Mosques on encroached land

Islamabad is thick with mosques built on encroached land or otherwise misappropriated, sometimes from the Capital Development Authority (CDA) itself. This is not new and has been going on for many years, but the scale of the illegal buildings has only now been revealed by a survey conducted by the interior ministry, which wanted to enumerate the mosques in the developed areas of the capital. There are 492 mosques within the municipal limits of the CDA and 233 of them, 47 per cent, are unauthorised. Despite this blatant flouting of the law, no civic agency or institution has taken action to either prevent or demolish the unauthorised mosques, such is the power of the clerics who built them. Simply, there is not an agency, not only in Islamabad but probably in the entire country as well, that would challenge the clerics who now sit on some very valuable real estate, and are unlikely to have been impoverished by so doing. They are well aware that they are protected by the culture of impunity, and may be relied upon to create widespread mayhem and damage were they ever to find themselves called to task for their actions.

If the state is willing to tolerate such a Faustian pact, then it has nobody but itself to blame and the problem of unauthorised mosques (and other structures owned and operated by ‘influentials’) is merely going to proliferate everywhere. The green belts of Islamabad have been appropriated and 45 mosques built on them and there are 14 unauthorised mosques in the capital’s biggest slum, the so-called Afghan Basti. Even those mosques that started life legally have encroached upon adjacent land or added floors above what they were originally planned for — with little thought of building regulations or the safety of those using the buildings. Commenting on the report, a CDA official acknowledged that razing a mosque, either authorised or unauthorised, was a virtual impossibility, and there is brisk trading in the unauthorised mosque sector which effectively institutionalises its presence. A battle lost before it has even been joined.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 21^st, 2015.

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