PAKISTAN — Former beauty princess and GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s sudden introduction to the world of international politics has made this year’s campaign season much sexier – and much more dangerous, as Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari discovered recently. Zardari’s overly affectionate introduction to the “gorgeous” candidate has earned him a fatwa, courtesy of infamous prayer leader, Maulana Abdul Ghafar.
According to press reports, Ghafar has labeled Zardari’s behavior as un-Islamic and unbecoming of a Muslim country leader.
At issue was a first meeting that would be considered effusive by any nation’s standard, but especially by morality conscious Pakistan, which has sometimes fatally strict ideas about proper etiquette between the sexes.
Upon meeting Palin in front of video and still cameras during her visit to the United Nations General Assembly in New York recently, the Pakistani president gushed that “Now I know why the whole of America is crazy about you,” and proffered that she was “even more gorgeous” than he had anticipated.
Clearly basking in the feedback of the cameras, Zaradi happily kept shaking Palin’s hand, even suggesting that “If he’s (an aide) insisting, I might hug you!”
Zardari was not the only Pakistani representative taken by Palin’s physical charms. Sherry Rehman, the country’s information minister, asked the Alaskan governor “how does one keep looking that good” while remaining active on the campaign trail.
Ghafar contends that Zardari’s behavior was indecent and shamed Pakistan and its citizenry with “indecent gestures, filthy remarks, and repeated praise of a non-Muslim lady wearing a short skirt.”
Whether the Pakistani president takes the fatwa seriously is unknown, but the blogsphere has exploded with buzz on the subject, including suggestions that a Zardari-Palin marriage might be necessary in order to maintain world peace.
Instep magazine quotes Secretary of State Condoleeza’s Rice’s biographer, Marcus Marby, as stating in his book Twice as Good: Condoleezza Rice and Her Path to Power, that former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukata Aziz “often boasted there wasn’t a woman he could not seduce. But as the story goes, the alleged charm didn’t work on the U.S. Secretary of State.”
Ghafar’s fatwa, which was a condemnation of behavior that included no proposed call for action, will likely be ignored by the majority of Pakistanis, but is an indication of the conservative pressures within that country to control social behavior.
Progressives within Pakistan were equally unimpressed by their leader’s behavior, with the Christian Science Monitor quoting Tahira Abdullah, a member of the Women’s Action Forum, as saying that “As a Pakistani and a woman, it was shameful and unacceptable. He was looking upon her merely as a woman and not as a politician in her own right.”
Further, Abdullah proposed that “if he loved his wife so much as to press for a United Nations investigation into her death, he should behave like a mourning widower.” She was referring to the likely politically motivated murder of Benazir Bhutto, whom millions of Pakistani view as a feminist role model.
