ISLAMABAD, 2 August 2005 — Pakistan’s Supreme Court yesterday adjourned till today hearing a government challenge against plans to introduce what critics call Taleban-style moral policing in the North West Frontier Province. Hard-liners in the assembly of the North West Frontier Province in mid-July introduced the Hasba Bill, or accountability bill, that would allow a cleric to enforce strict adherence to Shariah law.

“This bill is unconstitutional,” federal Attorney General Makhdoom Ali Khan told the nine-member panel at the start of hearings in the white-marble Supreme Court building, which was cordoned off by riot police.

“It lays down the foundation of a parallel judicial system and it is in violation of fundamental rights of citizens under the constitution.”

Critics say the plan mirrors policies of the Taleban’s Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice Department, which enforced strict Islamic law in neighboring Afghanistan before its ouster in a US-led invasion in late 2001.

The Taleban banned singing and dancing, harassed men who did not wear beards or failed to follow five daily calls to prayer, and only allowed women to leave the family home in head-to-toe burqas and accompanied by a male relative.

Under the Hasba Bill, passed two weeks ago in the provincial legislature in Peshawar, a government-appointed cleric called a mohtasib would “ensure adherence to Islamic values in public places”.

According to the bill, he would guide the provincial administration, “protect watch the Islamic values and etiquettes” and ensure media publications “are useful to the purpose of upholding Islamic values”.

Khan said there were fears that “widely vague, undefined and open-ended powers” would create Taleban-style rule within a province of Pakistan.

“The open-ended powers would lead to abuse of these powers,” he said.

Pakistan’s President Gen. Pervez Musharraf has argued the bill is unconstitutional and would undermine the independence of the judiciary.

Pakistan was founded in 1947 after independence from Britain as a secular state and a homeland for Muslims after partition from mainly-Hindu India, but military regimes in the 1970s increased the role of Islam in public life.

Muslim guerrillas were backed, with US support, to fight Soviet forces in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989. They continue to play a role in the battle for divided Kashmir, the Himalayan state also claimed by India.

Musharraf, who took power in a bloodless coup in 1999, has advocated a policy of “enlightened moderation,” banned 10 extremist groups and moved against radicals, who still enjoy support in parts of his security apparatus.

A key Western ally since Sept. 11, 2001 who has himself been targeted by militants, Musharraf has ordered the arrest of some 800 suspected extremists under US and British pressure following the July 7 London bombings.

In the two-week-old crackdown he has also banned “hate speech” from mosques and told foreign madrasa students to go home, over fears some Islamic seminaries may be breeding the next generation of anti-Western militants.