Islamic clerics in Pakistan have issued a 'fatwa' against the Taliban gunmen who attempted to kill the 14 year-old girl

Jon Boone in Islamabad
The Guardian,
Friday 12 October 2012 13.17 EDT



A group of 50 Islamic clerics in Pakistan have issued a fatwa against the Taliban gunmen who tried to kill a 14-year-old girl, famous for campaigning for the right of young females to an education.

The Islamic scholars from the Sunni Ittehad Council publicly denounced attempts by the Pakistani Taliban to mount religious justifications for the shooting of Malala Yousafzai and two of her classmates as they sat inside a school bus on Tuesday.A Taliban spokesman issued a statement on Wednesday claiming it was obligatory to kill anyone "leading a campaign" against Islamic law. The movement has also said they would attempt to kill Yousafzai again if she recovers from her
injuries.Hamid Saeed Kazmi, a former religious affairs minister, replied that Islam "holds the killing of one innocent person as killing the entirety of humanity".

There was continued outrage over the attack, which has left Yousafzai in a critical condition at a Pakistani military hospital after surgery to remove a bullet from near her spinal cord. Authorities are offering a reward of $100,000 for the capture of her attackers.Local police in Mingora, the largest city in Swat, said Friday they had arrested a number of suspects.

A spokesman for the Pakistani military, which has taken responsibility for her care in one of its hospitals, said the next two days would be critical for Yousafzai.Across the country, a national day of prayer was observed in schools and mosques for the young peace activist who became famous after writing a blog in 2009 for the BBC Urdu service about life under the Taliban insurgency. Some newspapers on Friday even suggested the army might now consider mounting operations in North
Waziristan, the centre of the country's militancy problem, which the military has long resisted confronting despite entreaties from the US.

Sceptics, however, fear nothing will change, noting the handful of tiny public demonstrations on behalf of Yousafzai have been dwarfed by the huge, violent protests that greeted the YouTube trailer for the blasphemous Innocence of Muslims film last month.One human rights activist said that while there was "a great big moderate majority" in Pakistan but "it never speaks up".Several commentators have also noted that, although almost all political parties have condemned the act, often in extremely harsh terms, most are unwilling to single out the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, even though it gleefully claimed responsibility."It shows that they have not yet really discarded
the Taliban," said Zohra Yusuf, head of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.She added: "There is fear element as well but they do have a soft corner – they have never tried to hide that."