Word: sufis
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...alliance with Sufi Muhammad, the hard-line cleric it enlisted to broker peace in the Swat Valley earlier this year, proved equally disastrous. Muhammad's politics were well known: during the 1990s he had waged a campaign of violence for the imposition of an austere form of Islamic law in the Swat Valley, and in late 2001, he led hundreds of young men to fight the U.S. invaders in Afghanistan. He had been imprisoned upon his return, and released last year on the condition that he disavowed militancy...
...government tasked Muhammad with urging his former disciple to lay down arms in exchange for the government's implementation of Islamic law in the area. It soon emerged, however, that the Taliban had no intention of laying down arms, but instead sought to extend its reach, and Sufi Muhammad turned out to be an active enabler of their advance...
Earlier on Saturday, a military convoy carrying two prominent cohorts of Sufi Mohammed, the hardline pro-Taliban cleric the government once negotiated with, came under attack and the pair was killed. As the vehicle made its way past the notorious gun-running town of Sakhakot, a roadside bomb exploded and militants opened fire. One of the men inside was Ameer Izzat Khan, Sufi Mohammed's fast-talking spokesman, who is considered one of the most senior militants killed so far. There is confusion over whether the attacking militants were trying to rescue the pair, or kill them before the military...
...Sunday, just a week after Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari signed a provision allowing for the implementation of Islamic law in Malakand, Sufi Mohammad, the local religious leader who negotiated the accord (and who is father-in-law to the local Taliban leader), announced that he would not recognize the Supreme Court of Pakistan, even in cases of appeal. He also said that while the Taliban fighters would adhere to the peace agreement, they would not give up their arms. (Read "Can Pakistan Be Untangled from the Taliban...
...What I listened to yesterday were the ghazal [a Sufi song form] of Mehdi Hassan and then I listened to Tchaikovsky, and then I listened to an Irish artist - I don't know who it was. So it's like three weird things. I was traveling from Bangalore to Chennai...