The trickle of suspiciously large-bellied men emerging from the fifth floor of Peshawar's poshest hotel has dried up. The Gulbar bar, which supplied the bottles that bulged midriffs beneath their salwar kameez, the baggy costumes worn almost universally in Pakistan, has shut its doors. Licensed to sell alcohol-supposedly only to non-Muslim foreigners-the gloomy night-spot fell foul of the province's Islamic government, elected a year ago. As an example of the new government's policies, the Gulbar's closure is trivial but far from untypical. The administration has concentrated on petty, rather vindictive, measures to demonstrate its Islamist credentials. Taken together, they amount to a creeping Islamisation of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), which borders Afghanistan. But the enforcement of virtue is a sign less of a tide of any great religious fervour sweeping the province than of the provincial government's political weakness.
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