ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A 6,000-strong army of young women wielding bamboo sticks and covered from head to toe in black is vowing to enforce the Islamist moral vision of their teacher, Abdul Rashid Ghazi.
For now, they are content to kidnap prostitutes — releasing them hours later after stern lectures on Islamic morality — and attack music video stalls and other targets.
But Mr. Ghazi, who runs a madrassa, or Muslim seminary, attached to Islamabad’s Red Mosque, warns that his female students will send suicide bombers into the fray if authorities lay a hand on them.
“It is [President Pervez] Musharraf and [President] Bush who have created these suicide bombers,” said Mr. Ghazi, a polite and erudite Islamic scholar who is about 50 years old. “I mean, the more you try to suppress them, the more they appear.”
Several female seminarians who surrounded Mr. Ghazi during a recent visit to the school’s Internet cafe hissed loudly when a reporter tried to photograph them.
Mr. Ghazi and several other leading radicals are openly challenging Gen. Musharraf and his counterterrorism alliance with Mr. Bush.
The female vigilantes struck this weekend, kidnapping nine women from a massage parlor in Islamabad, the capital, and accusing them of running a brothel. The abducted women, who included three Chinese, were released hours later.
Since January, the vigilantes have kidnapped other masseuses, shut down a children’s library and even seized policemen as part of a campaign to impose their strict interpretation of Islam.
Many Pakistanis, including some leading academics, think Mr. Ghazi and his Red Mosque radicals reflect a quasi-official policy of appeasing Islamists.
Afrasiab Khattak, a leading Pakistani human rights activist based in the northwestern city of Peshawar, said “Talibanization” has been the official policy in Pakistan for decades.
“Pakistan”s generals think they can force the West to quit Afghanistan by sending body bags to back to these countries,” he said.
Government officials vehemently deny the accusations. What is sure, however, is that Gen. Musharraf, a staunch U.S. ally in the war on terrorism, is facing mounting street protests in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi over his eight-year military rule.
Nationwide protests triggered by Gen. Musharraf’s attempt to fire the Supreme Court’s chief justice have brought government campaigns to rein in militants.
In response, radical Islamic groups such as the Red Mosque seminarians, which had been lying low in recent years, have stepped up efforts to move Pakistan in the direction of a strict Islamic state.
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