PESHAWAR, 3 June 2003 — The Islamist-led Parliament in the North West Frontier Province yesterday adopted a bill to introduce Islamic Shariah law in the region bordering Afghanistan.
The bill was adopted unanimously after the opposition parties withdrew amendments they had proposed earlier.
Witnesses said members chanted “Allah-o-Akbar after the provincial assembly passed the bill.
The Shariah bill, introduced in the NWFP Assembly last week, proposes to make Islamic law the supreme law in NWFP courts and to Islamize education, the economy and judiciary.
Provincial Chief Minister Akram Durrani thanked the opposition parties for lending their support to the bill.
“We will now mould all laws under the purview of the provincial government in accordance with the Islamic teachings,” he told the house. “No one will face injustice in the province.”
The NWFP is ruled by the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), an alliance of six Islamic parties, which swept to power in October on a wave of anti-Western resentment over the toppling of Afghanistan’s Taleban regime, and which has promised to enforce Islamic Shariah law.
The MMA government has banned men from training or watching women athletes, ordered civil servants to pray five times a day, and decided to establish a department for promoting virtue and suppressing vice in the deeply religious region.
The move has alarmed analysts, who last week expressed fears it would give legal cover to ultra-orthodox leaders to enforce harsh Taleban-style rules. They warned that the system could spawn militancy in the province.
Provincial Law Minister Zafar Azam has said the bill contained a clause that proposed the drawing up of a legal framework to ensure there was no clash between the country’s 1973 constitution and provincial laws.
The provincial government has pledged to exempt non-Muslim minorities from following the Shariah.
The passage of the Shariah bill coincides with a new rift between the MMA government and all 24 mayors in NWFP, who resigned en-masse in protest at alleged victimization by the ruling Islamic parties.
“We have sent our resignations to President Pervez Musharraf in protest at the negative attitude of the provincial government,” Azam Afridi, mayor of the provincial capital Peshawar told AFP.
Afridi said the MMA, which has no representation in NWFP’s local government administrations, was victimizing the mayors by withholding development funds and filing charges of embezzlement and nepotism against them.
Durrani in a statement denied the charges that the MMA government was against the local government institutions. “It was trying to remove certain flaws in the system,” he said, calling the resignations a “conspiracy” against the NWFP government.
