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Islamic clerics have far too much control over the Pakistani government, said the Karachi Dawn in an editorial. The government was all set to repeal the infamous Hudood laws, the Islamic ordinances passed in 1979 during the regime of Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq. The worst one of these is the rape law, which says that if a victim can’t provide four eyewitnesses to swear that she resisted her attacker, she must be prosecuted for adultery. President Pervez Musharraf has made “repeated declarations” that his government will scrap the law. Yet now it is obvious that he does “not have the courage to stare the still-strong Zia lobby in the face.” First his government abandoned the idea of outright repeal in favor of amendment. Then last week, it scrapped even the amendments after the religious parties protested. “The government has shown an appalling lack of political sagacity” in bringing forward legislation that it lacked the will to push through. Is it really so weak that it dare not offend the most conservative and extremist among us? All Pakistanis lose when the government fails to combat “the forces of obscurantism which claim for themselves the sole right to interpret Islam.”
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