Anti-Taliban Cleric Rises on Message of Peace in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD: Kiran Sajjad, a 16-year-old follower of Pakistani cleric Tahir ul Qadri, has a clear reason why she is living in a protest tent city in central Islamabad.

"The system is rigged. The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer," she said, as loudspeakers blared out the battle hymn of Mr. Qadri's movement: "Revolution! Revolution! The downtrodden will rise!"

It is this kind of anger with Pakistan's socioeconomic chasm that fueled the Taliban insurgency in parts of the country, where fiery mullahs promised swift justice to the peasants and curbed the power of feudal grandees. But Mr. Qadri is as anti-Taliban as it gets, and he is channeling this fury in a different direction.

A Canadian citizen with a daughter living in Houston, Mr. Qadri wrote a 600-page fatwa against terrorism, and is a frequent speaker at conferences dedicated to dialogue with Christians and Jews. Proud of having been educated in a Catholic school, he blasts Saudi Arabia as "the biggest problem of the Muslim world" for exporting its conservative strain of Islam, and says that his goal is to eliminate Islamic academies known as madrassas by replacing them with schools that teach secular subjects.

"I am trying to lead the Muslim world toward the right, moderate, path, to bring the leadership and the people out of this confusion of extremism and terrorism, towards humanism and a peaceful society," Mr. Qadri, 63, says in an interview in the armored shipping container, mounted on a flatbed truck, that serves as his home in the middle of the Islamabad protest encampment. "I am fighting to democratize, in a true sense, the Muslim world."

Mr. Qadri's critics dismiss him as a populist firebrand, and allege his throngs of followers in the tent city are being paid for their support.

The protests launched last month by Mr. Qadri and his ally, politician Imran Khan, have thoroughly shaken the administration of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, paralyzing the capital's government quarter and prompting the country's powerful army to intervene by demanding that both sides refrain from violence.

Mr. Qadri and Mr. Khan, the former cricket star who also operates from a shipping container in the tent city, share the goal of forcing Mr. Sharif to resign, saying that the prime minister's victory last year was illegitimate because of electoral law violations. Mr. Sharif, who denied the accusations, has refused to step down.

The prime minister' close aide, Defense Minister Khawaja Asif, dismissed the protesters camping out just outside his windows as a rent-a-mob of poor laborers who earn less than $2 a day rather than a genuine political force. "This is a hired movement, people are there on daily wages, these so-called demonstrators," he said.

Mr. Qadri's movement dismissed government allegations that it is paying protesters as a "complete lie."

Among the protests' two main leaders, Mr. Khan, a former cricket star, possesses a much greater electoral appeal: In last year's elections, his party bagged 7.7 million votes, more than any other except Mr. Sharif's.

Mr. Qadri's movement lacks that kind of voting power, but those who have signed on have done so with cult-like dedication: the vast majority of the tent city's inhabitants are his disciples.

It is Mr. Qadri's supporters, many of them young women, students or recent graduates, who provided the muscle for clashes with police late last month that left three protesters dead and hundreds injured. Now, they guard entrances to the tent city, frisking visitors, and provide food distribution to the hundreds of tents. Some run a temporary school for the protesters' children.

"Dr. Qadri is our inspiration because he is not just a religious leader, but also a research scientist," says the school's teacher, Mohammed Sarwar.

Another follower, Malkani Zahoor, says she has dedicated herself to following Mr. Qadri after her son had fallen ill with hepatitis C nine years ago. Mr. Qadri, she says, prayed for the child at the time, prompting a miraculous recovery. "How can I not believe in him? I will support him no matter what," Ms. Zahoor said sternly, the boy sitting at her feet.

Mr. Qadri, who follows the mystical Sufi tradition of Islam, attended the Sacred Heart Catholic school in the small town of Jhang in central Punjab province, where, he recalls, most of the teachers were foreigners, many of them from Malta and Italy. He started his career as a lawyer, and still peppers his talk with references to the numbers of sections and clauses of various laws and regulations.

He studied Islam with Sufi luminaries in Mecca, Medina, Baghdad and Beirut and, in 1981, founded the Minhaj-ul-Quran network of schools that now numbers some 600 schools across Pakistan, and that has spawned affiliated charities largely catering to the Pakistani diaspora in more than 90 countries. With his religious clout rising, Mr. Qadri became a spiritual adviser to Mr. Sharif and his brother, Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab.

"They didn't listen," Mr. Qadri says when reminded of that period. "They did whatever was suitable for them."

After breaking with the Sharifs in the 1980s, Mr. Qadri allied himself with their historical rival, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, launching a small party that allowed him to gain a parliament seat in 2002, under the rule of military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

By 2004, Mr. Qadri was spending most of his time in a suburb of Toronto, where he worked out of a Tim Hortons THI.T -0.17% coffee shop in the local mall. Mr. Qadri says he applied for Canadian citizenship because he needed a convenient passport to travel so that he could supervise the growing Minhaj-ul-Quran network world-wide. "This was my organizational necessity," he says.

Mr. Qadri returned to Pakistan's political scene when he organized last year's "Long March" by tens of thousands of supporters from Lahore to Islamabad, campaigning against corruption and bringing the government of the time to the brink of collapse. Many critics—then, and during the current protests—accused Mr. Qadri of being a populist tool of the military establishment that ruled Pakistan for half of its history, and that, they say, is interested in keeping civilian institutions permanently weak.

Mr. Qadri denies such charges. But, when asked whether he considers the continuation of Mr. Sharif's rule or a military coup a lesser evil, he provided an ambiguous answer: "When you open the door to lesser evil, it becomes bigger through empowerment."

Mr. Qadri boycotted last year's elections because he considered the makeup of election authorities to be unconstitutional and, in June, returned to Pakistan for another protest campaign. A fearful government diverted the plane that was bringing him back to Islamabad to Lahore. Then, a police attempt to clear out his movement's compound in Lahore ended in a bloodbath that killed 14 people.

That operation backfired: gaining its martyrs, Mr. Qadri's movement was reinvigorated, and the cleric soon joined Mr. Khan in the effort to unseat Mr. Sharif.

For now, his followers in the Islamabad tent city say they won't go anywhere until the prime minister and his brother, the chief minister of Punjab, are gone.

"We are completely peaceful," says one of the protesters, 23-year-old Sajida Sabir. "But we are also ready to lay our lives for Dr. Qadri's struggle."

Source: http://online.wsj.com/