Religious protesters have put Pakistan’s government on the defensive
Nov 7th 2019ISLAMABADRIZWAN AHMAD says he has everything he needs for the long haul. The 20-year-old has swapped his austere madrasa in Sukkur, a city in Sindh province, for a makeshift camp beside a motorway outside Islamabad, the capital, nearly 1,000km (620 miles) to the north. He has bedding, warm clothes, food and shelter. Anything else, God will provide. Tents, tarpaulins, food stalls and solar panels to charge mobile phones are laid out among rows of men bent in prayer.Mr Ahmad is one of around 50,000 protesters who, led by a veteran Islamist called Maulana Fazlur Rehman, descended on Islamabad late last month. The orange-turbaned leader of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) party stirred up religious students to demand the resignation of the prime minister, Imran Khan. “If the maulana says ‘Go home tomorrow’, we will go home tomorrow,” explains Mr Ahmad. “If he says ‘Stay a year’, we will stay a year.”Choose us for news analysis that respects your time and intelligenceSubscribe to The EconomistWe filter out the noise of the daily news cycle and analyse the trends that matterWe give you rigorous, deeply researched and fact-checked journalism. That’s why Americans named us their most trusted news source in 2017Available wherever you are—in print, digital and, uniquely, in audio, fully narrated by professional broadcastersThis website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard‘s standards of credibility and transparency.ORContinue reading this articleRegister with an email address