Muslim Cleric Threatens To Impose Sharia in Pakistan Through Jihad

The Religion of Peace™ threatens to topple another non-Islamic government. History repeats itself. From Playfuls.com:

A mosque leader in the Pakistani capital Friday threatened jihad and suicide attacks if the government of President Pervez Musharraf used force against the militant students of the madrassas, or Islamic schools, located in his Lal Masjid compound.

“We don’t want a clash. But if a crackdown is the last option for the government, our last option will be to lay down our lives in resisting it to establish Sharia rule in the country,” declared Maulana Abdul Aziz in his Friday sermon.

Aziz gave the government one month [Foehammer’s note: actually it was one week before, so the story keeps changing.] to eliminate purveyors of what he considers immorality, like music and video shops keepers and prostitutes, or else seminary students would take the task upon themselves and take the alleged evil doers to an Islamic court established by the clerics.

Riot police stood close to the mosque but did not obstruct the congregation.

Male and females students of the two seminaries have been on the warpath since they occupied a public library adjacent to the Lal Masjid on January 21 to force the government to take back its decision to demolish mosques built illegally on state land in Islamabad.

Emboldened by their success, the Islamic militants in subsequent weeks seized three women alleging that they were running a brothel and took two policemen hostage to secure the release of the vigilantes arrested for the acts.

President Musharraf and government officials have fumed and fretted but not acted against the militants entrenched in Lal Masjid, arguing that use of force against madrassa girls would not be taken well by the Muslim nation.

Civil society organisations, however, staged a protest in Islamabad on Thursday against the rising Islamic militancy and an Islamic scholar, Javed Ahmed Ghamdi, denounced the latest actions of the Lal Masjid as un-Islamic.

Islamic militancy took root in Pakistan in the 1980s when it served as a base for the US-backed jihad fought against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and has been growing with the US armed interventions in that country and Iraq since 9/11.

Unfortunately, I do not think that Musharraf will last another 5 years in power. Nukes in Pakistan are beginning to look like a serious problem again, and that is exactly why Musharraf took power before — to avoid nuclear weapons falling into less stable hands, namely those of Islamic jihadists.