A female teacher at a Pakistani religious school was killed by a colleague and two students who accused her of blasphemy. Blasphemy is a highly serious and sensitive charge in the South Asian nation, and even unproven allegations have led to vigilante justice including mob lynchings and violence.
Another of Peshawar's landmark bookstores is closing -- the third in two years. The closures leave the city ever more isolated in the war of ideas with jihadists.
While pro-Taliban militant groups are largely united by their terror agenda, Pakistan's political leadership has failed to define a shared vision and develop a unified strategy to defeat militancy and religious bigotry.
The Koran instructs every Muslim man and woman to acquire knowledge, but our religious leaders say nothing as our children are deprived of their future. They have nothing to say about this organized campaign to keep the region's people ignorant, impoverished, and terrorized -- a perfect recruiting pool for endlessly pushing the extremist, jihadist agenda.
Islamic militants in Pakistan view the country’s native Sufi traditions as a major impediment to the imposition of their extremist religious agenda. The result has been a relentless assault on Sufi shrines across Pakistan.
Shaheen Buneri of RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal says Pashtuns straddling the Pakistani-Afghan border face serious challenges to their survival, and it's very hard for them to know whether the world has dismissed them as simply Taliban supporters and sympathizers.
In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, Zar Sanga, known as the queen of Pashto folk music, finds herself homeless, one of millions of victims of the floods that plagued the country this summer.
"If there was a paradise on Earth, it was the beautiful valley of Swat. It had heritage, history, and traditions based on love and peace," says Pakistan's Abdurrahman Roghani, an eminent Pashtun poet, writer, and social activist.
