On July 10, 2007, Pakistani soldiers stormed the Red Mosque complex of Islamabad in an assault that killed some two hundred people, thus ending months of aggressive and well-publicized provocations by the students and teachers of its men’s and women’s seminaries. Instead of issuing the Pakistani state a challenge, however, the assorted kidnappings and armed incursions carried out by residents of the Red Mosque, not to mention the threat of suicide bombings, had presented it with a symbolic confrontation in the media.
