A Growing 'Talibanization' : Along the Afghan border, newly powerful mullahs are spreading a strict gospel.(election of Islamist United Action Council returns North-West Frontier Province, Pakistan to islamic values)

For 40 years, Shaukat Khan has made a modest income singing and dancing to traditional Pashtun music at weddings and family celebrations. Now the 50- year-old performer, along with hundreds of other musicians, is being run out of show business in Pakistan's North-West Frontier province. They are among the first casualties of the aggressive "anti-obscenity" crackdown being orchestrated by the Islamist United Action Council, or MMA in its Urdu- language acronym. "The mullahs hate us," says Khan, sighing. "They only want us to study the holy Qur'an."

The MMA rode to victory in October's NWFP provincial election on the strength of a campaign that was virulently anti-American and that promised to uphold Islamic values. Like the stridently religious Hindu nationalists in neighboring India, the pro-Taliban coalition of six conservative parties says it is doing exactly what the voters asked it to do. "People elected us to destroy culture that is alien to Islamic values," says Bakht Jan, the MMA's Provincial Assembly speaker. In its drive to Islamicize the strategic province, the MMA is targeting a widening sphere of Pakistani cultural life. "Sadly," laments Afrasiab Khattak, chairperson of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, "we're witnessing the Talibanization of the NWFP."

In mounting their cultural dragnet, the MMA-controlled provincial police are not acting on new laws but on the fatwas proclaimed by leading mullahs. In November the inspector general of police personally organized the first attack in Peshawar, leading his ...