Motus Mentis

It should come as no surprise to any that the Taliban, emboldened by its defeat of the moribund government of Pakistan over control of the valley of Swat, now seeks to seize the initiative in its campaign to impose its totalitarian and sadistic Islamic theocracy upon the entire nation.

Last week the architect of the Red Mosque uprising, Maulana Abdul Aziz, was released from detention and immediately gave a speech in Islamabad calling for the overthrow of the secular system and its replacement with Shari’a law; next the new masters of Swat have lost no time in casting away all remnants of civilized law in the conquered region. In a live broadcast, the Taliban cleric Sufi Mohammed announced that there will henceforward be no more appeals of Shari’a verdicts to the state courts. In effect Swat is now entirely isolated from civilization, and its Taliban captors have a free hand to subjugate and brutalize its hapless citizenry, and to impose upon them the odious and wicked religious barbarism that is the object of their ruthless and unrelenting jihad.

Now, in today’s news, we learn that the Taliban — capitalizing upon their gathering momentum, as any good tacticians would — have begun advancing into neighboring provinces. Such are the wages of appeasement.

There is a self-renewing core of fundamentalism at the heart of Islam; it is an explicit, and central, axiom of the religion that the Koran is a literal transcription of God’s word, as given directly to Mohammed in Arabic by the divine messenger Jibreel. Allegorical and metaphoric interpretations of the Book, then, are not permitted; every word is literally, and unchallengeably, true. Furthermore, the Prophet, during his lifetime, was not only the spiritual but also the political leader of his community, and thereby provided a holotype for what God intended Islamic society to be. The very idea of a separation of church and state is inherently un-Islamic. “Moderate” Islam, then, is arguably heresy, and we see that the Taliban feel the same way:

The Pakistani government appears unable or unwilling to stop the Taliban’s steady advance deeper into the territory of this nuclear-armed country.

In the days after the government’s April 13 decision to implement sharia law in Swat, pro-Taliban clerics have staged rallies in Swat and Islamabad. They have demanded the imposition of Islamic law across Pakistan and beyond.

Speaking before an audience of tens of thousands in the Swat Valley town of Mingora on Sunday, cleric Sufi Muhammed declared democracy and Pakistan’s judicial system “un-Islamic.”

A Taliban spokesman in Swat went a step further Tuesday, calling anyone opposed to his strict interpretation of Islam a non-Muslim.

There is now very little that stands between the Taliban and their goal of national conquest; it is not at all far-fetched to imagine that these grim and ruthless men may soon find themselves in possession of a glittering prize: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

Read the latest here.