Last week a conservative schoolteacher in Rawalpindi hailed a cab to get to work in the morning. She wore a gown and had covered her head with a 'dupatta'. A few minutes into the journey the bearded taxi driver asked her if she was Muslim. She said she was. Then why she had not covered her head properly, he asked. She responded by explaining that she ordinarily wears a headscarf, but as she was running late that day she was unable to put it on. Such hurry could invite punishment and result in her being dispatched to the hereafter soon, he retorted. At this point she began to shake with fear and tried to reach for her cell phone to seek help. He turned back and grabbed the cell phone. As the taxi had almost reached the school campus, she insisted that she be let out. The driver obliged, but left her with a chilling message: if the female staff of the school failed to observe proper 'pardah' they would all be sent to God sooner rather than later. Once out of the taxi, this horror-struck woman turned back to see if she could note the registration number of the taxi. The driver was still standing there watching her menacingly. She rushed into the school.
This is no isolated event. Be it warnings delivered to the medical community in NWFP to wear shalwar qameez, or edicts issued to music shops and barbers, or threats communicated to schools, or reports regarding women being harassed in bazaars and public spaces more generally, there has been a surge in vigilante action being carried out by our self-styled moral police. The worst justification for the Nizam-e-Adl regulation comes from liberals within the ANP and the PPP claiming that this legislation doesn't set up a parallel system of justice, as it is merely procedural law adorned with Islamic nomenclature. Accepting the demand to 'enforce' religion legitimizes the discourse of bigots and their obscurantist project of personally stepping into God's shoes to judge fellow Muslims, taking a measure of their sins and delivering divine justice in this world on God's behalf. The growing intolerance that our society is witnessing with mute horror is fuelled by our odious brand of hypocrisy that encourages double-speak in the name of protecting and preserving tradition, culture and religion.
http://newageislam.com/talibanisation-of-the-mind---/radical-islamism-and-jihad/d/1398
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