Word: matta
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...there's a tumbledown, slacker spirit among some of the 81 artists that Huldisch and Momin have selected. Yet they also chose just enough work in which the materials may be humble but the ambitions are larger. New York artist Heather Rowe has adapted ideas from the late Gordon Matta-Clark, who sawed entire houses into parts to expose their strange and poignant innards. Rowe builds her own wooden frameworks, embedded with shards of mirrors and bits of vagrant molding, that create memory mazes, which double as Minimalist sculpture...
...transformation was radical. In the village of Matta, the police post sported a new sign: "Taliban Station." So did the precinct in Kabal. In Kalam village, Dr. Fazli Raziq's barber disappeared, driven out of business by a new edict prohibiting men from shaving their beards. Fazli's wife, Zaibi, stopped leaving the house, preferring to stay inside rather than replace her headscarf with the freshly mandated shuttlecock burqa that left only a mesh opening for the eyes. Then militants threatened to bomb their daughter's school. All in all, five out of seven subdistricts - some 68 villages - in this...
...says Zaibi Raziq. "He gets the attention of a lot of people." In a region plagued by corruption and government inefficiency, Fazlullah's demand for rule of law - even Islamic law - struck a chord. "Many of his listeners were poor and illiterate," says Rahmat Ali Khan, a businessman from Matta who fled after his cousin, a police officer, was beheaded by Fazlullah's militants on Oct. 27. "They suffer under rich landlords who give them no rights. They think that if they follow [Fazlullah] they will be able to occupy their own lands, under Shari...
...Eventually, Fazlullah's didactic sermons started to alienate many of Swat's residents, but by then it was too late - his militia had already established a foothold. Khan, the businessman from Matta, was sent threatening letters after he denounced Fazlullah's men for killing his cousin. "They have spies everywhere," he says. For too long, the central government ignored the problems festering in Swat, concerned that a crackdown on demands for Shari'a would alienate the country's Islam-based political parties. By the time the military tried to intervene, a homegrown insurgency was in full swing. Fazlullah equated resistance...
...local police precinct in the village of Matta has a new sign: Taliban Station. The same thing in the village of Kabal - in fact, nine of the twelve districts in the picturesque Swat Valley, 100 miles from Pakistan's capital, have been taken over by militants, who have torched music shops, barred girls from going to school, forced women to wear burqas and decreed that men must grow beards. As if to complete the flashback to Taliban-era Afghanistan, the new overlords have even attempted to blow up centuries-old Buddhist monuments...