberals than the murder itself. Clerics organised huge rallies to praise the killer. Even lawyers, once at the vanguard of Pakistan’s democracy movement, showered him with rose petals.

In the growing climate of fear, the space for liberal voices is shrinking.

Pakistani rapper Adil Omar, who attends weekend parties, pokes fun of the Taliban and rising conservatism in his songs. But he never goes too far.

“A lot of people seem to be torn and seem to have an identity crisis,” said Omar, who wears the traditional flowing shirt and baggy trousers. His elaborate forearm tatoo featuring a semi-naked woman and a unicorn has drawn fire on his Facebook page from some fans who see it as an offence to Islam.

“I am careful not to give any opinions regarding religion on the record,” he said, adding: “I don’t want some crazy person chopping off my head.”

 

Sex-Slaves Should be Permitted: Kuwaiti MP

A Kuwaiti woman who once ran for parliament has called for sex slavery to be legalised – and suggested that non-Muslim prisoners from war-torn countries would make suitable concubines.

Salwa al Mutairi argued buying a sex-slave would protect decent, devout and ‘virile’ Kuwaiti men from adultery because buying an imported sex partner would be tantamount to marriage.

And she even had an idea of where to ‘purchase’ these sex-salves – browsing through female prisoners of war in other countries.

The political activist and TV host even suggested that it would be a better life for women in warring countries as the might die of starvation.Mutairi claimed: ‘There was no shame in it and it is not haram’ (forbidden) under Islamic Sharia law.’

She gave the example of Haroun al-Rashid, an 8th century Muslim leader who ruled over an area covered by modern-day Iran, Iraq and Syria and was rumoured to have 2,000 concubines.

Mutairi recommended that offices could be opened to run the sex trade in the same way that recruitment agencies provide housemaids.

She suggested shopping for prisoners of war so as to protect Kuwaiti men from being tempted to commit adultery or being seduced by other women’s beauty.

‘For example, in the Chechnyan war, surely there are female Russian captives,’ she said.

‘So go and buy those and sell them here in Kuwait. Better than to have our men engage in forbidden sexual relations.’

Her unbelievable argument for her plan was that ‘captives’ might ‘just die of hunger over there’.

She insisted, ‘I don’t see any problem in this, no problem at all’.

In an attempt to consider the woman’s feelings in the arrangement, Mutari conceded that the enslaved women, however, should be at least 15.

What is Wrong with Polygamy When Same-Sex Marriages are Fine?

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum got jeered for comparing the legalization of same-sex marriage to that of polygamy, but, whether or not the comparison is rationally sound, thoughts of the former’s facilitating the latter bring a smile to many Islamists.

If the definition of marriage can evolve in terms of gender, some Muslims ask, why not in terms of number?

Islam sanctions polygamy — more specifically, polygyny — allowing Muslim men to keep up to four wives at once.

Though marrying a second woman while remaining married to the first is prohibited across the Western world, including all 50 U.S. states, a Muslim can circumvent the law by wedding one woman in a government-recognized marriage and joining with others in unlicensed religious unions devoid of legal standing.

As Muslims have grown more numerous in the West, so too have Muslim polygamists.

France, home to the largest Islamic population in Western Europe, was estimated in 2006 to host 16,000 to 20,000 polygamous families — almost all Muslim — containing 180,000 total people, including children. In the United States, such Muslims may have already reached numerical parity with their fundamentalist-Mormon counterparts; as many as 100,000 Muslims reside in multi-wife families, and the phenomenon has gained particular traction among black Muslims.

The increasingly prominent profile of Islamic polygamy in the West has inspired a range of accommodations. Several governments now recognize plural marriages contracted lawfully in immigrants’ countries of origin. In the United Kingdom, these polygamous men are eligible to receive extra welfare benefits — an arrangement that some government ministers hope to kill — and a Scottish court once permitted a Muslim who had been cited for speeding to retain his driver’s license because he had to commute between his wives.

There are murmurs among the polygamist community as the country moves toward the legalization of gay marriage. They argue that they should have the right to legally marry whoever they please, or however many they please. Hassan Amin, a Baltimore imam who performs polygamous religious unions. “We should strive to have it legalized because Allah has already legalized it.”

Many Muslims connect the normalization of same-sex marriage and Islamic polygamy. As states move toward legalizing gay marriage, the criminalization of polygamy is a seemingly striking inconsistency in constitutional law. Be it gay marriage or polygamous marriage, the rights of the people should not be based on their popularity but rather on the constitutional laws that are meant to protect them.

According to a survey carried out by the Link, polygamy suffers from no lack of popularity among American Muslims. Thirty-nine percent reported their intention to enter polygamous marriages if it becomes legal to do so, and “nearly 70 percent said they believe that the U.S. should legalize polygamy now that it is beginning to legalize gay marriage.” Unfortunately, no details about the methodology or sample size are provided, and in general quality data on Western Muslims’ views of polygamy are scarce and often contradictory. Results from a recent poll of SingleMuslim.com users, many of whom live in the West, show significant support for the religious institution of polygamy, while findings from a more professional-looking survey of French Muslims indicate little desire for legalization.

Nevertheless, the number of polygamous Muslims and the opportunity presented by the redefining of marriage make it very likely that direct appeals for official recognition will ramp up over the next decade, as more Muslims join vocal non-Muslims already laying out the case that polygamists deserve no fewer rights than gays. In the meantime, watch for Islamists and their allies to prepare for ideological battle.

For starters, one hears a lot about the social necessity of recognizing Islamic polygamy.

The hardships encountered by second, third, and fourth wives who lack legal protections are regularly highlighted, while polygamy is promoted as a solution to the loss of marriageable black men in America to drugs, violence, and prison. Because polygamists who are not legally married are known to abuse welfare systems — for instance, Muslim women in polygamous marriages often claim benefits as single mothers — it would not be shocking to see legalization pushed even as a means of curbing fraud.

These practical arguments are supplemented with heavy-handed attempts to extol the supposed virtues of Islamic polygamy, as in a Georgia middle-school assignment featuring a sharia-lauding Muslim who tells students that “if our marriage has problems, my husband can take another wife rather than divorce me, and I would still be cared for.” Leftist academics such as Miriam Cooke, who has peddled the fiction that polygamy frees married Muslim women to pursue lovers, will have a role to play as well.

According to a Gallup survey from 2011, almost nine in ten Americans still see the practice as morally wrong. Opinions can change, of course, as they have regarding same-sex marriage.

Unfortunately for polygamy’s backers, however, the equality arguments employed to great effect by gay-marriage advocates may ring hollow, in that recognizing polygamy — which almost always takes the form of polygyny — would essentially endorse inequality between the genders.

Convincing American judges to overturn restrictions will be an uphill battle as well — and not just because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1879 rejection of the “religious duty” defense of marrying multiple partners in Reynolds v. United States. More recently, state supreme courts have explicitly held the line against polygamy in their rulings to extend marriage rights to same-sex pairs. See Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (Massachusetts, 2003) and In re Marriage Cases (California, 2008); the latter decision describes both polygamous and incestuous unions as “inimical to the mutually supportive and healthy family relationships promoted by the constitutional right to marry.”

Judicial criticism of polygamy is not unique to the U.S. In a case concerning self-proclaimed Mormon fundamentalists, the supreme court of British Columbia upheld Canada’s ban on plural marriage last November after the chief justice, in the words of the New York Times, “found that women in polygamous relationships faced higher rates of domestic, physical and sexual abuse, died younger and were more prone to mental illnesses. Children from those marriages, he said, were more likely to be abused and neglected, less likely to perform well at school and often suffered from emotional and behavioral problems.”

Focusing on polygamy in the Islamic world does not yield a happier image. Based on her experiences in Afghanistan, feminist university professor Phyllis Chesler has called the practice “humiliating, cruel, [and] unfair to the wives,” and noted that it “sets up fearful rivalries among the half-brothers of different mothers who have lifelong quarrels over their inheritances.” Likewise, Egyptian-born human-rights activist Nonie Darwish has elucidated polygamy’s “devastating impact on the healthy function and the structure of loyalties” within Muslim families.

Recent studies have bolstered these accounts. According to new research, Israeli Arab women in polygamous marriages are worse off than those in monogamous ones. A separate investigation uncovered similar negative effects on Malaysian Muslims. In addition, an academic paper released this year concludes that polygamous societies in general lag behind their monogamous counterparts and explores the reasons for this, including the increased tension and criminal activity that result from creating a surplus of single, low-status men.

There are many other arguments against polygamy that supporters of legalization will have to defeat, such as that expanding marriage to three or more people would require massive alterations of Western family law. However, neither bureaucratic obstacles nor public exposure of the social ills accompanying polygamy will deter polygamous Muslims from seeking what they desire.

Recognition of polygamous marriages would be a major win for stealth jihadists — and the time is nearly optimal for them to make their move. How ironic that laws benefiting gay couples may aid Islamists — followers of an ideology that despises homosexuals — in their campaign to establish sharia in the Western world.

— David J. Rusin is a research fellow at Islamist Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. This article initially appeared in the April 16, 2012, issue of National Review.

 

Why the Power Crisis in India?

The power blackout in northern India on two days should not be dismissed or misjudged.

Analysts are jumping to conclude that the crisis was foretold. They blame delays caused by environment and forest clearance procedures and demand winding down the regulatory framework so that we can re-energise ourselves. Their other favourite whipping horse is ‘free’ electricity to farmers, which is said to be crippling the state electricity boards. These explanations are naïve and mistaken. India’s power sector does need urgent reform, but first we need to know what to fix.

Firstly, environmental clearance is not an obstacle to power infrastructure. In fact, the pace and scale of clearances given to power plants are a jeopardy for the environment. In the five years preceding August 2011, 267 thermal power plants adding a total of 0.21 million megawatt (MW) were cleared—capable of more than doubling the current capacity.

It is also incorrect that green clearances are holding up India’s coal production. Clearances have been readily given. But the problem is that Coal India Limited is a monopoly player and sits on 0.2 million ha of mine lease area, including 55,000 ha of forestland. Its reserves are some 64 billion tonnes, but production lags at only 500 million tonnes per annum. As a result, every power producer wants a private coalmine and forests can be dug and destroyed.

Secondly, the matter of ‘free’ power to farmers needs more enquiry. The recent Report of the High Level Panel on Financial Position of Distribution Utilities, headed by former auditor general V K Shunglu, finds huge anomalies in data used to estimate 20 per cent usage by the agriculture sector. For instance, Jammu and Kashmir, where transmission and distribution losses (T&D) are as high as 70 per cent, estimates that farmers use 28,000 units per pumpset; in Rajasthan too, where losses are high, farmers consume 11,000 units per pumpset. But Tamil Nadu, with lower T&D losses of 15 per cent, shows just 5,300 units used perpumpset. The panel concludes that states hide inexplicable power losses in farmers’ accounts. There is, thus, no reliable estimate of power used by farmers.

However, it cannot be argued that agriculture should get ‘free’ power. There is no doubt that farming needs to be energy-efficient, and that ‘free’ power adds to the mindlessness in resource use. But if farmers must pay for power, then the government must account for its price in the cost of food. Currently, India is caught in a double bind. We need to procure large quantities of foodgrains to meet the needs of large numbers of people. The government must keep food production costs as controlled as possible. But input costs—labour and energy—are increasing. The minimum support price—which has seen a much-needed increase in recent years—does not keep up with this cost hike. So, farmers lose out. Free energy to farmers is not the question. The price of growing food in a globalised and subsidy-distorted market is.

So, why the power crisis? The reasons are deeply systemic and extremely worrying, First, there is no doubt that supply is constrained. In the past some years,governments have built power infrastructure at a feverish pace. But without much thought. As a result, today, India produces more electricity than previous years, but all this comes from coal-based thermal plants. Between April 2011 and June 2012, according to the Central Electricity Authority, hydro—needed as peaking power—was down by almost 9 per cent because of poor rainfall and low water flows. Gas-based generation fell by 20 per cent in the same period. Starved of raw material, power plants operated at m 47 per cent efficiency—compared to the projected 90-100 per cent.

So, raw material supply for all kinds of power (not just coal) is an issue. Hydropower needs water as raw material, not concrete structures on rivers. Currently, states have the perverse incentive to call for bids for projects—regardless of whether these will generate energy or not. Arunachal Pradesh has, for instance, tendered out some 54,000 MW of hydel power—every stream in the state has been sold to one company or the other. The situation is not very different on the Ganga or other rivers. There is no assessment of availability of the water needed for energy generation, let alone crucial functions like ecological flows.

Natural gas-based power with advantages over coal— it is environmentally cleaner and quicker to install—is also badly stuck. Reliance Industry, another monopoly, is sitting on reserves and not drilling fast or enough. It wants revision of tariffs and will not play ball till that happens.

Supply is one constraint. The more serious issue is our inability to pay for power. This is not just because power utilities are so inefficient that they cannot recover bills or keep track of their energy supply. It is also because energy cost is already high in India and will get even more expensive, and so even more inaccessible for the poor. In this situation, how will we work through our energy future? Let’s discuss this next fortnight.