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India-Pakistan
Clerics back campaign against Taliban
2009-05-13
The military campaign against the Taliban is getting support from more clerics who say they also fear a Taliban takeover.

Most of the anti-Taliban clerics, reports the Wall Street Journal, hail from the Barelvi tradition. In the past, the Barelvis have offered only passive resistance to extremists. Now, some prominent Barelvi clerics are publicly supporting the military offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Valley and, in one case, offering to send volunteers to fight.

Some officials say they fear images of internally displaced people in squalid camps could turn public opinion against the offensive and prompt the army to pull back.

The largest religious political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has demanded the government resume peace talks. Many leaders of the Deobandi and Wahhabi schools are support the Taliban.

But many Barelvi clerics are now pushing the government to sustain its assault on the Taliban and eventually widen it to other regions. "We can't allow the Taliban to take over the country," said Mufti Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi, who heads the Darul Uloom Naimia.

Naeemi is among a group of Barelvi clerics that on Friday announced the formation of a council whose goal, they said, would be to fight the spreading Talibanisation in Pakistan. "Taliban are destroying sacred religious places and killing religious leaders. They are working on an anti-Islam agenda," Naeemi told the WSJ.

The US pushed hard for Pakistan to move against the Taliban in Swat. But the Barelvi leaders were keen that their support for the offensive should not be read as backing for the US, which remains deeply unpopular among the vast majority of Pakistanis.

The Barelvis believe humans can connect to the divine through holy men, many of whose tombs are now important shrines. The Taliban and Al Qaeda, however, view such practices as heresy and have destroyed or taken over several Sufi shrines.

"It is against Islamic tenets to enforce sharia through violence," said Sarwat Qadri, chief of the Sunni Tehrik, which in the late 1990s and early 2000s tried to re-take mosques it said had been taken over by Deobandi and Wahhabi adherents. Sunni Tehrik had since fallen dormant, but this weekend Qadri said: "We are ready to send volunteers to fight along the military against Taliban".
Posted by:Fred

#1  Ya don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...
Posted by: tu3031   2009-05-13 15:11  

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