Lahore with its urbanity, its soft winter sunlight, its liberals and its many seductions is deceptive. It is easy to forget the Islamist violence that could make Pakistan the new hinterland of the jihad. Despite the pall of sadness that has hung over the city since the assassination of Benazir Bhutto there are weddings every night in the Pearl Continental Hotel and restaurants are full. You can drink wine in public if you bring your own bottle and there are private clubs that have licences to serve liquor.

A new middle class, created by the free-market economic policies of General Pervez Musharraf, is more interested in personal prosperity and a modern standard of living than jihad. Its financial muscle manifests itself in the glittering, new shopping malls and the vast housing estates that are coming up at such a pace on the edges of Lahore that it’s as if a whole new city were under construction. It is only when you talk to politicians that you get a whiff of the violence that spreads like a skein under the surface of Pakistani society.

In a glass-walled restaurant at the Royal Palms Golf Club I meet a minister in the caretaker government called Mobashir Lucman who tells me that the jihad is hard to control. There are 22,000 registered madrasas in Pakistan, he says, that raise Rs 19 billion a year in religious contributions called ‘zakat’. This money is used to spread the Islamist message and this is not hard to do among those who have been to religious schools themselves. The only solution is to resort to ‘hard options’ like the government’s action at Islamabad’s Lal Masjid last summer.

... contd.