LAHORE: The professor was working in his office here on the campus of Pakistan’s largest university this month when members of an Islamic student group battered open the door, beat him with metal rods and bashed him over the head with a giant flower pot.
Iftikhar Baloch, an environmental science professor, had expelled members of the group for violent behavior. The retribution left him nearly unconscious, and it united his fellow professors, who protested with a nearly three-week strike that ended on Monday.
The attack and the anger it provoked have drawn attention to the student group, Islami Jamiat Talaba, whose morals police have for years terrorized this graceful, century-old institution by brandishing a chauvinistic form of Islam, teachers here say.
But the group has help from a surprising source — national political leaders who have given it free rein, because they sometimes make political alliances with its parent organization, Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s oldest and most powerful religious party, they say.
The university’s plight encapsulates Pakistan’s predicament: an intolerant, aggressive minority terrorizes a more open-minded, peaceful majority, while an opportunistic political class dithers, benefiting from alliances with the aggressors.
This is the University of the Punjab, Pakistan’s premier institution of higher learning, with about 30,000 students, and a principal avenue of advancement for the swelling ranks of Pakistan’s lower and middle classes.
The battle here concerns the future direction of the country, and whether those pushing an intolerant vision of Islam will prevail against this nation’s outward-looking, educated class.
That is why the problem of Islami Jamiat Talaba is so urgent, teachers say. The rhetoric of the group is strongly anti-West, chauvinistic and intolerant of Pakistan’s religious minorities. It was a vocal Taliban supporter, until doing so became unpopular last year. Its members block music classes, ban soft drinks and beat male students for sitting near girls on the university lawn.
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6:18 AM
Moderate Islamist here
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