The struggle for Muslim hearts and minds has come to New York City, writes Graham Usher Out of the crush of New York's Union Square comes music: a thumping tabla, a voice that pitches and swoops over crashing handclaps and the roar of a crowd, mostly Pakistani but sprinkled with whoops and cries from Manhattan's ethnic pool. "Hello New York!" yells Abdallah Hussain Haroun. He is Pakistan's ambassador to the United Nations, gone native for the day in white cap and tunic. He has helped organise New York's first ever music festival of Sufism, a mystical strain of Islam indigenous to South Asia and far more widely followed than the austere Wahhabism proselytised by the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. It is to counter that "false" stereotype of a "Talibanised" Pakistan with the "moderate tolerant Islam practiced by the overwhelming majority of our people" that Hussain has called Sufism to New York. "I know a lot of you were very despondent about what happened in Times Square," he tells the crowd. "But we say that was not our Pakistan. THIS is our Pakistan." Times Square is a short taxi ride away. In May, a Pakistani citizen of the United States, Faisal Shahzad, parked a car there packed with propane and petrol. It failed to ignite. And he was captured on route to Dubai. But his face -- homegrown, zealous and lethal -- has become the dominant one of Pakistan for America's more rabid media. So has his message. In court he said he was a "Muslim soldier" who had been taught to wire a bomb by Taliban militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region. In a video -- clad in a black turban with bullets slung over his shoulder -- he said Times Square was "revenge" for those Muslims "martyred" by US forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and by US drone attacks in Pakistan. "The Muslim war has just started," he promised. In Union Square it is being fought on the terrain of culture, and Sufism is winning. Fakirs in flowing orange robes chant devotional songs drawn from Sufi shrines. A folk singer from Baluchistan spins like a dervish. And Abida Parveen -- perhaps Pakistan's best known Sufi songstress -- invokes God, Mohamed and Ali in a voice that soars from the serene to the ecstatic. She brings the house down: some women cry. But the effect on the non-Pakistan parts of the crowd is underwhelming. One man says he never associated Shahzad with all Pakistanis because "New York is fairly open-minded." Another shrugs his shoulders. "We get all phases of the Muslim community here, the reasonable and the crazies." A third -- a young Sikh -- says the festival is "a good start" but other steps will be necessary to "present the more peaceful side" of Islam. But perhaps the festival is not really meant for them, whatever the organisers hope. Instead, the music gives voice to the sentiment that Pakistanis -- far more than Americans -- have been the real victims of Taliban violence, especially those from the Shia, Christian and Ahmedi minorities. On 1 July a twin suicide attack on Lahore's largest Sufi shrine killed 42 people and wounded 175, the latest in a wave of assaults on Sufi holy sites deemed heretical by the Taliban. In such a climate the very practice of Sufi music is a kind of resistance, says Hameed Haroun, festival curator and brother to Abdallah. "It is a message to unite and stand up against intolerance and extremism that has engulfed portions of the Islamic world, to say that that is the religion of our enemies." The idea of enlisting Sufism in the struggle against the Taliban is not new. The Rand Corporation -- an influential US think-tank -- advocates it. Historian William Dalrymple sees the mass base of Sufi Islam in the subcontinent as perhaps the only bulwark against a creeping Talibanisation of Pakistan. And the US government gives discreet money to Sufi institutes as an alternative to the relentless growth of Wahhabi madrassas. Kamil Khan Mumtaz is unimpressed. He is a Pakistani architect from Lahore, lovingly restoring ancient Sufi mosques against the tide of the concrete-and-glass behemoths that have come in with Saudi money from the Arab Gulf. He is appalled by the violence in the name of Islam visited on his and other Pakistani cities. But he thinks the manipulation of Sufism for political ends is futile, and not just because of the anti-Americanism rife in Pakistan. It mistakes the political causes of radical Islam for religious ones, he says. "The Taliban is a rage against invaders and occupiers, out of a culture that believes it once ruled the world but is now enslaved. It has little to do with Islam, and nothing at all to do with Sufism." It's not a message you would hear from Union Square stage. The line there is "to be at peace with all of America". Downstage, however, there are discordant notes. A Pakistani gives out leaflets. They chart America's woeful involvement with his country, from backing military dictatorships to funding an anti-Soviet mujahideen (that eventually spawned the Taliban and Al-Qaeda) to drone attacks that are radicalising a new generation of Pakistan tribes people. The message is simple and obvious: the growth of jihadist Islam in Pakistan is related to US policy in the region. A Pakistani expatriate woman reads the leaflet, and tears it into a dozen pieces. It is a New York reflex. You would never get a reaction like that at a Sufi festival in Lahore or Peshawar or Islamabad.
