Asma Jahangir, a human-rights lawyer, has fought for a secular civil society. Female vigilantes from a madrassa calling for the establishment of full Sharia law, before the siege of the Red Mosque. JOOST VAN DEN BROEK/HOLLANDSE-HOOGTE (LEFT) / B.K. BANGASH/AP PHOTO

In the white glare of a hot summer’s noon, the broad avenues of Islamabad, Pakistan’s modern capital, are usually empty. But on a sweltering day this May the streets were crowded with noisily chanting protesters, all of them demonstrating against the military government of President Pervez Musharraf. Three separate protests were under way. Each one represented a slightly different vision of the future that Pakistan might have if—as now seems more likely than ever—Musharraf’s government were to fall.

The largest crowd by far was made up of lawyers in starched collars, white shirts, and black suits. They marched in orderly ranks, three abreast, like emperor penguins in a nature film. Some held up very British-looking umbrellas, on which markedly un-catchy slogans, such as “Long Live Lawyers Unity,” had been carefully daubed in white paint. In earlier demonstrations, the lawyers had clashed with riot police, and the country’s most senior barristers, silk ties flying, had responded with surprising vigor, hurling back tear-gas cannisters at staff-wielding policemen and jabbing at them with furled umbrellas.

The lawyers began demonstrating when, on March 9th, Iftikhar Chaudhry, Pakistan’s Chief Justice, was suspended, reportedly because Musharraf had accused him of using his position for personal gain and for trying to get his son a top police job. The first demonstrations, which consisted of a few hundred lawyers protesting against Musharraf’s attack on the independence of the judiciary, escalated into a full-scale campaign against military rule when, a week later, riot police attacked first the protesters and then the offices of an Islamabad news channel that had broadcast images of police beating up barristers. By May, the demonstrations had turned into a countrywide protest movement calling for fair elections, a civilian government, and the return of real democracy.

On that particular May day, the overwhelming majority of the protesting barristers were men. Yet at the center of the group was a fragile-looking, diminutive woman in a crisp white shalwar kameez, a neat black jacket, and heavy tortoiseshell spectacles, named Asma Jilani Jahangir. She is in many ways a symbol of the values that the lawyers are fighting for. Pakistan is a notably patriarchal society, but Jahangir is its most visible and celebrated—as well as most vilified—human-rights lawyer. She has spent her professional life fighting for a secular civil society, challenging the mullahs and generals, and championing the rights of women at risk of “honor killing” and religious minorities accused of blasphemy. She has investigated alleged extrajudicial killings by the security forces, set up a shelter for vulnerable young women, and campaigned to end child labor. For Pakistan’s liberals, she is a symbol of freedom and defiance, comparable to Aung San Suu Kyi, in Burma.

“These protests really have touched a chord,” Jahangir shouted to me as the lawyers chanted around her. “There is so much pent-up anger. The country is beginning to stir.”

Five hundred yards from the lawyers, a group of heavily bearded men wearing checked Arab kaffiyehs and black turbans were engaged in their own protest. These were the supporters of a right-wing alliance of religious parties, the Muttehida Majlis-e-Amal, or M.M.A., which has become a significant force in Pakistani electoral politics. The alliance’s imposing patriarch, Liaqat Baloch, was standing on a jeep, exhorting his flag-waving supporters. “The friend of Bush is our enemy!” he roared. “The rulers should read the writing on the wall! Help give one last push to the falling wall! The only system that will come here is the system of the Prophet!”

The third group of protesters that day was not as conspicuous, but represented the greatest immediate threat to the government. Less than a mile from the Supreme Court, and not far from the headquarters of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or I.S.I., an angry crowd of students stood outside the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, a sprawling complex of prayer halls, classrooms, and dormitories. During the previous six months, the Lal Masjid had become the principal center of radical Islamist resistance to Musharraf’s rule. The Islamists in the Lal Masjid were not interested in elections. They wanted to take direct and immediate revolutionary action against a government that they regarded as an American puppet, an infidel imposition on a state that should by rights be ruled entirely by Islamic law.

Under the leadership of two brothers, Maulana Abdul Aziz and Abdul Rashid Ghazi, the Lal Masjid had also become a base for Taliban-style vigilante squads, headed by fearsome, stick-wielding, burka-clad young women, which had been pouring out of the mosque and its two madrassas, one for men, one for women. For months, these women had been calling for the establishment of full Sharia law and the closing down of all “dens of vice.” Jokes in English-language newspapers about “chicks with sticks” were quickly abandoned as the women began kidnapping suspected prostitutes, threatening video-store owners, and making bonfires of books, videocassettes, and DVDs that they regarded as un-Islamic. For months, the security forces did nothing to stop them, even after the women kidnapped policemen and ransacked government buildings, while the two brothers threatened holy war, and even issued a fatwa denouncing a female cabinet minister who had been photographed receiving a hug from a French skydiving instructor.

The Lal Masjid was also allegedly sheltering militants from some of Pakistan’s most dangerous jihadi groups, so when I went to visit, in May, I took the precaution of arriving with a friend who is the owner of Mr. Books, Islamabad’s best bookshop. He had known Abdul Rashid Ghazi since Ghazi was a left-wing student activist at Islamabad’s leading university, Quaid-i-Azam. We were politely led inside the mosque by three men, two with walkie-talkies and the third with a Kalashnikov, and invited to sit on a carpet. Ghazi, in John Lennon-style glasses and a knitted woollen hat, looked more like an old hippie than like any sort of Islamic firebrand. As we sipped tea, Ghazi, speaking eloquently in idiomatic English, described his campaign to get rid of Musharraf’s élitist and pro-American government and replace it with a more egalitarian Islamic regime.

According to Ghazi, the women in his madrassa reflected the true feelings of most Pakistanis, and particularly their resentment of the United States’ influence over Musharraf. “After 9/11, Musharraf made an abrupt change in our policy that was not supported by the people of Pakistan,” Ghazi said. “The attack on Afghanistan caused a lot of resentment, and in the name of the war on terror many innocent people were killed. In the name of ‘enlightened moderation’ vulgarity has been promoted—women running in marathons, brothels, pornography in CD shops. . . . All these things have been accumulating in the minds and in the hearts of the people of Pakistan. What we are voicing is the desires of the people. The system is the root of all the problems. . . . The rulers are living a life of luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and can’t even get basic necessities.”

Six weeks later, Ghazi was dead. In early July, Musharraf’s government, after months of apparently ignoring the regular provocations issued by the radicals in the mosque, suddenly laid siege to the Lal Masjid. Ten days into the siege, after negotiations failed, commandos from the Army’s Special Services Group, backed by hundreds of troops, stormed the complex. Abdul Rashid Ghazi was killed in the basement of the building on July 10th, allegedly in the crossfire between his men and the commandos. Officially, seventy-six militants and eleven soldiers were also killed; local TV stations and newspapers gave figures almost double that. Although Pakistan is an unusually turbulent society, nothing like this had ever happened in the capital before.