muse
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While Nawaz and his Jamati allies have creasted the entirely political tamasha of the formerly Blackwater, and while it is Dyncorp with the contract in Pakistan, most Pakistanis have missed a serious problem:
Editorial: The case of foreign imams
According to news reports, the interior minister, Rehman Malik, has directed the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) to conduct a countrywide survey of prayer leaders who act as imams in the mosques of the country. He was compelled to take this step after the Senate Standing Committee complained to him that non-Pakistani imam masjid persons with clashing sects had taken over mosques in the country.
The efforts of NADRA will be greatly hampered by the fact that all these prayer-leaders have Pakistani ID cards and speak Pashto or Urdu. Mr Malik has himself admitted that his ministry has discovered that about 90,000 passports were issued to Afghan nationals. If a cleric is Pashtun and can speak Urdu, and possesses a Pakistani ID card there is no way you can catch hold of him for deportation. First you will have to prove that he has obtained his card through false pretences, and not because the ID card is fake.
In the General Zia-ul Haq Era, there was an unspoken policy of increasing Pakistans Pashtun population through a liberal issuing of ID cards to Afghan refugees. So powerful was the Deobandi thrust of the war against the Soviet Union that in down-country Pakistan, Barelvi mosques began to be taken over and the Barelvi cleric prayer-leaders began to be replaced by Deobandi imams. Recently the NWFP government, because of its knowledge of the tribes, has gotten rid of Afghan imams from its mosques; but elsewhere it is going to be more difficult.
Mr Malik might also like to ask his spooks to secretly record the speeches which the clerics make in the mosques and scan them for what kind of message they are handing down to the people. If he begins with Islamabad, he might be shocked by the content!
Editorial: The case of foreign imams
According to news reports, the interior minister, Rehman Malik, has directed the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) to conduct a countrywide survey of prayer leaders who act as imams in the mosques of the country. He was compelled to take this step after the Senate Standing Committee complained to him that non-Pakistani imam masjid persons with clashing sects had taken over mosques in the country.
The efforts of NADRA will be greatly hampered by the fact that all these prayer-leaders have Pakistani ID cards and speak Pashto or Urdu. Mr Malik has himself admitted that his ministry has discovered that about 90,000 passports were issued to Afghan nationals. If a cleric is Pashtun and can speak Urdu, and possesses a Pakistani ID card there is no way you can catch hold of him for deportation. First you will have to prove that he has obtained his card through false pretences, and not because the ID card is fake.
In the General Zia-ul Haq Era, there was an unspoken policy of increasing Pakistans Pashtun population through a liberal issuing of ID cards to Afghan refugees. So powerful was the Deobandi thrust of the war against the Soviet Union that in down-country Pakistan, Barelvi mosques began to be taken over and the Barelvi cleric prayer-leaders began to be replaced by Deobandi imams. Recently the NWFP government, because of its knowledge of the tribes, has gotten rid of Afghan imams from its mosques; but elsewhere it is going to be more difficult.
Mr Malik might also like to ask his spooks to secretly record the speeches which the clerics make in the mosques and scan them for what kind of message they are handing down to the people. If he begins with Islamabad, he might be shocked by the content!
