IN 2001, the Jama’at-i-Islami, the most influential Islamist political party in Bangladesh today, formed a strategic coalition with the ruling Bangladesh National Party (BNP), a religious nationalist party. Evidently, despite ideological differences in the two camps, the religious nationalists felt that they needed the Islamists as coalition partners in order to establish a dominant presence in national politics. In the process they also helped the growth of Islamist thinking in public life. Speaking of the differences between Arab nationalism and Islamism, Talal Asad has observed that ‘The Islamist project of regulating conduct in the world in accordance with "the principles of religion" (usul ud-din), and from the fact that the community to be constructed stands counter to many of the values of modern western life.’¹ 

In Bangladesh, while religious nationalists see both Islam as well as the idea of the nation as an integral part of their identity, yet unlike the political Islamists, they do not seek to impose an Islamic form of governance. In contrast, though political Islamists may participate in the nation state’s political process, they do not celebrate nationalism but merely acknowledge and work within the structure of the state to achieve their goals. In fact, all forms of Islamism pose serious challenges to the democratic forms of the nation state since political Islamists want to create an Islamic polity guided solely by usul ud-din.² 

The unspoken battle about the place of Islam in governance continues to plague Bangladeshi democracy. It is thus critical that instead of simply accepting or ignoring what Islamist parties propose, strategies which have failed to resolve the tension, we must make an effort to engage with the Islamist project by offering alternatives to their world-view.

The Jama’at-i-Islami’s re-entry into Bangladeshi public life began several years after the country gained independence. Since then other religious political parties too have risen to some prominence. Many of these political parties have been implicated in violence against not only minorities but also Muslims whose practices the Islamists deem unIslamic. Many Bangladeshi Islamists condemn the celebration of secular holidays as well as the existence of monuments associated with those holidays. In effect, the Islamists challenge secular practices.

Other well-known Islamist political parties or coalitions of parties include Harkat and Islamic Oikko Jote, which too have been implicated in the use ethnic and religious violence for political aims. Though membership in these organizations comprises only a fraction of the overall population, their aggressive tactics make them formidable foes of secularists and NGOs, many of whom have received death threats.³ Among the most widely publicized controversies were death threats against outspoken secularist Taslima Nasreen. Nasreen, a physician by training, wrote newspaper columns about problems women face as a result of fundamentalist beliefs and practices, and authored a novel, Lajja (Shame), on which Bangladesh’s Islamists heaped criticism. It hardly helped that despite local opposition, her neo-Orientalist writings were lauded in India and the West.

 

Political Islamists target any and all ‘un-Islamic’ activities, including those that take women outside the home. Journalist Jeremy Seabrook has accurately portrayed the tensions between Islamists and secularist-oriented NGOs, arguing that the secularists no longer effectively protect or represent the poor. Soon after Bangladesh’s independence, many NGOs began to spring up to perform the functions that government was incapable of fulfilling, serving the poor through rural development, micro-credit, and small business programmes.

According to Seabrook, ‘Micro-credit releases people from moneylenders, who enforce interest rates of 10 per cent per month. If people cannot pay, [the lenders] sequester the goods, houses, cattle or labour of the poor. Micro-credit disturbs traditional patterns of hierarchy and dependence. Rural elites, seeing their power diminished, are then ready to ally themselves with fundamentalists to restore their control over the poor. Indeed, this is a significant element in the rise of fundamentalism.’⁴ The elite and the Islamists create roadblocks that make it difficult for nongovernmental organizations to work with the poor, especially poor women. The effort to make women self-reliant and financially independent threatens traditional power dynamics.

 

The escalating violence at the hands of Islamists and their supporters against religious and ethnic minorities in Bangladesh has assumed alarming proportions. Each year, an increasing number of Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists flee Bangladesh for India, seeking refuge from the violence.⁵ The 2002 U.S. Committee for Refugees, drawing on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report, estimated that 200,000 Hindus and other religious minorities were displaced as a result of post-election violence, and that between 5000 to 20,000 Bangladeshi Hindus had sought asylum in India.⁶ Though all asylum seekers are not necessarily victims of religious violence, many are, and many more fear it. A publication released by Bangladesh’s minister of state for planning, A. Moyeen Khan, reveals as much. Khan notes that according to census data, Bangladesh’s Hindu population dropped from 18.5% of the country’s total in 1951 to 13.5% in 1961, to a low of 10.5% in 1991.

 

The willingness to employ violence as a means for controlling the public is not the only strategy these Islamists rely on. The Jama’at-i-Islami carries out all of its programmes with support from sources both within and outside Bangladesh, with significant funding coming from the Middle East. The Jama’at-i-Islami depends on the financial contributions of its members, who are expected to donate 5% of their monthly income to the organization. Members and supporters also give zakat and other contributions during Muslim festivals, and the organization accepts donations from around the world. Though exact figures are difficult to determine, funds funnelled from the Middle East to the Jama’at-i-Islami are constant and support its many activities.⁷ The Jama’at-i-Islami has established close ties with government officials and wealthy private citizens in the Gulf states and Iran. Moreover, as Rafiuddin Ahmed has noted, a great deal of financial support comes from Bangladeshis in the Gulf states, who have emigrated in search of paying jobs which are scarce at home but plentiful in the Gulf region.⁸ 

Since 2004, the political climate in Bangladesh has only become worse. Hostilities between the Awami League and the Bangladesh National Party have increased, further enhancing the ability of Islamist groups to pursue their agenda without repercussions. In 2004, Sheikh Hasina was the target of a bombing at the Awami League headquarters and in 2005 an unprecedented number of suicide bombings rocked the country. On 17 August 2005 there were 350 simultaneous bomb blasts throughout Bangladesh. The officially banned Islamist organization, Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh, claimed responsibility for the countrywide attacks. Despite the Jama’atul Mujahideen Bangladesh’s public acknowledgement of their role in the attacks, the government has been ineffective in stopping them and other extremist groups regardless of who is in power, be it the Awami League or the BNP with its Islamist coalition.

One basic roadblock to effective resolution of extremist violence has been the constant political bickering of the two dominant political parties. Both the BNP and AL are guilty of abusing democratic means to hamper governance. Hartals, student political parties, and boycotts of Parliament have in the past been important tools for promoting democracy in Bangladesh, but their excessive use has led to an utterly dysfunctional government. A sheer lack of will to move beyond a politics of vengeance to actually governing the country has provided the space for Islamist parties to thrive.

 

It is routinely suggested that the Awami League and the BNP must deal with the ‘menace’ of Islamist parties.⁹ But how are the BNP and Awami League to accomplish this objective without the apparent political will to govern effectively, since the Bangladeshi government seems to function more to serve its own interests than those of the people. It is only the NGOs that have in any substantial measure taken up the interest of the majority of the population. Without the NGOs, Bangladesh would have fallen into complete chaos long ago. Unless the Awami League and the BNP are prepared to eschew the politics of vengeance in order to subserve the public interest, the Islamist parties will continue with an agenda that embraces a narrow and intolerant understanding of Islamic governance. They will continue to use extrajudicial means to limit peoples’ freedom of religious practice without fear of retribution; destroy temples and shrines and persecute minorities, including Muslim minorities.

 

Islamists must be held accountable through serious political engagement. They must be compelled to present a viable political platform if they wish to participate in the democratic process. It is important to remember that the Islamists have gained political power thus far only as coalition partners of the BNP. The BNP, in turn, has never challenged the Islamists, blindly accepting them as coalition partners in order to gain power. Unfortunately, political parties like the BNP and Awami League, instead of insisting that Islamist parties embrace democratic values, have either assumed that political Islam cannot work with democracy or that they do not pose a threat to their own dominance in government.

The fact is that both western governments as also many secularists in the Muslim world have assumed that to combine Islam and democracy is not viable. Simply because Islam is brought into the public sphere does not negate the possibility of maintaining a democracy. Instead the nationalist parties must make the Islamist parties present reasonable goals that work within a democratic framework. If it is a theocratic state they wish to establish, then the Islamists should be excluded from participating as coalition partners. If they want to limit diverse expressions of Islam, then again the Islamists should not be considered worthy partners in democratic nation building. If they continue to present obstacles to women’s work outside the home, the Islamists should be denounced. One important lesson from micro-credit programmes is that women are more likely to use income for the welfare of their children than men. If women are forced out of the workforce, poverty levels will only worsen in an already impoverished nation.

 

The greatest fear from Islamist parties is that given an opportunity, they would institute Sharia which is feared not only by many in the West but also many in the Islamic world. This is no surprise given international awareness of rule under the Taliban in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Islamic world. The ideal of Sharia has been betrayed by groups such as the Taliban, exploiting it as a tool of oppression by which power may be gained and authority exerted over the majority. Despite many other examples of Islamic jurisprudence around the world, such articulations of Sharia have largely gone unchallenged. As a result, in public perception the only articulations of Sharia that exist are oppressive. Sharia has often been reduced to legislating on women’s modesty, confining them to the home and denying them employment, or providing limited protection to minority communities, if not sometimes targeting them for persecution.

Many contemporary Muslim scholars argue that such an interpretation of Sharia is misguided. Tariq Ramadan, for instance, explains that Sharia must first be undergirded by the fundamental Islamic principles that guide the faithful to action. Otherwise, its interpretations are likely to be contradictory. ‘There can be no Sharia without a corpus of fundamental principles that set, beyond the contingencies of time, a point of reference for faithfulness to the divine will. This corpus of principles, as we have seen is a fundamental given of the Islamic universe of reference, which asserts, in the midst of post-modernism, that all is not relative, that there does indeed exist a universal, for it is a God, an only God, who has revealed timeless principles, which, while not preventing reason from being active and creative, protect it from getting bogged down in the contradictions and incoherences of the absolute relativity of everything.’¹⁰ Sharia may be the way, a path to the divine but for the most part, there are signposts indicating the way. It is human intelligence guided by a will to understand the way of God that will illuminate that path.

 

The most fundamental path markers are the Five Pillars of Islam. However, because Sharia is revealed through human intelligence, the foundations for illuminating the Sharia are set forth in the usul al-fiqh laid out by early Muslim scholars. Ramadan suggests that the distinction between the timeless principles of Islam and contingent models, models that must be understood in their historical context, has been inadequately appreciated. ‘Faithfulness to principles cannot involve faithfulness to historical models because times change, societies and political and economic systems become more complex, and in every age it is in fact necessary to think of a model appropriate to each social and cultural reality.’¹¹ 

In the Muslim world, the critical obstacle to governance has been an inability to recognize timeless principles and how to apply them to each society with its unique problems and concerns. To know Sharia requires rational investigation to illuminate the principles of Islam and the intellect to apply them in different societies and cultures. Therefore, what works in one context may not be applicable in another. The way to faithfulness, Ramadan argues, rests on the Qur’an, sunna, and the conditions of a particular society.¹² 

 

In the case of Bangladesh, the people and their representatives in government must challenge outmoded and misguided assumptions about Sharia. They must demand that if the Islamist parties wish to be full partners in democracy – not merely use it as a means of usurping power – then they must take up the challenge of finding ways to apply Islam in the context of Bangladesh, with its particular problems and aspirations as a diverse nation. The Iranian scholar Abdulkarim Saroush declares, ‘A rule that is not just is not religious. Justice, in turn, aims to fulfil needs, attain rights, and eliminate discrimination and inequity.’¹³ If justice in a diverse nation is made a guiding principle, Bangladesh has a better chance of evolving its own brand of democracy, even if that includes more than a tinge of Islam. Instead of having to fear Islam, the citizens should rather fear an interpretation that is not guided by Islamic ideals of common good and justice for all.

 

* Sufia M. Uddin is the author of Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

Footnotes:

1. Talal Asad, ‘Religion, Nation-State, Secularism’, in Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehman (eds), Religion and Nation, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1999, p. 190.

2. Ibid.

3. Mumtaz Ahmad, ‘Islamic Fundamentalism in South Asia: The Jammat-i-Islami and the Tablighi Jamaat’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Fundamentalisms Observed, vol I of The Fundamentalism Project, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991, p. 502.

4. Jeremy Seabrook, Freedom Unfinished: Fundamentalism and Popular Resistance in Bangladesh Today, Zed Press, New York, 2001, p. 30.

5. ‘Unending Tragedy: Delhi Must Take up Minority Issue with Dhaka’, The Statesman, 16 November 2001.

6. See www.refugees.org/data/wrs/03/country_reports/SouthNCentralAsia.pdf (accessed 12 October 2009).

7. B.M. Monoar Kabir, ‘Islamic Fundamentalism in Bangladesh: Internal Variables and External Inputs’, in Rafiuddin Ahmed (ed), Religion, Nationalism, and Politics, pp. 140-146.

8. Rafiuddin Ahmed, ‘Redefining Muslim Identity in South Asia’, in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (eds), Accounting for Fundamentalisms: The Dynamic Character of Movements, vol. 4 of The Fundamentalism Project, p. 693.

9. Ali Riaz, ‘Bangladesh in 2005’, Asian Survey 46(1), January-February 2006, pp. 107-113.

10. Tariq Ramadan, Western Muslims and The Future Of Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, p. 32.

11. Ibid., 70.

12. Ibid., 72.

13. Abdul Karim Saroush, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 132.