FM MULLAHS 'talk radio' fuels sectarian killings

FM MULLAHS
Fatah, Sonya
Columbia Journalism Review > Jul/Aug 2006
In Pakistan's tribal frontier, 'talk radio' fuels sectarian killings


On a hot Monday afternoon in late March hundreds of armed men brandishing black flags descended upon Bara, a village in the tribal badlands that straddle the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. They were on a mission to hunt down and kill the green-flag-bearing followers of Pir Saifur Rahman, a Muslim cleric. The men in black, followers of a rival cleric, Mufti Munir Shakir, reached the Rahman stronghold in Badshahkili, a neighborhood in Bara, fourteen miles west of Peshawar, and a clay-long battle - involving mortars, assault rifles, and both hand- and rocket-propelled grenades - en-sued. By Tuesday afternoon, some twenty-five men were dead and fourteen seriously wounded.

In this largely autonomous frontier zone about the size of Vermont, officially known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, such skirmishes, often over honor or land, are common. But recent encounters have added an interesting media twist to these ancient feuds, and earned men like Shakir and Rnhman a new title: FM Mullahs. Since Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, allied with the United States in its so-called war on terror, scores of mullahs have set up illegal radio stations in the FATA and other frontier regions to preach and rail against the West and its lackeys. Until 2002, radio in Pakistan was state-am. The Musharraf government promised media reform, and there are now more than fifty private radio stations operating across Pakistan. Most, however, are in the Punjab, Pakistan's richest province. In the FATA all legal stations - there are four - are still state-run. The resulting pirate radio boom is largely the byproduct of the government's determination to withhold licenses from jihadi or pro-Indian groups, and the emergence of cheap, portable broadcasting equipment - some of the mullahs attach transmitters to bicycles and pedal about preaching.

Solid numbers are hard to come by, but Pakistani officials estimate that there are dozens of pirate broadcasters in the FATA alone. The more extreme of these FM Mullahs preach jihad; most simply provide translations of the Koran. But in the case of Mufti Shakir and Pir Rahman, at least, competing religious visions met the power of talk radio and its attendant financial rewards, with deadly consequences.

Neither Mufti Shakir nor Pir Rahman is native to the FATA region. Rahman, an Afghan who arrived in the 1970s, preaches Barelvi, a more tolerant and flexible strain of Islam, and has long had a significant following in the region. Two years ago, Mufti Shakir, a kind of circuit preacher, showed up in the Khyher Agency, one of thirteen districts in the FATA. Shakir, a proponent of the Deobandi school of Islam, which is a stricter, more orthodox interpretation that was once followed by the Taliban, set up a makeshift radio operation in his courtyard, and began to preach. (Before landing in the FATA, Shakir had been thrown out of the Kurram Agency, which borders the Khyber Agency to the north, by tribal elders there for fanning sectarian hatred.)

In the FATA, Shakir's radio ministry quickly drew hundreds of supporters, many of them away from Rahman. Not to be outdone, Pir Rahman launched his own radio operation in 2005.

It isn't clear just who listens to the FM Mullahs, but locals say women have a lot to do with their success. Shakir and Rahman air religion-based question-and-answer programs (often about social issues such as marriage and duty) which appeal to the conservative, isolated women in these tribal villages. The clerics convince women that it is their religious duty to ensure that their husbands, brothers, and sons observe Islam properly, dress properly, grow beards. Villagers in the region are hardly rich, but collectively they help finance clerical operations by donating whatever cash, gold, and jewelry they can afford. One woman in the Swat region was so moved by the broadcasts of another militant cleric, Maulana Faizullah, that she reportedly donated 300 grams of gold (worth more than $6,000).

When Shakir and Rahman discovered that they were competing for the same audience - and the same financial support - each began to use their broadcasts to attack the other as un-Islamic. In December 2005, tribal elders in the Bara area, fearing that the war of words would escalate to violence, denounced religious leaders - Shakir and Rahman in particular - for fomenting sectarian tension through their broadcasts. But efforts by local administrators to shut down the illegal stations were in vain; the clerics had amassed hundreds of armed supporters.

In the wake of this denunciation by the elders, both Rahman and Shakir went into hiding, but Shakir anointed a successor - a local driver named Mangal Bagh - who took over his radio operation and launched Lashkar-e-Islam (Army of Islam), an extremist Islamist group. The tension between the two groups continued to mount. Pir Rahman's followers claimed that the local political administration was favoring the followers of Mufti Shakir, and said Shakir was responsible for the deaths of fifty people. Shakir countered by demanding that all of Rahman's houses and property he handed over to Shakir's followers. The bloodshed of March 29 was the culmination of months of this on-air pot-stirring.

In the wake of the March skirmish, Pakistan sent 8,000 troops from its Frontier Corps to quell the tensions. With specific orders to root out the engine of hate, the soldiers shelled Shakir's headquarters, and Mangal Bagh was told to leave. He at first refused, but after a series of ultimatums by the government, Bagh, too, went into hiding. Although Shakir was reportedly arrested at the Karachi airport, and Rahman seems to have shut down - his more tolerant version of Islam apparently has less appeal in the increasingly radicalized frontier - the saga of the FM Mullahs is hardly finished. In April, five more men were killed in a clash between followers of the two clerics, and in early June Bagh's Lashkar-e-Islam fighters took the bazaar in Bara hostage. Bagh, meanwhile, is rumored to be still in the region, still at the mike.

Sonya Falah is a journalist based in south Asia.

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