Pakistan's Taliban-friendly corner

Yet secularists like Imam say that the rise of religious parties is, nonetheless, a warning sign for Pakistan. The Jamiat-e Ulema-e Islam, in particular, has enjoyed close ties with the Taliban. Most of the Taliban's top leaders were graduates of madrassas run by the JUI's two factions, and the leader of one of those factions, Maulana Sami-ul Haq, keeps a picture of himself and Osama bin Laden in his office. The Jamaat-e Islami, meanwhile, was one of the founding sponsors of the Kashmiri terrorist group, Hizbul Mujahideen, although Jamaat has severed its relations.

But the elation that followed the recent election has been replaced by a certain befuddlement. The NWFP government's first act this month was to ban alcohol. Islamists applauded, but critics noted that alcohol had already been banned in the 1970s. In other matters, the religious parties seem to be stepping back from their hard-line speeches as they see the limits of their power. They are talking in cool tones of the day-to-day work of running schools, law enforcement, and promoting the economy.

Some actions, however, have a distinctly Taliban feel to them. In Peshawar, cinema owners were forced to tear down billboards deemed obscene, and cinemas that play pornographic films were shut down. State officials have also forced all public bus drivers to remove cassette players and destroy music cassettes, and also talk of changing the weekly holiday from Sunday to Friday, the traditional day of Islamic prayer. More ominous, state police have begun to lodge new cases of blasphemy against those who are thought to have offended the Holy Koran or the name of Allah. Human rights advocates argue that such blasphemy laws are often used as retribution against political enemies.

"It was not anger that got us elected, it was unity," says Qazi Hussein Ahmed, national president of Jamaat-e Islami, a party that has its roots in middle-class urban Pakistan and gathered force during the pro-Islamic student movements of the late 1970s. "We are united for the first time on one election agenda, and we want to implement the Constitution so that something of the national character will be restored."

Yet despite claims of unity, there are some signs of cracks. Most of NWFP's budget comes from the federal treasury, so there are likely to be intense disagreements on how to spend what little money the state has for the variety of Islamic reforms that the religious parties hope to enact. Further, divisions between Sunni and Shiite sects - and between rural and urban constituencies - could develop rapidly.

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