Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

A female suicide bomber killed three Chinese teachers and a local driver at Karachi University in Pakistan this week. The separatist militant group, the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), claimed responsibility for the attack which targeted a Chinese language centre at the university. The Confucius Institute, the BLA said in a statement, was a ‘symbol of Chinese economic, cultural and political expansionism.’ The suicide bomber was a 31-year-old schoolteacher with a master’s degree who read Arundhati Roy and Richard Dawkins. This isn’t Pakistan’s first anti-China attack. The BLA has recently targeted the Chinese consulate, a five-star hotel, and the stock exchange.

On Sunday, Imran Khan became the first prime minister in Pakistan’s history to be ousted by a no-confidence vote. Followers of Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party naturally took to the streets; much of their anger has been directed at the generals who engineered their leader’s downfall. It was a clash with the all-powerful military that, like so many of his predecessors, finally ended Khan’s prime ministership. The former cricketer had attempted to oust one of the country’s all-powerful spy chiefs, a move that finally ended the uneasy relationship between the PM and the military. Attempting to save his own politician skin, Khan tried to block a no-confidence vote by dissolving the assembly last week but this was deemed illegal by the Supreme Court.

Imran Khan’s innings as the Pakistani Prime Minister may be coming to an end. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, one of his coalition partners, has split from the government. Khan has now lost his majority in the National Assembly, which is set to meet for a no-confidence vote on Sunday. And while all this falls perfectly in line with parliamentary norms, in the context of the country’s tumultuous political history, Khan’s premature exit would be another blow to democracy. Not a single Pakistani prime minister has completed their five-year term in the country’s 75-year history, almost half of which has seen direct military rule.

This week, the Council of Europe was forced to pull an advertising campaign promoting the hijab following a backlash from the French. As part of a campaign to promote respect for Muslim women, the European body released a number of campaign posters, one of which read ‘Beauty is in diversity as freedom is in hijab’. Shortly afterwards there was an outcry from French politicians, who called for the campaign to be dropped. Sarah El Haïry, France’s youth minister who is of Moroccan descent, said she was vocally ‘shocked’ by the campaign. The posters were also condemned by many Muslim heritage women and secular activists around the world. Some of the campaign’s messages, such as ‘my headscarf my choice’, are pretty uncontroversial.

Taliban flags are already flying in Islamabad. Among those hoisting the white flag of the group is the women’s madrassa Jamia Hafsa, affiliated with the adjoining Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), which has also released a song celebrating the Taliban as ‘the symbol of Islam’. Lal Masjid, a few miles from Pakistan’s military headquarters and parliament, has been an emblem of terror and factory of jihad in Pakistan since its formation in the 1960s. The Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Aziz has in the past pledged allegiance to Isis and appeared to defend the 2014 Peshawar school attack which killed 141, mostly schoolchildren. When the army moved against Lal Masjid in 2007 it led to a nationwide explosion of terror attacks.

The Taliban retaking Kabul has been inevitable for almost the entirety of the 20 year war, and certainly since Barack Obama announced the US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011. And yet the manner in which Kabul has fallen, with images of despair and the Taliban’s unopposed march to the presidential palace, heralds a global tectonic shift. For Islamist militia, regardless of their orientation, it signifies jihad’s biggest win of the decade. Jihadist outfits from Africa to the Middle East and South Asia, including groups that have been facing off against the Taliban in Afghanistan, will bask in the ‘triumph of Islam’.

An eight-year-old Hindu boy is currently in custody in the southern Punjab. He is the youngest person in Pakistan to be charged with blasphemy. The boy, accused of urinating in a local madrassa, was released last week on bail — in retaliation, a Muslim mob vandalised a local Hindu temple. Meanwhile, on Thursday, a day after the temple attack, a transgender person was arrested on blasphemy charges in Abbottabad, around 100 miles north of the capital Islamabad, for allegedly burning the Quran. These are but the latest in an unrelenting spree of blasphemy cases, a victimless crime that carries the death penalty in Pakistan.