The Last Picture Show

Oct. 8 - For more than 50 years, the Delight Theater on Baghi Street was one of the epicenters of cultural life in Quetta. Situated in one of the city’s busiest districts, the cinema played host three times a day, six days a week to crowds of Pashtun and Baluchi tribesmen lured by its mix of Hollywood hits and local action-adventures. When I visited the Delight on the Saturday before last, its crumbling lobby was filled with tattered posters for “The Terminator: Judgement Day,” “The Mummy Returns,” and “Jihad,” a movie celebrating the exploits of Kashmiri Islamic militants.

FOUR WHEEZING PROJECTORS, manufactured in the 1940s, beamed grainy images into the dank 700-seat theater, where Sylvester Stallone hung on a mountaintop, speaking fuzzy Urdu. “Some people come back to see ‘Cliffhanger’ seven or eight times,” Abdillah Khan, whose family has owned the Delight for two decades, told me. “We’ve shown it every year, 10 weeks a year, since 1992.”

No longer. This morning, nine days after my visit, mobs of fundamentalist Muslims, enraged over Sunday night’s air strikes against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, rampaged through the streets of Quetta in the worst rioting the city has ever seen. As journalists huddled inside their rooms at the heavily guarded Quetta Serena Hotel, thousands of militants, many of them students enrolled in the city’s Islamic schools of learning (known as madrasas) chanted anti-U.S. slogans, fired rifles in the air, then set out to destroy Quetta’s symbols of secular and Western culture. Sometime around noon, they marched down Baghi Street, surrounded the Delight Theater, doused it in gasoline and then burned it to the ground.

The owners, secular Pashtuns, had seen the disaster coming. When I spoke to the Khan family in their cramped office during the Saturday matinee, they expressed fear that the tide of Islamic fundamentalism sweeping Pakistan was threatening to engulf the city of Quetta. Situated in a desert valley in southwestern Baluchistan province, about 30 miles from the Afghan border, this town has experienced growing tensions between proponents of secular culture and the religious right: chiefly, students in the madrasas and members of the powerful fundamentalist party known as the Jamiat-e-Uleme-Islam, which has strong ties to the Taliban.

Tensions grew dramaticaly after Sept. 11, when noisy anti-U.S. protests led by the local Mulwis, or religious teachers, filled the streets. Quetta’s police force set up checkpoints and beefed up their presence along the border and inside Afghan refugee camps, anxiously keeping an eye on the Taliban and their sympathizers. According to the most recent estimates, there are more than 10,000 Quranic students studying in madrasas in Quetta alone, and between 7,000 and 8,000 of them can be counted on to show up at pro-Taliban, anti-American demonstrations.

Pro-Taliban demonstrators expressed their rage in Quetta on Monday

The rise of the Mulwis is partly the Pakistani government’s own doing. In the late 1970s Pakistan’s military ruler, Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, set up hundreds of religious schools throughout Pakistan, which offered free education to the country’s poor. In the two decades since, the religious schools have spread widely, spawning a subculture of youth lettered in the Quran but little else, and inculcated with religious fanaticism. Poor and disenfranchised young men, many of them refugees fleeing civil war and anarchy in neighboring Afghanistan, found meaning, community and a sense of belonging in the harsh regimens and “purist” philosophy of the Deoban Islamic sect, while the message of Islamic triumphalism and eternal life in Paradise provided an additional incentive to embrace the religious life. When the Taliban seized Kabul and consolidated their control over 90 percent of Afghanistan, the madrasas’ fortunes soared. “There was a feeling among the fighters that ‘we can do anything’,” says Sami Yusufzai, an Afghan refugee from Peshawar and a journalist for the English language daily The News. “The Afghani people, especially the young, had great respect for them. Many people were encouraged by the Taliban.”

The power of the radicals began to be felt on the streets of Quetta several years ago. Threatened with destruction, dance clubs were forced to close down and outdoor music concerts ceased. There have been constant calls from Mulwi Nur Mohammed, the fiery local leader of Jamiat-e-Uleme-Islam, to ban coeducational schools, force men to wear beards and require women to drape themselves in a burkha—the coverall garment that all women must wear in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Two years ago the fundamentalists led a campaign to close down Quetta’s cinemas during the month of Ramadan. Mobs brandishing bricks, stones and Kalashnikov rifles surrounded the Delight Theater and threatened to destroy it. “We had no choice but to close,” says Amadilu Khan.

A ladies-only night at the Delight was also discontinued recently after the fundamentalists complained. Earlier this year, Quetta’s police force raided and sealed the theater after Maulwis complained about the movies’ sexually explicit content. And co-owner Khan, 40, better known as the romantic lead in dozens of Pashtun action movies highly popular in this part of Pakistan, found himself tossed in a jail cell on obscenity charges. Khan and his brother took the case to district court and won, but lawyers fees and losses from the shutdown ran to $50,000.

One week before the attack on the Delight Theater, I found Mulwi Nur Mohammed at the Al Habib Mosque, which can be reached via a rickety flight of stairs half hidden between two tea shops in Quetta’s teeming bazaar district. A sixtyish sage with a flowing gray beard, a white shalwa kamiz and huge white turban, he sat on an Afgan carpet in a tiny, windowless room and beckoned for me to sit beside him. Nur Mohammed exuded piety, calm and absolute conviction. “Are you a Christian?” he asked. I sized up the dozen fierce-looking Taliban who sat at his feet. “Yes,” I said, lying.

Nur Mohammed nodded in approval, and made an insulting remark about “the Jews” that my translator had a hard time interpreting. He offered no apologies for the sometimes violent campaign to shut down Quetta’s movie theaters and other secular entertainment, no regrets for trying to impose the will of the few upon the many. His goal, he said, was straightforward: “The first step is complete Islamicization of society. The second step is a jihad against the enemies of Islam. If the United States dares to attack Afghanistan,” the Mullah intoned, “thousands of men from Quetta will rush across the border and join the jihad.” Several of his followers nodded vigorously.

Nur Mohammed’s mosque is one of the prime refuges of the Taliban when they come into Quetta, and nearly all of the bearded, turbaned men surrounding him had recently fought in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance. Among them was Abdul Bari, 27, who wore the black turban that signified he was still a student; until seven years ago, he’d been a secular Muslim in Quetta, but embraced the Deoban sect in 1994 and joined the Taliban on its march to Kandahar.

Islam in Quetta isn’t a pretty sight. It’s in-your-face politics, a shove-it-down-their-throats mentality that gains its conviction from the Taliban’s triumph in Afghanistan. Its religious practitioners believe they’re on a holy mission, and their stridency has polarized Quetta just as it has the rest of Pakistan. Indeed, it can be argued that the real “clash of civilizations” isn’t between the West and Islam, but between the secular Islamic forces represented by Khan’s Delight Theater and the radicalism epitomized by Mulwi Nur Mohammed’s Al Habib mosque a few blocks away. And the anger and resentment on both sides is palpable.

Nine days before the attack, in the Delight Theater’s back office, a dozen members of the Khan family—secular Pashtuns who support the return of King Zahid Shah to the Afghan throne—talked disparagingly about the “Sufis,” the bearded, turbaned religious Pashtuns who have become an ever more visible sight on Quetta’s streets. “We love the Afghans as we love all humanity,” said Kalim Khan, a neighborhood political leader. “But we are closer to you than to them. We want capitalism. We want entertainment. We want to be the 51st state of America.” Many of the dozen men in the room laughed appreciatively and nodded their heads in agreement. Zarak Khan, 18, a son of the cinema’s co-owner and a second year student at a coeducational English-language preparatory school in Quetta, told me that feeling in Quetta has deteriorated in recent months. “The Sufis have changed the atmosphere totally,” he said. “They throw bottles at people. The women in town are afraid to come around here anymore because of these people. The Sufis are uneducated, illiterate women-haters.”

Even before the U.S. attack, it had been a difficult year for the Khan family. Growing competition from satellite TV and “movie nights” at the local hotels hurt their business. The Maulvis’ protests and the month long shutdown dealt them further damage. In August, a bomb hidden inside a motor scooter went off around the corner from the cinema, killing four people and shattering the theater’s windows; the Khans suspect the act of terror had something to do with the Taliban, though it appears it was related to a political feud within one of the Baluchistan nationalist parties.

Whatever the case, it was one of a half-dozen such incidents in Quetta in the last few months, and it only intensified the edgy atmosphere. When I spoke to the Khans, they expressed their fear that more trouble was imminent. Two months ago, Gen. Pervez Musharraf ordered Quetta’s residents—many of whom are heavily armed—to turn in their weapons to the local police. The Khan family, which had a stockpile of shotguns and pistols, obliged, but many people, says Kalim Kahn, “hid their weapons in the ground.” Now, says Khan, in an eerie foreshadowing of yesterday’s cataclysm, “We feel like we made a mistake to hand them over. If the fight comes, with what things should we fight?”

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.