HYDERABAD, Feb 15: Speakers at a women’s convention on Sunday denounced extremism in all forms and manifestations in Swat and tribal areas and urged people to resist the menace through unity in their ranks.

Aurat Foundation’s Anis Haroon, Ms Zubeida Mustafa, Barrister Zamir Ghumro and Ms Amar Sindhu said at the first convention of the Women Action Forum at the Sindhi Language Authority auditorium that the West did not need to teach Muslims Islam or Sufism.

The theme of the convention was “Stop institutionalising violence”.

Ms Haroon said that ‘modern Islam’ and Sufism were theories of the West, which the WAF did not accept because it was debatable. Any progressive interpretation (of religion) would be welcomed, she said.

“…the state should not have the right to codify any (particular) religion because we believe that the state should be secular,” she said.

She said that jirga system never addressed the root of discord, which led to killings and bloodshed and extremism was embedded in the system under which people did not have the right to marry of their own free will.

She criticised the country’s governance structure and said “it appears the state has disappeared. The abolition of jirga system will benefit peasants, women and other downtrodden sections of society.”

She said that unless amendments to the 1973 Constitution, including those of Nov 3, 2007, were done away with, no one could talk about democracy, and called for nurturing democratic culture in political institutions and parties.

She called for a review of the concurrent list and advocated autonomy for provinces in accordance with the 1940 Resolution.

Ms Haroon said that religious extremists existed everywhere, including the Untied States and India. “The entire US establishment is religiously extremist in shape of neo-cons,” she said.

She urged people to resist extremism in all its manifestations through unity in their ranks. “There are pockets of population in Swat, Fata, Balochistan and Waziristan which hate extremism and we need to support them. We will have to put up resistance because it is not Taliban’s or the US war but people’s war,” she said.

Reading a paper on extremism and patriarchy, Ms Mustafa said that negative tendencies were increasing in the society and there was fear everything that had been achieved for women after years of struggle would relapse into darkness. “This is the danger against which we have to fight,” she said.

“Extremism is the result of failure of institutions, which were destroyed by frequent military interventions. The menace has polluted socio-political environment and made women the worst affected segment of society,” she said.

She said that only 42 per cent of women were educated as against 67 per cent men. Taliban’s attack on schools in the northern areas would further scuttle girls’ education, she said.

Mr Ghumro discussed governance in light of provincial autonomy and said that prevailing conditions of governance in Sindh were pathetic. No political party had any strategy to address issues of governance though they did talk about provincial autonomy, he said.