Introduction

Summary

It was early July 2007 and Pakistan’s capital city Islamabad was in uproar. Armed military personnel lined the streets in a face-off with students and faculty of the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) complex, a compound housing the Red Mosque and a women’s religious seminary (madrasa); the affiliated men’s seminary is a short drive from the compound. This unusual situation had some precedent. The seminaries’ leaders, brothers ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and ‘Abd al-Rashid often entered into disputes with the government. Until summer 2007 the altercations had been largely verbal: The mosque and seminary affiliates had a history of publicly condemning the state and its policies as un-Islamic. At times the critique was justified through meticulous religious reasoning. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the older of the two brothers, had trained extensively at the famous seminary Jami‘at al-‘Ulum al-Islamiyya in Karachi. Some years earlier ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, drawing on his study of Islamic law, had issued a religious decree declaring the state’s battle against the terrorist groups al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban as un-Islamic.²