Shiraz Ahmed was tending his music store in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, when a group of 15 bearded young men walked in bearing bamboo poles and a chilling message.

Politely but firmly, they instructed him to take down the colourful array of Bollywood and bhangradance tunes on display and to restrict his business to Islamic music.

“They told me I had to change my business,” said Mr Ahmed, 25, whose family has run the store for 15 years. “I am so confused. I don’t know what to do.”

Until last week he might not have worried about these men from Islamabad’s Lal Masjid (Red Mosque). After all, his shop is legal and within walking distance of Pervez Musharraf’s presidential palace.

But this was just one of several signs in the past ten days that a creeping campaign to “Talebanise” Pakistan has spread from tribal areas on the Afghan border right to the heart of the capital. And to judge from the Government’s response, even here it is reluctant to confront the radical clerics who openly preach jihad (holy war) and defy the writ of the state.

Last week hundreds of women students from the Jamia Hafsa seminary, which is attached to the Lal Masjid, raided a nearby house that they said was a brothel. Wearing black burqas and wielding bamboo poles, they dragged the alleged madam, identified only as Aunty Shamim, to the seminary along with her daughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

When police arrested two women teachers from the seminary, its students responded by abducting two policemen along with their vehicles. A tense stand-off only ended when Aunty Shamim was released with her relatives after reading a signed confession in public.

Pakistani police have promised to arrest Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the seminary’s vice-principal, and to prevent more vigilante raids. Maulana Abdul Aziz, the seminary’s principal, has refused to give up Mr Ghazi, who is his brother, and has vowed to cleanse Islamabad of brothels, liquor stores and other “unIslamic” activity.

He also gave the Government until today to introduce Sharia (Islamic law) across Pakistan. Otherwise, he said, his students would do it themselves, starting with the surrounding G-6 neighbourhood in central Islamabad.

“It’s like if you have garbage outside your house and the city authorities fail to clear it — you have to do it yourself,” he said. “We’re urging the whole country to rise up and make the country clean and pure.”

Radical clerics have made similar calls in vain in the past but never before have they been backed up by vigilante raids in the capital. The seminary’s students have also been seen carrying Kalashnikovs and other weapons around their compound.

Mr Aziz denied having violent intentions but said his 10,000 men and women students, most from tribal areas near the Afghan border, were ready to die for their cause.

“If the police and Army come here we will sacrifice our bodies and will not allow anyone to be arrested,” he said.

He admitted openly that some of his students may have joined the Taleban in Pakistan or Afghanistan because he taught jihadi principles. He admitted too that his students had been to the local market, where Mr Ahmed’s shop is, to tell video and music stores not to sell “unIslamic” products.

They have also been seen at traffic lights around the capital telling women to stop driving cars and asking people playing “unIslamic” music to turn it off.

Analysts say the Government is capable of arresting Mr Ghazi and even closing the mosque. Because it is a state religious institution the Government still pays its utility bills. It was also built illegally on government land.

General Musharraf has, however, shied away repeatedly from confronting the Lal Masjid’s clerics – even when they openly called for his assassination. In July 2005 his security forces tried to raid the mosque after suicide bombings in London that month but were beaten back by women students.

His Government announced plans to demolish the mosque in January but backed down when its students occupied Islamabad’s only children’s library in protest. They have been there ever since.

Analysts say President Musharraf is worried about losing the support of Islamist parties in the presidential and parliamentary elections over the next year. He is already in the midst of a showdown with the country’s lawyers after suspending Pakistan’s independent-minded Chief Justice.

Some critics also accuse him of tolerating the Lal Masjid and other madrassas to justify continued military rule. Analysts say, however, that his tactics are playing into the hands of the mullahs, allowing them to act with increasing audacity and impunity.

“They know Musharraf needs them now more than ever,” said Samina Ahmed, South Asia project director for the International Crisis Group. “What other constituency does he have?”

Creeping influence

— Leaflets distributed to barbers in the North of Pakistan last month said that growing a beard was an Islamic practice. Barbers no longer offer to shave patrons

— Militants destroyed CDs of Urdu, English and Indian films at a video shop in Bannu, northern Pakistan, in February

— Zil-e-Huma, a woman Punjabi minister, was killed in February by a vigilante because “she was leading an unIslamic life and spreading an evil influence over other women”

— A report by International Crisis Group this month said that madrassas were breeding religious militants

— In Tank, in the North West Frontier Province, the Taleban were discovered recruiting students at a boy's school. The school head confronted them and was kidnapped the next day

Source: Times archives

Times Recommends

• Tehran cannot live up to its rhetoric
• The new unicycle that will ‘change the world’
• We cannot wish away Iran’s bomb