PESHAWAR, Pakistan: Hundreds of Muslims in Pakistan's staunchly conservative northwest have set ablaze dozens of TV sets following a cleric's ruling that watching television was a sin, police said Saturday.
The men congregated in a park after Friday prayers and piled up about 25 TV sets, doused them with fuel and set them on fire, said witnesses from the Charsadda district of the North West Frontier Province near the Afghan border.
"These people actually responded to a cleric's call," said district police chief Muhammad Iqbal, after a local mullah had said on radio that watching TV was a sin and declared a jihad or holy war against vulgarity and obscenity.
The park echoed with shouts of "Allah-o-Akbar" (God is greatest) and "Islam zindabad" (long live Islam), while the emotional crowd also decried an ongoing crackdown on suspected extremists following the London bombings.
Parliamentarian Maulana Gohar Shah addressed the crowd and called the 800 arrests and series of raids on Islamic seminaries ordered by President Pervez Musharraf a "conspiracy of the infidel (non-believer) world".
A local journalist said that, days earlier, influential local cleric Abdullah Shah had decreed that TV was "not allowed in Islam" after followers had asked him to give an Islamic ruling.
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