Taliban seek support 'in Rushdie's
name' By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR - Taliban members have resorted
to invoking fictitious links of academics with
writer Salman Rushdie in a bid to boost their
popularity.
Senior professors at the
University of Peshawar have received death threats
from persons claiming to be Taliban members. The
professors have been told they would be killed
because of their
plans to include Rushdie in
the university curriculum. The university says
Rushdie books are not a part of the curriculum -
and that there are no plans to include them.
"The Taliban who are active in Pakistan's
lawless tribal region near the Afghanistan border
will make any move that brings them some respect
in the public eye," Professor Javid Khan of the
political science department at the University of
Peshawar told Inter Press Service (IPS).
"They know that threatening or killing
anyone for siding with Salman Rushdie would
restore their dwindling popularity - which has
been eroded by Taliban's targeting of mosques,
funeral ceremonies and marketplaces where innocent
people have been killed."
Two professors
received identical letters May 1 allegedly from
militants, asking them to prepare for their death
and arrange their funerals. "I put you on the list
of those people liable to be killed ... It deeply
shocked me to know about your friendship with
blasphemer and apostate Salman Rushdie," said one
letter.
"This is not the first time that
Taliban have sent letters to professors at the
University of Peshawar," police officer Sajid Khan
tells IPS. "One year back they made telephone
calls to the same teachers."
The letters
bore the signature of Muhammad Tariq Afridi, who
described himself as Taliban chief of Orakzai
Agency and of the adjacent Dara Adamkhel, 40
kilometers north of Peshawar, capital of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa province.
Activists from a
radical student wing had held a protest late April
alleging that the University of Peshawar's
academic council has included Rushdie
Midnight's Children and Shame in the
curriculum. The protest is believed to have
alerted the Taliban.
Midnight's
Children won the Booker Prize in 1981. The
fourth novel of Rushdie - a British Indian -
The Satanic Verses (1988), was the center
of a major controversy, provoking protests from
Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death
threats were made against him, including a
fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February
14, 1989.
His second novel, Midnight's
Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. The
fourth novel of Rushdie - a British Indian -
The Satanic Verses (1988), was the center
of a major controversy, provoking protests from
Muslims in several countries, some violent. Death
threats were made against him, including a
fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, on February
14, 1989.
Professors continue to deny any
plan to include Rushdie novels in the English
literature courses.
"There was no such
decision," Mujeebur Rehman, one of the threatened
professors told IPS. "We never discussed Rushdie,
let alone making him part of the courses."
Rehman, who heads the English department
at the University of Peshawar, says he had written
to the vice chancellor and to the government after
receiving the threats. "We cannot ignore these
threats. We know the Taliban can do whatever they
want."
The letters have spread fear across
the local University of Peshawar, the University
of Engineering and Technology, the Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa Agricultural University and Islamia
College University. The campuses include 20
hostels with 55,000 students, many of them also
now worried.
The abduction of Muhammad
Ajmal Khan, vice chancellor of Islamia College
University in September 2010 is still fresh in the
memory of the academic staff. Khan is still
believed to be in the Taliban's custody. The
Taliban have said they would release him only if
the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government releases some
hardcore militants from jail.
In August
2010, Professor Naeem Khalid, chairman of the
physics department of the Islamia College
University (ICU) was given threats, and asked to
help the Taliban make bombs.
In October
the same year, the Taliban killed Swat University
vice chancellor Dr Muhammad Farooq Khan who had
spoken against suicide bombing. A religious
scholar and psychiatrist, Farooq had been
threatened again and again by the Taliban. But he
had continued to oppose the Taliban openly.
The Taliban have long targeted academics.
They had kidnapped the vice chancellor of Kohat
University of Science and Technology Prof
Lutfullah Kakakhel in November 2009. The
government paid ransom to his captors to secure
his release after six months.
Leaders of
the proscribed jihadist organization
Lashkar-e-Toiba forced their entry into a Peshawar
campus mosque in February and made speeches
against the US and India. They sought recruits to
fight those they called the enemies of Islam.
Over the past five years, insurgents have
blown up about 800 schools in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
and in the northern Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA). Five students have been killed in
the attacks carried out by Taliban on schools.
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