Mohmand’s residents are highly religious and conservative, but the agency nevertheless is considered to be more integrated into mainstream Pakistani society and culture than most other areas in the FATA and the NWFP.[iv] Mohmand is predominantly populated by nonviolent Deobandis, a Sunni belief tradition that advocates a conservative understanding and practice of Islam. However, since the 1970s when large numbers of Mohmand residents went to work in Gulf and Arab countries, the number of people in the agency who subscribe to the Salafi ideology has increased rapidly. Many Mohmand residents now support the implementation of sharia, although they lack consensus on what sharia specifically would mean in their society.[v] Young people in Mohmand live in a society with a very strict moral code that nonetheless features a variety of behavior considered “deviant.” The dichotomy seems to have brought many of Mohmand’s young men, “under the sway of new, foreign Islamic ideologies like Salafism, the ideology of al-Qaeda.”[vi] This is happening even though the people of Mohmand traditionally have preferred Tableeghi Jamaat, a conservative but nonviolentIslamic missionary movement, to militant groups. 
 

Like other tribal areas of Pakistan, Mohmand was affected by the 1980s Soviet-Afghan war, when hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees burdened its fragile economy and social structure. However, unlike some other tribal areas, few militant recruiting and training camps for Afghan mujahideen and other international jihadists were established in the agency. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, indigenous militant groups such as the Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Muhammadi (TNSM) were established in the northern FATA and the neighboring Malakand Division of the North-West Frontier Province. Although these movements certainly affected Mohmand, they had relatively little organized infrastructure within its borders.

 

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