Sharia Alert. “Pakistani minister draws wrath for embracing man,” from Deutsche Presse-Agentur:
ISLAMABAD – Fundamentalists forming a self-declared Islamic court in the Pakistani capital have decreed that the government should dismiss a woman minister for “˜obscenely posing” with her French paragliding trainer in Paris.
The Fatwa, or religious ruling, by the court set up in Islamabad’s Red Mosque followed last week’s publication of a photograph in some national dailies that showed Tourism Minister Nilofar Bakhtiar embracing her veteran instructor as she landed after a jump.
Seeking “˜punishment” for Bakhtiar, the hard-line clerics claimed that the minister’s acts violated the injunctions of Islam and went against the societal values of segregation of the sexes.