Click to play videoNew Delhi: The fatwa row in Pakistan flared up against Tourism Minister Nilofer Bakhtiar seems to have subsided after due intervention by Pak President General Pervez Musharraf.
Islamabad's Lal Masjid, which reportedly issued a fatwa against the Pak tourism minister for wearing tight clothes and hugging a foreign man, denied on Tuesday that it ever issued one. The chief of the Masjid Maulana Abdul Aziz and his deputy Maulana Ghazi said no decree against Bakhtiar had been issued.
Nilofer’s pictures taken in France where the minister was paragliding reportedly triggered the fatwa row on Tuesday. In one of the pictures she is seen hugging her paragliding instructor. This had incensed the clerics at the Masjid who described ‘it’ an obscene gesture and demanded her resignation.
Bakhtiar fought back and she condemned the fatwa while dismissing all the allegations against her. She said she had no faith in such self-made courts.
The retraction reportedly came after senior politician Shujaat Hussain intervened. There were even hints from General Musharraf that force could be used to stop the Masjid's highly publicised Islamisation activities.
The Pak Supreme Court is now hearing a petition against the Masjid's courts and its private army. But at the end of it speculation that the entire controversy may have been triggered off by none other than Gen Musharraf himself to douse an earlier controversy—his suspension of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhary and to redeem himself in American eyes as the only check against Taliban forces in Pakistan.
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