An avid member of a Pakistani university’s Anti-Sex League has sent an email to the entire university condemning a student for having pecked her boyfriend on the cheek, an act the emailer witnessed. 

The university has “promised to issue a code of conduct to ban PDAs.”   (Says in the article this stands for Personal Displays of Affection; but shouldn’t it be Public?)

… The brouhaha at LUMS, Pakistan’s premier educational institution, points to the drastically different ideological directions in which youths across the country are being pulled, says Asif Akthar, the Lahore-based blogger who first reported the story and is now a research assistant at the university.

“I think [the debate over the kiss] signifies a conflict between different cultural identities and shows there is something unresolved there,” he says.

LUMS’s leafy campus, located in a heavily fortified compound in the posh Defence neighborhood of Lahore, has stood out in Pakistan as a place where students of all stripes seem to coexist. Dressed in everything from burqas and shalwar kameez to tank tops and skinny jeans, and drawn mostly from the upper-middle class, the student body goes on to hold top jobs in finance, industry, law, and software engineering. Many continue their studies in the West.

“At LUMS, you’ll find people of all ideological persuasions studying and living together easily. There’s a deeply secular community. There are religious ascetics who believe in a more tolerant form of Islam. There are Deobandis [an ultraconservative branch of Islam], and there are Marxists,” says Ammar Rashid, a recent graduate and now research assistant in social sciences.

LUMS has also been more open about men and women studying together – in contrast with some government-run universities, such as the University of the Punjab also in Lahore, where “free-mixing” between the sexes is frowned upon and in some instances violently opposed by the Islami Jamiat Talaba, an Islamist student group…

… [Some students have] responded [to the kiss controversy] with sarcasm: “I have sinned. I do not believe that there is a God because I can not see, feel, hear or touch Him/Her… During the holy month, instead of attending Koranic recitals in the mosque, I was listening to the demonic sounds of Pink Floyd,” wrote one junior…

As regular readers know, UD follows with great interest growing tensions on and off university campuses involving secularity and non-secularity.

These tensions exist on religious as well as secular campuses; there will always be disputes about how overt the religious character of a religious campus should be (recall the controversy at Boston College, which recently put Catholic icons — mainly crucifixes — in every classroom). But they can be particularly difficult in hybrid places like LUMS, where there’s an effort to be culturally open in the context of a culture increasingly dominated by radicals who refuse compromise.