Those were trumped-up charges, according to writer and advocacy worker Nasrin Alavi, the author of “We Are Iran,” a recent anthology of Iranian blogs. “When Arash was first arrested, I went through his archives and couldn’t initially find the inflammatory statements,” she said. In these cases, “they were just unlucky in that someone decided to make an example of them. Especially with Arash, who was being tried by a small-town judge who wanted to really make a name for himself as revolutionary. A lot of that goes on Iran. To work your way up the system there’s rivalry to show off your revolutionary credentials.”

Alavi, now based in London, wrote the book about bloggers to show the world an Iran beyond the familiar radical images created by the current regime and echoed by the Western media. “I wanted to show the changing consciousness of Iran and the conversations people were having behind closed doors,” she said.

The attack on bloggers is the Iranian regime’s latest crackdown on freedom of speech. In the last six years, more than 100 magazines and newspapers (including 41 dailies) have been shut down, and many journalists imprisoned. Those reformist papers had flourished after the 1997 election win of the relatively liberal president Muhammad Khatami. But as Khatami’s powers were curtailed by the hard-liner establishment, so were the newspapers that had prospered under his government.

Young Iranians, well educated and net savvy, have turned to the Internet to get news and information — and to discuss their society. A recent Harvard summit cited more than 700,000 Farsi blogs, mostly based in Iran, making Farsi the second-most-popular language in the entire blogosphere.

The government has now moved against Internet media. The BBC’s Farsi service, which provides national and international news, has been blocked, and according to Reporters Without Borders, the filtering of Web sites considered “non-Islamic” is on the increase.

But given the technology of blogging, the government can’t realistically silence every blogger in Iran — so it’s also logging on and trying to get in on the act. In February, Iran’s culture ministry held the “Revolutionary Bloggers Conference” to promote pro-regime blogs, such as that run by Saleh Meftah, a member of the Basij militia. In a recent post, Meftah boasted of the excitement he felt at attacking the Danish embassy in Tehran during the worldwide controversy over caricatures of the prophet Mohammed published in a Danish newspaper.

Yet, the posted replies show how the government’s plans for pro-regime blogs could backfire. “I cannot hide my hatred of you and your actions,” wrote one respondent. “It’s your bestial breed that give Westerners cause to insult our dear prophet and faith.”

Most blogs don’t just show how Iranians feel about critical issues like the cartoon controversy, nuclear weapons and the inflammatory Islamist rhetoric of hard-line President Mahmoud Amadinejad. They also give insight into the tension bubbling up in the ordinary hearts of Iran’s predominantly young population. (Seventy percent of Iranians are under the age of 30.)

Spooky, 22, at My Lucid Dreams, agonized recently over an on-off relationship: “Maybe he knows that I am a swinger type gal.” Rodman, a 24-year-old who authors Planet Rodmania, enjoyed the Hollywood film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and wonders whether Tehran will ever have a proper vehicle-pollution study.

Blogging in Iran took off in September 2001, when journalist Hossein Derakhshan posted a “how to blog” article in Farsi, which coincided with the regime’s newspaper crackdown. “It was unbelievable,” said Alavi, who was living in Iran at the time. “Journalists were being put behind bars and suddenly you could read things that you couldn’t get anywhere else.”

Alavi says the majority of young Iranian bloggers represent a new, nonviolent breed of activist. She believes that, having lived under theocracy, they are desperate for a genuinely accountable government. “Radical Islamic government has run its course. The revolution wasn’t to become Muslims — it was for economic growth and equality. That still hasn’t happened yet.”

Amadinejad was voted in as president last summer with just such an agenda but instead has fallen back onto anti-Western, Islamist rhetoric. He has called the Holocaust a “myth,” declared that Israel should be “wiped off the map,” and jump-started nuclear research in defiance of international regulations. On his watch, the Danish embassy was attacked by a mob, and a week later an Iranian paper launched a competition for cartoons ridiculing the Holocaust.

Even though Ahmadinejad promised to champion the little guy against Iran’s corrupt elite, in Tehran, state-backed thugs have been beating up bus drivers striking for better pay. “I detest him, his party and his ideas,” Tehran blogger “Mr. Behi” told Salon recently. “He is a mob kind of president and came to power with impractical slogans for the economy and radical ideas about politics.”

The 28-year-old tech worker was one of several bloggers Salon contacted by e-mail. Mr. Behi describes himself as secular in his thinking, but says he also adores the prophet Mohammed. “Democracy, as I believe in it, is freedom but also respect for others,” he said. “I detest the fact that some others burn the flag of countries because of their opposition to a group of citizens from those countries.”

He also put forward the argument that the anti-cartoon protests at the embassy were orchestrated by the government. “I can assure you that those who did this in Tehran were not regular people,” he said. Alavi agrees, saying, “There is no freedom of assembly in Iran. An attack like that is not a spontaneous process — it’s a foreign policy directive.”

The protests may have been staged, but there was still genuine anger over the cartoons. “Nina,” a 24-year-old university student and computer programmer in Tehran, was very unhappy at seeing the cartoons. “They were a lie,” she said. Reza, 31, said he found two of the cartoons “soaked in hatred. They put Muslim violence and terrorism squarely at the door of the Prophet Muhammad. A big historical lie. The publication of these cartoons was thus irresponsible and contemptible. So were the violent attacks on the missions.”

Tehran-based writer and blogger H. Utanazad told Salon: “Making fun of the deities and their assorted satraps is one of our favourite pastimes in Iran. Some of the best jokes are to be found in some of the more devout households. But in times of war people tend to lose their sense of humour — everywhere, all the time.”

Iran’s hard-liners have a legacy of shackling politics to religion, a legacy from which it’s tough to break free. “These slogans against Israel and U.S. started when the revolution happened 27 years ago,” said Mr. Behi. “Ahmadinejad is so stupid not learning the politics of today. I believe in the miseries Jews had in World War II, and I feel sorry for them. The bad thing is that the event has never been brought to the full attention of Iranian people. They are as biased about the world as the Western people are about the Middle East.”

“Denial of the killing of Jews is like denial of killing of hundreds of thousands of Iranians by chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war,” Mr. Behi said. “These days no one in the trial of Saddam talks about those victims. We have the same feelings towards that and we are also ignored.”

But young Iranians also appear to have absorbed the hard-line views of the president, even among the educated and tech-savvy Internet users. E. Haddadian Moghaddam, 32, an Iranian translator and journalist currently pursuing post-grad work in Sweden, sees merit in Ahmadinejad’s suggestion that the Jewish homeland be moved to Europe, America or elsewhere. “I see his view of moving the land of Israel somewhere outside the present land as a possible solution,” Moghaddam said. “As for his opinion [denying] the Holocaust, I would prefer to see it just as a personal opinion that is open to criticism.”

Nina also thinks the idea to move Israel is worth considering, adding, “In my opinion, President Ahmadinejad is right.”

Yasget, a 23-year-old student, argues that Iranian politics is less one-dimensional than many outsiders realize. He claims Ahmadinejad only spoke once about wiping Israel off the map. “Then he never spoke about it because someone told him: ‘Are you crazy? Do you want them to attack us?’”

If America or Israel were to attack Iran, the nuclear program would, of course, likely be both the pretext and the target. Many of the bloggers agree that Iran has the right to develop nuclear technology, believing the regime’s assertion that its primary use would be for generating energy. “Many young, aspiring scientists and researchers like to test the new horizons of sciences, namely atomic energy,” Moghaddam said. “Also, Israel enjoys atomic power and bombs without any international control.” Others point to a nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.

Iran may have massive reserves of oil and natural gas, but, Nina said, “Iran needs nuclear researches to provide a huge resource of energy to help reduce consuming oil.”

Mr. Behi calls the issue “scary” on his blog and disagrees with any nation having nuclear weapons. “Pakistan is a much more volatile country, where people themselves are much more conservative and Islamic radical than Iran,” he said, pointing out that although there were sanctions against Pakistan’s military nuclear program, these were relaxed when the United States needed Pakistan’s help in the Afghan war. That gives a clear message, he said, that “the no-nuke Middle East idea is negotiable” even if the Iranian government tries to build a nuclear weapon.

Utanazad said he believed that the ruling clergy were trying to do exactly that. “I’d like to see a concerted effort to reduce the already existing stockpiles and ultimately have them eliminated even in countries that already have them,” he said. “One more country with those weapons doesn’t make me feel any safer. And especially controlled by such brutally authoritarian regime as the Islamic Republic.”

The bloggers’ views of rising confrontation with the West cut in different and sometimes conflicting directions.

“Twenty seven years ago, we set up a revolution to end an American government in Iran,” said Nina, the student. “I do not really think Iranian people want to see them back with their new collection of weapons, marching on the streets. If a U.S. attack is coming to us, I will do everything to defend my homeland.”

Utanazad offered this view of America’s role in the world today: “Long term, this callous, thoughtless militarism in America is going to have to be looked square in the face and dealt with. This romanticism about violence is dangerous, both for the planet and for the health of the American Republic as well.”

“War kills and Iranian people are not America’s enemies,” said Mr. Behi, whose childhood memories of the Iran-Iraq war cause him to worry about an attack on his country today. “The opposition always get [blamed] that they are paving the way for foreign attack. Many of those who are opposing the current government will need to shut up as soon as the country comes under attack. That will be the biggest gift to Ahmadinejad — to prove that U.S. is the true enemy of Iranian people.”

The government is now trying to create an all-Iran intranet, to give it greater control over what Iranians do online and stamp out the kind of dissident opinions you’ve just been reading. With the crackdown intensifying, Alavi finds that bloggers have become more guarded. “I’m trying to write an afterward to the book and I’m having difficulty getting bloggers to allow me to quote them,” she said. “Even bloggers who gave permission for the inclusion of their blogs on the condition of total anonymity are now hesitant.” But the Iranian regime could be fighting a demographic tide that may one day overwhelm them. “Iran’s youthful majority will ultimately determine the future of their country,” Alavi said.

The irony is that being pro-American in Iran is rebellious, and the young now frame their dissent not with talk of jihad, but in terms that Americans would understand. Young Iranians love Hollywood, even if Western movies are officially banned. Yasget, who recently watched “Sin City,” “Crash” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” said, “I believe in a global culture, but I don’t want all the content of that culture to be from the West.”

“My feeling is more nuclear weapons bring more madness to the world,” Yasget added. “One of my favourite movies is ‘Dr Strangelove.’”

The curfew is part of the state of emergency declared by King Gyanendra on Nov. 26, three days after Maoist guerrillas broke a cease-fire and attacked army and police posts across Nepal.

We saw it was a soldier when Mrs. Devkota answered the door. She and her sister Neera went outside to talk with him. The soldier was upset and angry. There was a heated argument. The only words I understood were “emergency” and “Maobadi,” the Nepali word for Maoist.

Inside, Abhilok, 14, sat wrapped in a blanket, rocking back and forth, watching TV and refusing even to look outside.

The argument stopped. The women came inside and we all watched the movie again. The good guy smashed a fish tank into the face of the bad guy; it was the kind of up-close-and-personal violence common in Hindi movies.

Outside a gunshot split the night air.

For a moment no one spoke. Then there was another hushed discussion in Nepali, and finally the situation was explained. Abhilok, still staring straight ahead at the TV, had fetched a chowki, a wooden board used in chapatti making, from a neighbor’s house. Soldiers in the army base behind the Devkotas’ house thought he was carrying a bomb. Although they could have shot Abhilok on sight as a suspected Maobadi, instead they gave him the benefit of the doubt and came around to check out the situation, firing the pistol in fear and anger.

The phone rang. It was the army officer, apologizing for his bad temper.

It’s been a bad year for Nepal, indeed a bad decade. Things have not gone smoothly in the Himalayan kingdom since the country underwent the transition to multi-party democracy in 1990 after 30 years of autocratic rule by the monarchy. Ten governments in 10 years, frequent violent protests and rampant corruption have plagued Nepal, better known in the West as an unworldly Shangri-La for adventure tourists. Since 1996, Maoist guerrillas have fought an insurgency throughout the country; over 2,000 people have been killed.

Before the latest fighting, the Maobadi were a common sight in rural Nepal. Their policy of constant violence, kidnapping and intimidation had the police confined to the roads and major towns, leaving the Maobadi the effective government in 46 districts out of Nepal’s 75.

On June 1, Nepal was shaken to the core by the massacre of its royal family in their palace in Kathmandu. Much-loved King Birendra was gunned down along with his family by his son, Crown Prince Dipendra, who then committed suicide. The official explanation is an argument over Dipendra’s choice of bride, but few Nepalis believe this story, preferring a conspiracy theory involving Gyanendra, the present king. Pictures of the dead king are displayed in everywhere in Nepal. Gyanendra’s image appears nowhere.

For a time, conspiracy theorists speculated that the Maobadi had something to do with the royal killings. Although apparently uninvolved, the Maobadi have tried to gain political capital from the tragedy. They infiltrated street protests, and their leader, Comrade Prachanda (“Comrade Awesome” in English), tapped into the popular sentiment by sending the palace a tribute to the slain king, head of the very same monarchy he had vowed to overthrow.

Nepal calmed down after the turbulent summer. A cease-fire was agreed to and the Maobadi and the government started talking. But by early November the talks had broken down and the Maobadi retreated into the heavily forested Himalayan foothills and prepared for war.

Previously the Maobadi had only attacked the police force. The government, fearing a civil war, refused to send in the army. But in the Nov. 23 attacks the Maobadi targeted Royal Nepalese Army posts and the government decided it was time for soldiers to deal with the guerrillas.

According to the papers, the war is going well for the army, with over 250 rebels killed since the uprising began. But exact figures are impossible to come by, as the government claims the Maobadi remove the bodies of their fallen comrades from the battlefield.

The insurgency has come at a bad time economically. Tourism, a major foreign-currency earner, is down 17 percent in the wake of the royal family massacre. Although the Maobadi are strong in many popular tourist destinations, they have not attacked foreigners, unlike Peru’s Shining Path Maoists, and areas for tourism, trekking and mountaineering remain safe.

Gorahi, in the Dang district, about 220 miles west of the capital Kathmandu, was one of the towns attacked on that first night.

“This area is densely forested and hilly, making it ideal for the Maobadi’s hit-and-run style of warfare,” said Narayan Sharma, editor of the regional paper Naya Yogbudh. “Also the home minister is from Dang.”

In an ambitious and carefully coordinated attack, the Maobadi broke into an armory, stole a truckload of weapons and ammunition, looted $120,000 from two banks and killed 14 soldiers, 23 policemen and four civilians. Now the small market town is quiet but tense. Pickup trucks full of soldiers are parked in the bazaar and an armored car patrols the streets. Strangers are eyed warily.

Jhak Bahadur was one of the few people in Gorahi willing to talk, and he only in private.

“We don’t talk about politics in the bazaar these days. Spies from either side might overhear us.”

He stopped me from writing down the names of Maoist leaders, saying there would be trouble for me if the army saw it. At the frequent checkpoints, soldiers take particular care with books and papers, looking for Maoist texts or military handbooks.

Bahadur served with the British army’s elite Gurkha regiment for 15 years and has been asked to help the Nepalese army fight the rebels. He refused, afraid of reprisals: “Most of us ex-servicemen won’t fight the Maobadi. As a private citizen, you’re safe unless you’re caught in the middle of a fight. But if we help, we’ll become targets for the Maobadi for many years afterwards.”

He said both sides in this civil war are badly equipped. “The army are short of ammunition and rations. They don’t have enough rounds to do proper weapons training. They’re not fully trained. The Maobadi have improvised bombs and guns, homemade weapons, but they train very hard. Villagers from remote areas have seen them doing a lot of exercises. And they’re very determined.”

Tulsipur, where the incident with the trigger-happy soldier took place, is the next town after Gorahi and comes at the end of the paved road. Communism is popular in this area, as it is throughout most of rural Nepal. On one wall a shopkeeper had posters of the Hindu gods, on the other pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. He didn’t see a contradiction: “Hinduism is religion, communism is politics.”

The various communist parties of Nepal (they’ve split and re-split like amoebae) have always done well in elections and were even in power for a time in 1994.

From Tulsipur I took a bus northward to Salyan, one of the districts most affected by the insurgency. A blue head with long dreadlocks was painted on the bus door — Lord Shiva, Hindu god of creation and destruction. Shiva’s destructive side had clearly been hard at work on the bus. The tires were balding, holes peppered the rusting bodywork and the exhaust coughed up foul black smoke. The driver needed two assistants, one to hold the gearshift in place and one to frantically pump a mysterious fourth pedal when the going got tough.

The bus, designed to carry 40 passengers, took 60. Behind me, an old lady wrapped herself in a shawl and laid her head on her son’s lap. Her eyes were childlike and frightened, her cheeks horribly sunken. She pulled the shawl over her head, trying to get away from it all. The son held her hand and stared forlornly into the middle distance. Only later, away from the dust, the pressing bodies and the bumping, did I realize that the old lady was dying.

She probably wasn’t even old. The life expectancy in Nepal is 57, the per capita income $220 per year. Forty-two percent of Nepalis live in poverty and 60 percent are illiterate.

Transport in most of Nepal is bad. Looking back from a high pass, the road to Salyan appeared as a winding yellow incision in the green hills; up close it was a rutted track that did its best to overturn the bus. For three months during the monsoon it turns to mud and the bus service stops. Occasionally, the bus halted and people got off to take tracks that led to the remotest jungle villages. This is what J.B. Oli did when he passed this way.

It was hard to believe J.B., with his neatly pressed shirt and slacks, his smooth skin and clipped Indian accent, came from the Salyan district. He’d escaped the “hilly station” at 15, fed up with the two-hour walk each way to school. So he walked five hours to this road, caught a bus to Tulsipur and traveled for a couple of days to his brother’s place in New Delhi. Working as a delivery boy and live-in servant, he put himself through school, learned English and got a job with a nongovernmental organization. After 11 years in Delhi he was a city boy (“I find all this up-and-down walking most unpleasant”) but he still made the annual trip to the village to see his father.

A few hours into the walk from road to village he’d been surrounded by men in combat fatigues, members of the estimated 5,000- to 10,000-strong Maobadi army.

“They hadn’t seen me before and wanted to know who I was, why I was there. They kept me for two or three hours. They were very calm and polite, they didn’t lay a finger on me.”

“I had to pay them a few hundred rupees [about $3]. Everyone does — shopkeepers, farmers, landlords. They don’t call it tax, they call it ‘yogadan’ — a contribution. I don’t mind. You have to pay tax to the government and in the hilly stations the Maobadi are the government.”

Everyone had stories of paying their “contribution” in cash, food or medicines. But fewer knew of the Maoists doing anything other than political work. Bahadur, the Gurkha, said he had heard of Maobadi working in the fields at harvest time.

Newspaper editor Narayan Sharma said: “The Maoists spend their money on their army. They’ve made some small roads and electricity projects in remote regions, but it’s a very, very small amount.”

But now that the army has been mobilized against them, the Maoists have melted away into the forests, becoming a guerrilla force on the move. It’s something they have long trained for, said J.B., whose village teacher had joined up.

“They don’t take the drunkards and the loafers. They’re very careful about who they select; they put them through a three-month training program. The recruits go through the hot, the cold; go without food, do long marches.”

The army is on high alert in Salyan district. At the area’s major checkpoint, soldiers ordered everyone except the dying crone to get off the bus and did a thorough inspection of every bag and case. They were calm and friendly, but wary. A truck was also being searched, each sack of grain skewered in the search for hidden weapons. I looked up at the hills behind and imagined little bands of guerrillas marching through the jungle with their looted weapons slung over their shoulders, or leading mule trains loaded down with ammunition and bank notes.

In Sitalpati, a one-tractor Salyan town, I met Uttam Hamal, a local radio reporter full of suggestions for people I could meet. Next morning Uttam’s wife told me he had gone to another village. No one told me which one. No one would take me there. The police told me to stay in Sitalpati – “For your own protection.” It must have been too close to Maobadi territory.

The curfew in Sitalpati was even earlier than in Tulsipur — 6 p.m. The electricity was turned off at 7 p.m. and the town plunged into a medieval darkness. Every night there was shooting, and one night there was an explosion. Mohan Pandy, the police chief, made light of it: “It’s just to scare the security personnel. I believe in fate. Life is like a film, we are just the actors and God is the director.”

God had a nasty surprise in store for Mr. Pandy and his colleagues. The Maoists attacked the local telecom station, and two soldiers and 11 Maobadi were killed in a five-hour gun battle. The armored car rushing up from Tulsipur was ambushed, blocking the way for further reinforcements.

Nepal has no air force and the army has only a few outdated helicopters. Ground forces alone are not enough in the steep, isolated valleys where much of this war is fought. India has given Nepal two helicopters — New Delhi has communist problems of its own in the border regions and fears a cross-border alliance of leftist groups. The government has announced it is spending $70 million on weapons over the next five years, an enormous burden for this very poor country.

“The money that is being spent on weapons could be spent on schools, hospitals and roads, things we really need,” said Dinesh Khadka, a Kathmandu shopkeeper. Without more of these essential services, there is a real risk that more Nepalis will look to the Maobadi as their saviors.

The conflict is not likely to attract much attention in Washington, London or even Beijing. Although the Maobadi believe in worldwide revolution, they are about 30 years behind the times and pose little real threat to the rest of the world. Devoutly Hindu Nepal is an unlikely hideout for Islamic terrorists. So the stage is set for another intermittent conflict ignored by the West.

Here in Pakistan, Sufism is part of the culture. Anti-mullah, anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, Sufis, who prefer to call themselves “we friends,” have no hierarchy, no organization and no set text; instead they search for direct communion with God through poetry, music and dance. Much Sufi teaching is done by sharing fables and jokes, such as “The Subtleties of Mullah Nasruddin,” a classic Middle Eastern collection of extended haikus about a holy fool’s misadventures.

Spread out across Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Sufis aim to be “in the world, but not of it.” Sufis are different from Western mystics; rather than retreating into contemplation, they tend to combine their spiritual search with daily chores, work and family obligations. Many hold high office; Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani, organizer of a recent meeting of Afghan exiles in Peshawar, also heads one of the main Afghan Sufi orders.

The name sufi comes from the Arabic word for wool, a reference to the coarse woolen clothes worn by the wandering holy men who brought Islam to the subcontinent from Iran and Central Asia. My introduction to Sufism came here in Lahore, at the shrine of Baba Shah Jaman, where Thursday night has been Sufi night for the last 357 years.

The shrine lies in Icchra, Lahore’s oldest quarter, which was founded in mythological times by the Hindu god Ram. It was a short ride in a tonga — a horse-drawn carriage — through the damp night air from the city center to a world quite removed from both Western neon signs and the screeching mullahs.

The lane leading to Baba Shah Jaman’s shrine was lined with wild-eyed old men meditating behind begging bowls. In front of the large, two-story building that houses the shrine, men parked their motorbikes in neat rows or clambered out of rickshaws to join the milling crowds. Their faces were illuminated by the bare bulbs of the stalls where samosas, lentil patties and religious knickknacks are sold. Vendors walked through the crush of people with round baskets of candy on their heads.

“Cigarette, smoking, smoking, cigarette!” shouted a man whose teeth were stained scarlet from chewing betel nut. In the background was the sound of drums and enthusiastic shouting. It felt very much like arriving at an outdoor rave or festival.

I climbed the steps leading up to the shrine, left my sandals with the attendant and stepped into a marble-tiled courtyard full of men who stood praying. In one corner was the mausoleum, a square building with a dome and a queue of supplicants at the door. I joined the line, feeling a little out of place. Inside, the mausoleum was white and bright, the walls glittering with hundreds of tiny mirrors and adorned with curling Quranic inscriptions. The air smelled of rosewater from the petals scattered over the grave. Subdued praying was the only sound, as dreamy men stood with their hands cupped, or prostrated themselves and kissed the saint’s grave. It was a room of concentrated holiness.

Next to the serene courtyard was a graveyard, which was, unexpectedly, more lively. I was sucked into the crowd of pressing bodies that were pushing and shoving, not letting one pause for even a moment.

Men were sitting everywhere, sprawling onto and over the graves, with no women in sight. Suddenly, I noticed that almost every pair of hands was busy rolling a joint or even two or three at once, emptying the tobacco into the palm, burning lumps of hashish and packing the resulting mixture up into the cigarette. It was an egalitarian crowd puffing away in the dark: unwashed rickshaw drivers, businessmen in Western shirts, trendy young toughs, dreadlocked holy men in green turbans.

There was a warm-up drummer entertaining the crowd, but the main event at these Thursday night gatherings is the drummer Pappu Sain. A great big brown Hell’s Angel of a man with a beard and slicked-back hair who wields a dhol (drum) the size of a barrel, Pappu and his cousin Joora Sain have played at all the major Sufi festivals and have ventured as far abroad as Germany.

Mahmood, a 24-year-old law student with a fine bouffant hairdo, was one of the hundreds sitting patiently in a ground-floor courtyard waiting to hear the local hero play.

“This music you will hear is very special music, very spiritual. It is our obligation to Allah to listen to this music. We forget ourselves and only know God,” he said.

I asked him if he was a Sunni or Shiite Muslim — usually a big issue in Pakistan’s sectarian and divided society.

“I am Muslim. I am Sunni and Shias and Wahabbi. Here we are just Muslim,” he replied.

What did he think of the religious parties that organize the demonstrations?

“I’m liking them a little but they are,” he said, stopping to make a sign of narrowness with his hands, “too aggressive.”

What about the Taliban?

“The Taliban are upright, honest men. They are not corrupt, they do not steal. But they don’t like music.”

I should say so.

But do you think it’s OK to like music? He looked shocked at such a question.

“I am a modern Muslim!”

A man with seven joints between his fingers thrust his hand toward us. Mahmood leaned forward, put his lips onto the man’s fist, and all seven ends glowed bright orange. Exhaling the thick smoke, he made a few things clear to me: “Hashish is totally banned in our religion. It is like sharab — wine. But it helps us to concentrate on the music. It is a train station, the start of our spiritual journey.”

Sufism has long been associated with the use of hashish. Pakistani author Aga Saleem says Sufi tolerance toward mind-altering substances can likely be attributed to Islam coming into contact with India and also the philosophy found in far-flung Greek colonies in Iran and Afghanistan:

The Greeks worshipped Dionysus and sought ecstasy in wine. They thought of this as a means of liberation.

Similar traditions exist in Hinduism and this influenced Islamic mysticism. Since wine is strictly forbidden in Islam, the Islamic mystics prefer hashish and bhang (hemp).

The warm-up drummers finished and a space was cleared in the courtyard for Pappu Sain and his crew of dancers. Pappu and Joora started to beat out complex rhythms between them, each eyeing the other up suspiciously as the music stopped and started.

Mahmood said: “They are attacking each other in beats.” Through their music, they were also chasing each other through the forest, dipping their feet in an icy Himalayan stream, cheering each other up as they trudged across the deserts of Sindh. They were like brothers, the best of friends; they fell out, then made up again.

In the crowd, heads started to shake and bodies to rock. Each time the drumming reached a crescendo everyone started shouting, howling, yelping a guttural “Ay, ay, ay!” I felt tremors run from the pit of my stomach and took a sharp breath.

“This is catharsis,” said Mahmood.

“Mast qalandar!” shouted a man in the crowd. Five hundred others took up the chant.

“Mast qalandar mast! Mast qalandar mast!”

Mahmood told me that “mast qalandar” means “we have forgotten ourselves and are with Allah.” Pappu Sain began to whirl round and around, eyes closed, keeping perfect time as he scattered the crowd with his circlings.

“He is now mast — completely forgetting himself,” said Mahmood. “You could touch him and he wouldn’t notice. Pappu Sain has supernatural strength to dance with such a big drum. No other man could do it.”

The dancers around Pappu were also men possessed. A thickset, pale man who looked like a pub landlord shook his head from side to side so fast his features blurred. An old man blew on a goat’s horn, making a sound like a didgeridoo. Two teenage boys in shiny red dresses danced a sweaty, jerky, provocative dance, sweat gleaming on their flushed cheeks.

The drummers and dancers were individual planets, moving in their own orbits like pieces of a medieval clockwork model of the solar system. These people were night people, I thought, the kinds of misfits I’d seen at raves in Britain, but here they weren’t outcasts or losers, they were gifted. Then Mahmood pointed out a middle-aged, bearded dancer whose every limb jerked spasmodically.

“He is professor of English at Punjab University,” he said, “but tonight he is Sufi.”

The Friday protests were only the latest move in an ongoing chess game between Musharraf and the Islamicists. The general’s first move had been to eliminate the threat of dissent within the army by forcing out senior officers with Taliban sympathies, including Lt. Gen. Mahmood Ahmad, head of the ISI, Pakistan’s powerful secret service. The ISI was instrumental in backing and arming the Taliban during the 1990s, and Mahmood was considered one of the most significant threats to Musharraf from within his own ranks.

Pakistan had already seen a week of unrest before the crucial holy day Friday. The most violent of the earlier protests were in and around the southern border city of Quetta. On Monday, the police lost control of the city center, shops were looted and cinemas destroyed; and on Tuesday, three people were killed by the security forces. In Peshawar, police fired tear gas at a mob, and Karachi also saw violent clashes between police and protesters.

Nonetheless, these protests were muted considering the vehemence of the Islamic groups’ rhetoric prior to the attacks on Afghanistan — calls for jihad against countries helping America, and declarations by tribal leaders in the area along the Afghan border that their small private armies would willingly fight the government.

At an emergency government meeting on Thursday, Musharraf warned protesters that any violence would call forth a harsh government response and Afghan refugees found taking part in demonstrations would be deported. He angered hard-line mullahs by declaring that mosques should remain places of worship, not centers of “disruptive activities.” One hundred radical clerics had already been placed under house arrest. The detained leaders include figures such as Sami ul-Haq, who runs the large Haqqania madrassah (Islamic school) close to Peshawar where many senior Taliban figures were educated. The largest madrassahs were also placed under army guard.

Friday morning, the security services were out in force on the streets of all major cities. In Peshawar, traditionally a hotbed of religious extremism and widely expected to see violence, 800 police and a 1,200-strong army battalion were deployed. Machine-gun emplacements and armored cars were placed at strategic junctions. Trucks full of soldiers drove slowly through the town center for days beforehand.

The protesters were allowed to take a well-defined route from a central mosque to a large square. Side streets were blocked off with rolls of barbed wire, behind which stood a row of riot police and then a row of soldiers. Other soldiers had taken up positions on rooftops, and military planes and helicopters circled overhead. Most shopkeepers had rolled down their shutters; many joined the streams of men and boys who were heading towards Namak Mandi, the market street where the march began.

The Namak Mandi mosque was overflowing and loudspeakers broadcast the mullah’s exhortations and the crowd’s enthusiastic response out into the street.

“Musharraf you are a refugee from India, you are not a Muslim,” shouted a spokesman for Muslim radicals Jaish-e-Mohammad, referring to the Musharraf family’s flight from India to Pakistan in the Partition of 1947.

Most people on the streets expected to see violence. Rumors swept the crowd that militants were carrying hand grenades to throw at the police and Western journalists. Everyone knew that the police were ready to fire should the protests turn sour and that machine guns, crowds and tight, tiny streets could be a disastrous combination.

Many of the young men carried sticks, among them Saeed Shar Pavuki, a 19-year-old Pakistani with only his eyes showing through the scarf wrapped across his face: “We want a peaceful march,” said Pavuki. “But we have to defend ourselves in case the police attack us like they did the last time. I’m wearing the scarf in case of tear gas. Also it is what a mujahedin wears.”

Just after midday, around 10,000 protesters marched out from the mosque, waving flags and chanting the slogans that have become de rigueur in the last few weeks: “Long live Islam! Long live the Taliban! Death to Bush! Musharraf is a dog!” After listening to a few more impassioned speeches they burned the usual effigy of President Bush, as well as a Tony Blair and a Gen. Musharraf for good measure. When the excitement of the burning had ebbed, the mullah asked everyone to leave peacefully: “Go home, love Allah and your wife.”

So everybody went home. The young men who had declared their willingness to die for Islam and their Muslim brothers in Afghanistan saw the firepower of the government’s security forces and decided that jihad could wait for another day. They had vowed to fight the American aggressors and all those who supported them — including, presumably, the Pakistani military — but went for lunch instead.

Things were a little more serious in Karachi, where a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet was set alight and a grenade was thrown at a police van. Real as the violence was, it is not so out of the ordinary in Karachi, where many longstanding ethnic and sectarian hatreds often boil over.

Quetta, which had seem the most unrest earlier in the week, remained fairly calm, with 15,000 people gathering in a cricket stadium to chant slogans and burn effigies before dispersing quietly, as in Peshawar. Humayoun Jogzai, Quetta’s deputy police chief, was proud that for today at least his city remained calm: “If they love holy war so much, let them go to Afghanistan and fight. We don’t need jihad here.”

Despite earlier setbacks in Quetta, Musharraf has shown that he can control the streets and face down the Islamic parties. If the attacks on Afghanistan are short-lived, as Musharraf has publicly requested, then he may continue to reduce the power and prestige of the religious right while reaping the economic benefits of his American alliance.

However, many Pakistanis who already see the American campaign as a war against Islam, not terrorism, do nothing because they feel they have no choice in the face of American power. If they see weeks or even months of Afghan civilian casualties, then anger at America will grow, and the religious parties’ message will become increasingly attractive — possibly to some army officers as well. Musharraf could face more difficult Fridays.

Assadullah is apparently one of just a few casualties to make it over to the Pakistan side, and to Hayathabad hospital, though reports of civilian injuries dominated the day’s news from the region. Four workers at a United Nations-funded mine-clearing operation just east of Kabul were killed, according to the U.N., the first independent confirmation of civilian deaths inside Afghanistan. Taliban representatives were claiming that civilian deaths from the first day of bombings ranged from 8 to 20.

According to Assadullah, the explosion ripped off his left foot and two fingers on his left hand. His right knee and foot were also badly wounded. He bit his lower lip as he described waking up in Jalalabad hospital on Monday. “In the morning I felt extremely lonely and scared. There were no doctors or nurses in the hospital. I felt totally alone.”

By Monday afternoon his family had found a taxi willing to take Assadullah to the border, where, he said, his father had to plead with soldiers to let them enter Pakistan. Finally, Assadullah and his father were allowed through and made it to the hospital in Hayathabad, 35 miles from the border.

“My father is here with me but my mother and sisters are still in Afghanistan,” he said. “I lay here and worry about them.”

Hayathabad hospital is a decrepit and depressing place. Tonight the electricity was down, despite the fact that just half a mile away the neon signs were flashing outside the burger joints and boutiques frequented by Peshawar’s middle classes. Some wards were lit with candles; in other wards — like Assadullah’s — men lay in the dark as relatives fanned them with newspapers. There was little medical equipment and few doctors or nurses attended to the patients.

In the emergency ward, eight policemen surrounded a man with blood-caked bandages on his head and patches of dried blood on his face.Heavy chains shackled him onto the hospital trolley.

“Islam zinderbad! America murtzabad!” — long live Islam, death to America — he cried, thrashing his head from side to side.

The policemen said that the man had been found wandering Peshawar carrying a hand grenade. He escaped once, but the police recaptured him and beat him with their batons.

“Then we put the grenade in his mouth and asked him if we could pull out the pin,” said one of the policemen.

In another stuffy hospital ward Mohammad Raza, 35, lay on his back with his shirt open, panting heavily and staring at the ceiling. His cousin, who had brought him to Pakistan on Monday, said that Raza had been getting out of his car at his farm near Jalalabad airport on the first night of the attacks when a bomb landed nearby. Some kind of debris or shrapnel had hit him in the neck.

“Now he is a full paraplegic, paralyzed from the neck down,” his cousin said. “There’s no chance of him ever walking or using his hands again. He doesn’t want to speak to you himself because he is afraid he is dying.”

Israralik Khan, a hospital dispensing chemist, said: “We don’t know if more people will come, but we are prepared.”