A Pakistani Shia Muslim devotee marks Ashura. Photograph: Shakil Adil.
More blood on the streets of Pakistan this week, but thankfully at least some is being shed voluntarily. Thousands of bare-chested young men are marching in towns and cities for Ashura, one of Islam¹s most mesmerising, if troubling, spectacles, writes Declan Walsh in Islamabad.
Ashura is the climax of Muhurram, the 10-day festival of mourning that is marked mostly by Shia Muslims. My first experience of it, two years ago in the enigmatic desert city of Quetta, left bloodstains on my clothes and questions ringing in my head.
This year in Islamabad it was hardly less intense. Standing amid a throng of black-clad mourners, the young men thrash their backs using chains with small, curved blades attached. The devotees, some only teenagers, claim to feel no pain. It's hard to believe them.
But, like events elsewhere in the Islamic world, Ashura in Pakistan has become caught in a vicious sectarian current. The Islamabad procession took place inside a ring of steel of the kind last seen during the visit of Prince Charles and Camilla. Snipers wielding old rifles perched on rooftops, and intelligence agents mingled among the crowd.
The stringent measures were triggered by a spate of attacks across the country that started on Friday, when a suicide bomber flung himself at an entrance to the Marriott hotel in Islamabad. The next day another bomber blew himself up outside a mosque in Peshawar, killing 15 police. On Monday there were more bombs and a rocket attack elsewhere in the same province. An explosion early today in Hangu - where 40 were killed in a suicide attack last year - has prompted a police curfew.
Some believe the violence is being driven by foreigners. "There may be people in Iraq or Afghanistan who also want to put us in sectarian strife," Islamabad's police chief, Iftikhar Ahmed, told me. But Pakistan's extremist tinderbox needs no outside spark. More than 2,000 people have died in religious violence, mostly Sunni against Shia, over the past 20 years, according to the International Crisis Group.
What's most worrying now is that since 9/11 this small minority of fanatics is diversifying into other areas of business. Arrests over recent years have proved that the same people who orchestrate attacks on Shia parades are also forging alliances with al-Qaida godfathers, or prodding penniless young men into fighting Americans and Britons across the border in Afghanistan.
When Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, carved the country out of northern India in 1947, he wanted a homeland where the subcontinent¹s Muslims could feel free and safe. But 60 years on, when religious parades require extraordinary protection, that vision is deeply troubled. As Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear scientist and intellectual, put it recently: "Mr Jinnah's Pakistan isn't working. What can?"
