DESECULARIZATION IN BANGLADESH: Deracinating the Fundamentalists Resurgence
Posted: Saturday, January 27, 2007
by Hasan Shafie
The emergence of radical fundamentalism as a major social movement, across a wide spectrum of countries including Bangladesh, is a great surprise to both theologians and to social scientists. The eminent sociologist of religion Peter Berger observes that the ‘world today, with some exceptions … is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever’. Our recent experience of worldwide religious terrorism suggests that the world is becoming increasingly de-secularized, increasingly religious, and increasingly fundamentalist. We are even convinced that the world continues to be religious as ever although in some highly disguised ways. According to the prevalent scholarly views today, this religious upsurge, often crystallized into violent fundamentalism and prone to degenerate into militant-coercive fundamentalism, is a direct counter-reaction to the processes of accelerated modernization– the culture of the despiritualization and economical globalization.
I, however in this essay, would consider radical fundamentalism as the joint product of both: first, uncontrolled globalized capitalism, which made fundamentalism exist in the objectified formal state and second, culture specific acceptability, resistibility and sensitivity generating varied degrees of driving force, which only previously existed in a recessive or implicit form camouflaged under cultural guise. Hence, I would, therefore, analyze the root causes of violent fundamentalism, from macro political-economic perspective and try to develop a psychoanalytic reasoning of how people, having different cultural and religious orientation, receive and perceive these pervasive techno-capitalist processes and differentially respond to such processes. The central explanatory dilemma in understanding the causations of fundamentalism, or in other words, the point of schism in much of today’s geopolitical discourse, suggests deep divisions concerning the primacy of economic values versus cultural values, the pre-eminence of outside versus inside forces, of trauma versus drives, and of experience versus innate disposition. I address these polarities with equal dignity assuming the complementarity between this duality of motivation and between these two sets of causative factors.
The expression of religious fundamentalism differs in relation to different cultural and religious traditions, although the underpinning of fundamentalism is essentially of similar nature. I make no distinctions of fundamentalism between Islam, Judaism, Christianity and other religions, for the purpose of the present essay, but I will bring about significant illustrations on the aspects of Islamic upsurge. Besides being its serious political ramifications both nationally as well as internationally, but in the specific context of Bangladesh, radical Islam significantly yielded on the political unrest and developed a politico religious space of sponsoring brutal violence. The root causes of today’s conflicts in Bangladesh simultaneously anchor in economy, ideology, and culture, and therefore, I suggest that the Islamic upsurge in Bangladesh is not only revolutionary but also evolutionary. The coercive and violent Islamic fundamentalism has gradually developed in Bangladesh. We have started experiencing the consequences and realizing the hysterical power of religious ideologies and emphatic religious commitmentsin evoking and setting latent fantasies in motion into everyday paranoia. In this short essay, I depart from analyzing the interplay of socio-cultural processes and the certain state of mind that leads to fundamentalism, and lately, I ground in the conceptual reasoning to reflect on the present and future directions of politico-religious movements in Bangladesh.
- PART ONE -
Culture, Ideoscape and Globalized Economy:
Roots and Routes of Fundamentalism
The effects of new world system have globalized economy and risks as well as decentralized them down to local communities, while opportunities and privileges have been centralized into a few centers. The poor communities, their local market systems, and emerging national economies have been threatened and blocked by the hegemonic market rules unleashed by the expanding power of transnational organizations like IMF and WTO thereby generating detrimental processes impairing domestic resource generation and mobilization, and resulting fiscal crises and poverty. Moreover, role and function of the United Nations as a legitimate but weak authority over international community has also significant causal connection to conflict and tension between ‘justice and power’, because, according to Jürgen Habermas, the weakness of the UN has strengthened the power of the nation-states in deploying military power for pursuing their own interests of techno-capitalist expansion.
The outrageous and recurrent failure of the UN to preserve international harmony and peace, according to Jürgen Habermas, through decisively enforcing cosmopolitan state of law against state sponsored genocides, massacres, and terror has invalidated UN’s normative authority. He suggests that terrorism is a traumatic effect of modernization, and accuses the vital material interests of the West, in particular America, as the root cause of this problem. Considering Islamic fundamentalism as a product of defensive reaction and strive against the fear of a violent uprooting of traditional ways of life, Habermas emphasizes that ‘without the political taming of an unbounded capitalism, the devastating stratification of world society will remain intractable’. The conditions generated for their ‘provocative and trivializing irresistibility of a leveling consumerist culture’ are conducive to widening the gap between the rich and the poor, and eventually fueling conflicts.
The ideological representations of rootedness and collective sense of belongingness, encompassed with the larger world politico-economic transformations, is a significant source radiating motivational energy, which may be mobilized to form destructive power. Conflict resolution requires the democratic power of consensus rather than the power of violence and fear. Habermas views the risk of overreaction by the U.S. and others as leading paradoxically and tragically to the result that ‘global terrorism succeeds in the supremely political goal of de-legitimizing the authority of the state’. He insists that the central achievement of the order after World War II should have been preserved by rejecting the preemptive strikes regardless of the imminence or severity of a threat. Because, any endeavor to bring everything under control, in the guise of professed civilizing missions of this superpower, would accelerate the formation of radical fundamentalism and conflicts.
The war on terrorism, Jacques Derrida suggests, regenerates a self-defeating tenor and this is inherently self-destructive since the implacable law of aggression ‘has itself given the weapons of its destruction to the terrorists’. He goes on to say that ‘our defenses and all forms of the war on terrorism work to regenerate the causes of the evil they claim to eradicate’ and lead to ‘the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism’. Terrorism is viewed as a symptom of a traumatic element intrinsic to modern experience, whose focus is always on the future, somewhat pathologically understood as promise, hope, and self-affirmation. Contrasting to the essence of Enlightenment in Europe concerning to ‘the authority of religious doctrine over the political’, Derrida asserts that, it is precisely religious doctrine that rules both American democracy and the Muslim world. The principles and the predominant reality of American political culture are in fact governed by religious doctrines not by European secularism, says Derrida. Thus the ‘war on terrorism’ pits ‘two groups with a strong religious identification’ against each other. Interestingly the present confrontation is actually between two political theologies, issuing out of the same stock or common soil of what he says ‘Abrahamic’ revelation’.
The starting point, in this line of reasoning, for many intellectual contributions is trauma, however. The central underlying dynamics of the perpetrators, religiously motivated terrorists, remains with their phobic avoidance of social and political counter-transference. But this Marxist credo, however, of poverty as the root cause of violence seems to be dubious and inadequate, since terrorism, as Jessica Stern suggests, correlates with wealth and education positively. But I argue for a synthesis focusing on internalization, at the individual level, of salient features of cultural representations, i.e. how the trauma is being internalized and invested with emotion before instigating fundamentalist acts. Therefore, the complementarity of both inside focus (psychoanalytic) and attention to the traumatizing outside is here decisive, instead of focusing only on any of these. In the following discussion, I explore the deep psychic equivalence of aggression, sexual excitement, and traumatic affects in the specific context of religiously motivated terrorism.
Desire and Motivation in Fundamentalism:
The Homoerotic quest for God's love
The patriarchal monotheist ideology not only sanctions, on one hand, repressions of sexuality through the devaluation of genital sexuality, of women and of everything feminine, but also promises for future rewards for redemption from all these conditions. The perpetrations of massacres and suicide bombings are unique cases that call for psychoanalytic understanding of sexualization as a consequence of strongly suppressed accumulation of aggression forming a crucial part of the reaction to ‘traumatization’.
The fundamentalist mind is highly intolerant of negotiation, compromise, or even dialogue. Instead, this is a way of thinking that nothing is opaque and truly puzzling, nothing needs further understanding (i.e., understanding anything other than their own prejudged frames of interpretation), and everything is self-evident. Intolerance is the underpinning of fundamentalism. The characteristic features of fundamentalist state of mind are: a sense of utter certainty, a feeling of being in the right, hermetic consistency, and highly rhetorical reiterations of perceived truths. Such nature of belief in any ideology, be that religious or not, as a dormant element, however, is capable of harnessing enormous energy to activate and externalize latent fantasies into everyday life. We often devalue the power of religious ideology on the ground that it sometimes appears to be devoid of intellectual content, irrational and/or inconsistent, but we learned from history that ideologies or ideas do not necessarily have to be true to be believed.
Human behavior is motivated. It is formulated in terms of wants or desires, and satisfies, directly or indirectly, some wishes, desires, or fantasies. Fundamentalist ideology as a motivational and directive force when activated has the power of instigating action. Fundamentalist motivations can be seen as context dependent interpretive device in which a fundamentalist person sees himself as threatened by bad authority and systems which will destroy his autonomy and identity, and, however, he perceives the situation that ought to be changed. Society is constructed out of human fear of ‘being left alone in the dark’, as psychoanalysis says, human collectivity is founded on their apprehension of defect, of death and of flight against death, of separation and of individuality, and not instead of, what Aristotlesays, for the sake of life and more life.
The attempt of simplifying complexities, as Ruth Stein says, into oppositions like good and bad, not only creates order out of chaos and vagueness, but also constitutes a vertical homoerotic desire for God's love. Such directive ordering and desire are coupled with the need to sacrifice, masochism, and coercion, and are activated in an increasingly severe purification processes. The fundamentalist state of mind and its formation originates from a series of transformations of fear of two elemental types: firstly, the fear of death, or rather, of personal annihilation and secondly, the fear and rage in the face of the very existence of other human beings , whose presence and intentions are experienced as an obstacle to one's desires (please see the work of Hegel and Sartre for details). Hence the fundamentalist formation everywhere suggests a kind of quest to get rid of these experiences, or so to speak, to violently transcend them. It is usually assumed that human nature of fashioning destructiveness and self-destructive follies is to a large extent the need to destroy these fears. Significantly, the destruction of fear and rage can be accomplished through processes of idealization and purification in whose favor destructiveness is being battled, and at the same time, activated or enacted, even worshipped in the name of religion.
Desire constitutes the most significant elements behind the fundamentalist subversive force. This desire is individual by definition but the proximity in terms of desire is mobilized to form fundamentalist corporations enabling them to perform joint activities. The source of fundamentalist dissension and violence is derived out of a highly symbolic interpretive process whereby desires for worldly concerns are transformed into intense desires for achieving spiritual depth and accomplishments. Nearly all monotheist doctrines commit their adherents for rewards and promotions in spiritual realm at the price of sacrificing worldly concerns and desire. They devalue the present as a repulsive reminder of mortality, while sacrificing present desire, as a form of complete submission to God, sustain their desire for immortality.
Patriarchal monotheism is another viewpoint of de-secularization (Christopher Rhoades Dykema) that may perhaps help us understand why the world becomes increasingly religious again. Monotheistic religions are consistent and continuous with both coercive fundamentalism and with the liberal religions. The monotheistic religious prohibition of pictorial representation of God and the renunciation of images and image-making enabled the followers to cross the threshold from sensory imitation to abstract ideas through replacing images by a series of duties in the form of ritual performance. Ascetic renunciation of instincts and eschewing desire to create images becomes the motive force for cathartic violence that becomes justified and sanctified by the perceived self.
The return of what has been renounced under a different guise seems to generate destruction and self-destruction as well as deception and self-deception within societies and civilizations of which religious fundamentalism forms a special part. The repressed impulse of renunciation in favor of spirituality in patriarchal monotheism has been rather radicalized in Islam, than many other religions, where not only God, but all creatures are prohibited from being pictorially represented. The notion that one must not make God visible because creating an image of something is to imagine it and to imagine a different reality, many realities, alternative realities, and pluralities.
The free play of imagination, from monotheistic religious perspective, creates anarchy, and hence, in an attempt to transcend the anarchic proliferation, monotheism professes the singularity and abstractness of God. Islam proposes, since emergence, to reduce the many into the one, to abolish all statues of gods and goddesses, and believe in one God. The singularity of God reduces the scope of individuality and choice for the believers. Whatever stands in opposition to the one is forbidden and there is no alternative of submission to the one.
Monotheism is about the one, about the only one who is invisible, and almost by definition is patriarchal. Belief in masculinity, patrilineality, integrative singular entity and sanctity of the one, as Ruth Stein suggests, generate problematical forms of unsatisfied longing and desire. The fundamentalists are cognitively energized with instinctual drives (libidinal) and transfer all of their interests, from the disapprovingly experienced social realities, onto the creation of a life of fantasy through perverted imaginary relations between them and their God. This special relationship suggest that fundamentalism is not mere strictness, rigidity, and literal adherence, but is an intensive emotional investment out of libidinal dimension of desire bridging the exorbitant distance between the two polar extremes of exaltation and degradation.
The socio-cultural premises, the context of praxis as such, define the situation including conditions, possibilities and means of achieving instinctual gratifications or fulfillment of libidinous and other forms of desires. Failure to satisfy or otherwise controlled libidinous desires and other drives leads to repression that results in producing fundamentalist state of mind- a perversely perceived self. Hence, the fundamentalist mind is transformed and transmuted out of basic set of unsatisfied but unrestrained fantasies, instincts and drives (libidinous, aggression and so forth), and vertical oppressive inequalities between God–man and man–women, while violent fundamentalism is a degenerated, violent, and persecutory form of exalted paternal devotion and mystical homo-erotic or libidinous desire toward God.
Fundamentalism is, therefore, a self-rejecting submission to an ideal authority that impliedly turns out to be submission to a virtually alienated, horrifying aspect of oneself. They strive for precious imagined reward of immortality– the royal road to the conquest of time, and a great Beyond where they would live for eternity – in exchange for their faithful submission from the God. They finally enter into a virtual world of trance where everything is divided neatly into oppositions like good versus evil, victim versus oppressor, believer versus non-believer, like minded versus enemies and so forth. A sense of transcendence drives them with great courage, on behalf of a purported spiritual cause, to embark on the ecstatic and heroic tasks of battling against whatever they consider wrong.
The Rewarding Route to Eternity:
Idealized Self, Suicide, and Salvation
The discourses on fundamentalism uncover that it is a schizo-paranoid state of mind involving processes of transformations of hatred (and self-hatred) into idealized self, sacrifice and a single value of obliterating all moral ambiguities and everything else, while salvation is sought in their attempt to purify the world. Therefore it is a process that begins with self-hatred and abjection, perceiving oneself as weak and ineffectual, which gets translated through a transformative process of purification through ascetic self-castigation represented below in a simplified sequential manner.
Sense of revulsion from an unwanted self> > intolerable self-loathing> > the impulse to forget it> > slough it off and lose it> > readiness to sacrifice the self or dissolve his individual distinctiveness> > substantiates a sense of transcendence> > proviso for different incarnations> > attains a feeling of megalomaniac superiority> > elates to release self-hatred on target objects.
Purification through ascetic self-castigation can relieve the torturing experience of psychic illness derived from the unbearable self-condemnation, self-loathing, self hatred, or internalized shame (Kaufman) and the feeling of depletion and worthlessness. Purification rites in fundamentalism are essentially similar to ascetic destructive acts aimed at crushing destructiveness. This sort of psychic state drives one to purify or cleanse oneself through destroying the destructive part within oneself. This involves the fantasy of being purified that is a way of dying in order to be reborn. The increasingly destructive processes of purification and self absolution may be equated with the increasing efforts at eliminating bad feelings about oneself, while religion provides the potent means toward accomplishing this procedure.
Monotheist religions guarantee salvation through the doing of good. The fundamentalist terrorists largely embark on synchronizing the meaning of ‘ doing good’ , in religious discourse, with that of ‘ fighting the bad’ . Psychoanalysis suggests that the war between good and evil as an expression of a psychic oscillation and/or conflict between a sense of inner badness– that which brings suffering and pain– and a need for goodness to attain a state of purity. Religious war, perceived as means of purification, entails extreme emotional reversals during the perennial striving to transform bad feelings into good feelings, while religious doctrines mediate the basic psychic activity of fighting an eternal war between good and evil.
Purification attempts to separate good and evil through religious rituals, in conventional practice for instance, prayer, fasting, removal of excremental symbols, circumcision etc. But these rituals seem to be inadequate in fundamentalist’s discernment and, hence, their formation implies and necessitates more rigid rituals for a permanent prevention against the return of the evil and its infiltration into the realm of the good. Seeking warranties against badness or evil, in violent fundamentalism, generates a psychic reasoning of projecting destructive part of oneself onto the enemies of God. Purification through the effort to kill the impure part of one leads the religious terrorists to the killing of God's enemies. One purifies oneself to death, one purifies oneself out of existence, and one purifies the world out of existence (Ruth Stein).
Repression is the key word upon which the whole psychoanalytic edifice of violent fundamentalism is based. The return of the repressed represents extroversion of the death instinct– a transformation of the desire to die into the desire to kill– a process of releasing enormous repressed energies out into the external reality. The religious ratification of the conviction t hat killing is good and righteous is founded on a series of assumption that it is good to fight evil, that doing the good means eliminating the bad, that it is good to erase or evacuate evil, and hence, the consequent inference is that it is good to kill something or someone who represents evil. The phenomenon of the transformation of the good and spiritual into the murderous is associated to the divine command to kill the evil or the object of evil.
The diminished and depleted state of self, following this psychoanalytic line of reasoning, in order to achieving a feeling of great relieve through the destruction of bad parts of the self, is in a continuous position of destroying the people who have become recipients and carriers of badness and evil. At this point the psychoanalytic and the existential reasoning converge into a religious sense of transcendence of human dread of death by embracing death and conceiving of it as the gateway to a new and better life. This perplexing religious process of purification suggests that the boundary between life and death, as well as between self and other has completely been obliterated and swamped by the total destruction of all materiality. This process, being founded upon the attempt to exterminate defilement and infidelity, eventuates in the necessity to die together with the killing of others. The bad and the idealized part of the self destabilize each other into a mindless state, and therefore, the physical body of the terrorist is prepared to transcend existence for redemption by becoming pure instrument of God's will.
The splitting of physical appearance and perceived self leads to the ultimate act of purification and spiritualization through exceeding the desire of the flesh and body to represent self and, reinforced, motivated, and energized by another desire for merging with God by offering Him the extreme, ultimate, and most loving due. Ruth Stein suggests that the construction of the Religious terrorist mentality is composed of an incestuous desire for father's love, supplanting the love for the mother, and oedipal and post-oedipal desire for woman. A potentially equal and loving relationship between man and woman (or between man and man) became idealized and demonized into a perverse loving relation to a God who demands for His satisfaction endless sacrifice and self-sacrifice, in which His satisfaction is the reward. The self-abnegation and the abnegation of earthly love eventuate in murderous religious ecstasy that offers salvation.
Tracing this sequence of reasoning, death is a final solution to all troubles, since death is fantasized as a magical device or a means to forestall a more eternal death. The recent resurgence of violent Islamist in Bangladesh and their suicidal attack insinuate a wrathful castrating image of God condescending ratification of physical destruction dedicated to the constant appeasement of and sacrifices to their omnipotent and omniscient God. The image of God thus constructed is punitive as well as He bestows inner entitlement and a sense of protective superiority in exchange for complete submission to His will. The media coverage of the fundamentalist leaders, recently captured in Bangladesh, reveals that these leaders are overwhelmed and overconfident on their absolute dependency on God to whom they became, so to speak, addicted. They recurrently emphasized on their belief of having received a divine command to kill the bad ones, which motivated the furtherance of forming group dynamics through brainwashing in isolation.
Interestingly enough, we came to know that one of the terrorist leaders has given up with his own suicidal attempt before being captured from his residence by the law-enforcing agencies in Bangladesh. He rejected what he had cultivated among his disciples. His translation and confusion between killing and dying, between natural death and violent death, have unfolded the significant divergence between what is being said and what is being done . Therefore, it becomes obvious that self-destruction through suicide does not necessarily refer to the leaders who recruit the suicidal Islamic terrorists both in Bangladesh and elsewhere. The recruiter and the recruited, in religious terrorism, traverse through a transformative preparatory process whereby the mind of the recruited is taken hold of, steeled, washed, shaped, and converted into an efficient tool of death. They are ridded themselves of all evil and are encoded to project all evil onto the outer menacing world, which eventually turns them to become persecutory and malevolent.
- PART TWO -
Rereading Secularism and Modernity:
Religion, Culture and Economy in Bangladesh
Let me open up the discussion through recapturing the underpinning of secularization as well as its connections to the basic premises of modernity with reference to the present social realities in Bangladesh. The secularization hypothesis suggests that the idea of modernization causes organized religion to play a lesser role in political decision-making, and in social and legal processes. Modernization, however, typically encompasses an array of changes, which include increases in per capita income, education, life expectancy, and urbanization; reductions in fertility; and changes in age structure. All of these aspects have deferential effects on religious minds in everyday life. In the first place, let us consider the impact of education on religious beliefs. The idea of secularization leads us to expect that more educated people are more scientific and are, therefore, more oriented to be less religious by rejecting beliefs that reflect mainly superstition and reliance on super-natural forces. A counter line of reasoning suggests that the more educated persons are more capable of abstractions needed to think scientifically, and hence, they may also be more able or willing to make the abstractions needed to support religious beliefs. Therefore, we may see that the more educated persons might be more religious.
We observe in Bangladesh that people having higher education are capable of understanding the worth of and return from engaging in wider social networks as well as other forms of social capital. Consequently, the highly educated persons participate in various group activities including mosque, although their attendance is not anchored in religious beliefs, rather it is one of many ways to build social capital. Moreover, increased attendance in Mosque is higher among people as they become old and get closer to death i.e. the lower is their life expectancy. In religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, this argument about age and life expectancy is stronger since redemptions relate especially to activities toward the end of life, which allow for a continual cycle of sinning and absolution.
The Islamic doctrine accepts the possibility of redemption at any time by attaining belief in Allah and otherwise ascribing to the five pillars of Islam. Thus, persons at advance ages may achieve salvation, even if they have already been condemned. Hence, this doctrine seems also to motivate devout behavior especially at advanced ages, unlike some other religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism. This flexibility of deferring religious investments from early life to advanced ages may significantly affect the opportunity cost of being engaged in religious activities and of time. The economic rationality raises the value of time, measured by market wage rates and per capita incomes, complementing the rising opportunity cost of participating in ritual performances both at collective level as well as personal level. Therefore, increasing labor-force participation would reduce time allocated to prayer, mosque attendance and other religious activities. This is justified by the fact that social categories like women and retired men, remaining out of the labor force, would tend to allocate more time for religious activities than those who are active in labor-force participation.
Urbanization is another component that has a substantial negative effect on practicing religious rituals and on investment in attaining personal spiritual capital. People enjoy a wide variety of alternative choices to allocate time in social activities such as museums, theatres, and political organizations, other than allotting time for ritual performance. Contrastingly, in rural societies in Bangladesh, people can sustain collective ritual performance at mosque. Besides the availability of urban/rural pattern of social amenities, the agricultural production system in rural Bangladesh is especially prone to the uncertainties of natural disasters. Greater time allocation in religious activities in rural areas reflects a greater demand for religious engagement as a means to cope with these uncertainties.
Today, the social realities in Bangladesh do not support the general assumption that modernization leads to the secularization not only of individuals but also of political and social institutions. Instead Islam plays a significant role in governance and legislation, which is even drastic in rural areas than urban centers. The symbiotic relations between the political and religious leaders in Bangladesh endorse the alliance of religious and political institutions at different levels. Islamic indoctrination reinforces the religious regulations over economic affaires, marriage, divorce, birth control, abortion, and so on.
The resilient patterns of fear, suspicion and mistrust between groups of people bearing different ´truths´ or worldviews and clashes between such groups having their own self-understanding characterize the world history of all times and almost everywhere including, in this case, Bangladesh. Though there is no consensus as to the nature of the triggering factors of historical conflicts, but an intellectual current, especially since the wars of religion in the 16 th and 17 th centuries, recognizes religion as the main source of such conflicts. This way of thinking believes that religions should be deprived of all influences in public discourse and reduced to the private realm, a view which sometimes, in its extreme form, seems to be produced a form of secularist fundamentalism. In response to such predispositions, a line of reasoning developed with motivation to reaffirm the public value of religion, which, in certain cases, has led towards forms of religious fundamentalism.
A Theocratic Venture in the Nation-State:
The Recent Islamist Canopy in Bangladesh
Theocracy can no longer be regarded as fossilized remnants of pre-modern culture; instead the emergent Islamist resurgence in Bangladesh challenges the assumptions of democratic order. The linkages between religion and political economy have attracted remarkably little attention from the social scientist. The impact of fundamentalist religion on political and economic doctrine and policies is, so to speak, not adequately explored in the context of Bangladesh. The fundamentalists, however in Bangladesh and elsewhere, reflect a common conviction that the tribulations of modernity are rooted in moral degeneration and hence, emphasize on behavioral reform to achieve moral reviviscence.
The state level politics, policies, and apparatus in Bangladesh are increasingly drawing inspiration from and adhere to Islam. But what are the meaning and consequences of adhering to fundamentalist doctrines? Below I describe the socioeconomic and political consequences of subscribing normative religious prescriptions, grounded in the context of Bangladesh from a temporal perspective. In the subsequent discussion, I aim to investigate the effects of emphatic religious commitments on political and social variables including democracy, the rule of law, and legislation, and the ideological sources of our disadvantages impairing our socioeconomic development. Furthermore, I plan to explain the evolutionary convergence of religious and political power in Bangladesh, accelerating the formation of fundamentalism and of radical Islam, and influencing political and legal structure of the country, including the propensity to have state religions.
Although Islam played a significant role in the life and culture of the people, religion did not dominate national politics because Islam was not the central component of national identity. The constitution in post independence Bangladesh was founded upon four guiding principles: nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism. However, the role of Islam gradually began to increase in Bangladesh’s civil society and state apparatus. In 1977, the government replaced Article 12 of the founding constitution, which provided that the principle of secularism should be realized by the elimination of communalism in all its forms, with the assertion that the Muslim faith would be one of the guiding principles of the nation.
In June 1988, Bangladesh moved a step further away from its secular heritage when Islam officially became the state religion through an amendment to the constitution, Article 2-A, which reads: “The state religion of the Republic is Islam, but other religions may be practiced in peace and harmony in the Republic". During this constitutional amendment, very little attention was paid outside the intellectual class to the meaning and impact of such an important national commitment. Most observers believed that the declaration of Islam as the state religion might have a significant impact on national life, however. Aside from arousing the suspicion of the non-Islamic minorities, it could accelerate the proliferation of religious parties at both the national and the local levels, thereby exacerbating tension and conflict between secular and religious politicians.
The Natural History of Islam in Bangladesh
The recent shift of Bangladesh away from its secular roots, including the increasing Islamization of Bangladeshi politics and society has generated different trajectories in the political sphere of the country. The parallel development of violent fundamentalism and Islamized government has complemented each others interest and consummated in sustaining absolute power. The Islamization of the government can be explained partially through looking at the natural history of Bangladesh. I would adopt both spatial and temporal perspectives, though in a few words, to sketch the essential conditions, the rules of games, given and transmitted from the past , defining the all encompassing Bangali Muslim social settings within which the other indigenous and religious communities are being embedded. This discussion would develop the background context for analyzing the role of Islam in developing Bangladeshi nationalism, as I move further onto the discussion.
Cultural Roots and Local Adaptation: The historical connections of today’s Bangali Muslims have resulted in the bifurcation of two quite opposing mode of discourses, which may be seen as dharmic dik (religious mode) and shamajic dik (community or societal mode). This divergence between the discourses involves some potentially conflicting sets of morals and values between the Islamic ideology and other social orientations. The religious ( dharmic ) context is rooted in Islamic prescriptions, providing a framework to evaluate people and their actions as bhalo (good) or kharap (bad). The central theme of Islamic indoctrination is the discernment of intentions, actions, and conducts, and its congruence with sanctions of shariat, the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence. The dharmic (religious) context emphasizes consistency, equality of people, and the exclusion of alien values and conducts from the way of life. Contrarily, the shamajic (community/Societal) context is concerned with social hierarchy and differences in identity as these configure the every day life of the Bangali Muslims.
The everyday conducts of Bangali Muslims primarily refers to the potential contradiction between these two modes of discourses based on the distinction between Islam and the rest. Eventually, when Hindu and Muslim identity and practices are distinguished and juxtaposed, the community/Societal (shamajic ) context becomes associated with Hindu order and the religious (dharmic) context corresponds to Islam. However, they refer to the Quranic prescriptions and precepts when they ‘say’ about the local social situation but in practice they follow the principle that alters their life-world around them since in ‘doing’ behavior they recognize that men are equal before God but they are not equal among themselves. This inconsistency between ‘what they say’ and ‘what they do’ , between ideas and actions, and the flexibility in the application of religious doctrine to personal practice, may be meaningfully explained only if we make distinction between religious and social frames. This line of reasoning may be paraphrased as the discrepancy in what Bangali-Muslim-Men ‘say’ or make statements about Islamic egalitarianism i.e. by religion all men are equal and what in practice they ‘do’ i.e. the Bangali-Community-Men are not equal in everyday life.
The most important realm of this discrepancy derived from the obscurity that prevails in the relationship between religious and social values as well as the Islamic doctrine of equality of all and existing social inequality. The everyday life of the Bangali Muslims is governed by their subscription of ideology that ‘by religion all men are equal, men are equal before Allah but they are not equal among themselves’. Their apparently paradoxical statement may be conferred meaningful sense if we place it in the broader politico-historical context of this region that induced contesting elements in the relations between the two categories. Consequently, while making Hindu-Muslin distinction, they resort to Islam i.e. their dharmik dik (religious context) or else, in practicing social activities, though largely Hindu oriented, they resort to Bangali custom to explain and rationalize their everyday performances.
The relation between the rhetoric of identity assertion and the place of rank in it refers to determining factors like religion, history of regional origin, ideology, and the changing political economic features. Islam was spread to Bangladesh first by the Sufi missionaries and Saints in thirteenth and fourteenth century. Converted into Islam were mainly the low caste Hindus. Islamic doctrine of egalitarianism, especially the ideals of equality, brotherhood, and social justice, attracted numerous Buddhists, lower caste Hindus, and a few other social groups to be converted since these groups, in their respective way of social life, were suppressed and subordinated.
Bangladesh, where Islam found most of its adherents, has been a peasant society for the whole of her recorded history: agriculture, including the supporting occupations like fishing, woodcutting, boating, etc. have founded the basis of agrarian social structure. Ecologically, people living in this part of Gangetic delta found themselves pitted against a nature, rich but unpredictable, and unkind. Their adaptation process to the habitat and the cruelties of nature distinctly affected and shaped their version of religion and culture. Folk beliefs and practices reflect this and hence couldn't be eliminated by the introduction of Islam.
Islam in this region, like many other Muslim societies, thus has taken many forms and has assimilated values and symbols not always in conformity with Quranic prescriptions and precepts. Islam then converged with and was assimilated to the local cultural milieu, a milieu that was Hindu in orientation. Thus, a distinct popular Islam was evolved through the cultural assimilation of Hindu and Muslim belief and practice, which in essence represented the popular culture of rural Bangladesh, rooted in the pre-Islamic past. Muslim elites, at this time, diluted the Islamic propositions with the existing Hindu cultural tradition to monopolize the situation they make and made it acceptable to the people. This is the background of how Islam was locally adapted and eventually the origin of Muslim rank is rooted in it.
The Muslim social inequality places the Sufi saints and foreign or immigrant elites over the commoner Bangali. Again, the place of Pir or Sufi saint is higher than his disciple and should therefore be given submission and devotion just because of his esoteric knowledge and believed that being a good man he is beloved by Allah. Although in religious terms all Muslims ought to be seen equal but they practice somewhat differently in everyday life. Under this circumstance, the Islamic leaders undertook several reformist initiatives of Islamization . Proponents of these revivalist movements tried to purify Islam through the exclusion of non-Islamic elements of belief and practice that have no foundation in Shariat. In the subcontinent, this chiefly means the exclusion of Hindu belief and practices.
Political Implications of Revivalism and Islamization: The reformist movement led Bangali Muslims to become aware of their distinctive Muslim identity. At the same time, this provides the incentives to foster a sense of community solidarity that did not previously exist. Eliminating Hindu beliefs and practices became an important strategy for drawing a clear boundary around the Muslim community to reinforce Muslim identity. Emphasizing upon the contrast between the Hindu hierarchy and Muslim egalitarianism was a fundamental way of distinguishing the two communities. The reformist movements had a profound impact but still there had traditionally been a pervasive cultural dichotomy in Bangladeshi Islam between foreign Muslim culture (as imported to Bangladesh by the immigrant elites) and the culture of Bangali converts. Foreign-born nobles were segregated from the mass of local converts. This cultural bifurcation has an expression in the way of talking of the Bangali about themselves. Even today they tend to distinguish "Bangali custom" from Islam as an alternative code of behavior.
The tradition of Islamic mysticism known as Sufism appeared very early in Islam and became essentially a popular movement emphasizing love of God rather than fear of God. Sufism stresses a direct, unstructured, personal devotion to God in place of the ritualistic, outward observance of the faith. An important belief in the Sufi tradition is that the average believer may use spiritual guides in his pursuit of the truth. These guides--friends of God or saints--are commonly called pirs (a holy man who has achieved a higher spiritual level) that combines the meanings of teacher and saint. In Islam there has been a perennial tension between the ulama --Muslim scholars--and the Sufis ; each group advocates its method as the preferred path to salvation. Both fakirs and pirs are familiar figures on the village scene, and in some areas the shrines of saints almost outnumber the mosques. The ulama , on the other hand, have traditionally provided the orthodox leadership of the community. The ulama unofficially interpret and administer religious law based on their knowledge of sharia .
The members of the ulama include maulvis , imams, and mullahs. The first two titles are accorded to those who have received special training in a madrasa concerning Islamic theology and law. At the village level, the mullah plays significant and comprehensive roles, for instance, advise on points of religious practice, perform marriage and funeral ceremonies and a variety of services, far from the purview of orthodox Islam, like providing the villagers with amulets, talismans, and charms for the remedying of everything from snakebite to sexual impotence. The fact that many villagers have implicit faith in such cures for disease provides some of the mullahs with an opportunity to derive a significant portion of their income.
Given the aforementioned politico-historical backdrop, the Bangali people are very much concerned with the Muslim ‘self’ in opposition to a Hindu ‘other’ . The Bangali Muslims, in their attempt to establish a distinct ‘self’ , resort to their contrast with the Hindus with particular reference to the ideology of equality in these two religious traditions by emphasizing that Islam believes in the equality of all and the brotherhood of men. The Bangali Muslims over-communicate and accentuate the Islamic doctrine of egalitarian society to make contradistinction to the hierarchic sanctions of Hindu cosmology, being fully aware of their own practice of hierarchic arrangements in their everyday life. A modified Anglo-Indian civil and criminal legal system operates in Bangladesh, where there are no official sharia courts. The ulama of Bangladesh, especially encountering the ideas and images of modernism and globalism, are persistently functioning in teaching and preserving the Islamic way of life in the face of outside challenges. The ulama as a class started resisting and counteracting such pervasive global processes, since they perceived such processes as a threat to core religious values and institutions, and in oppositions to the matters of sharia . Many members of the ulama favored the establishment of an Islamic theocracy in Bangladesh and were deeply involved in political activism through several political parties.
The Return of Political Theology:
Nationalism and Nation Building in Bangladesh
It is generally anticipated that the religious and ethnic identity would erode with the progress of modernization and modern societies would have been characterized by pattern of achieved status and identity rather than ascribed. Secularization would have been expected to erode the religious foundations of ethnic identity, while rational self-interest would lead to class based rather than ethnic based political and economic agreements. The relationship between culture, religion, and the state, however, has been a contentious issue in social science. The idealist perspective would view cultural factors as independent variables in the formation of national consciousness, while materialist interpretations would suggest that national culture is a dependent variable– molded by the state rather than a source of state formation (Steinmetz). But the political history in Bangladesh, like many other places, supports the fact that the relationship between state formation and cultural change is recursive as well as running in both directions.
Now, before drawing conclusion of this essay, I would address the issue of nation building in Bangladesh. The inception of Bangladesh in 1971 is rooted in the conflict among two culturally defined civilizations. The issues of indigenous minority cultures remained largely insignificant during our liberation war. I do not address the issues of indigenous insurgency or how the indigenous people are being deprived of representation in the state system, since in some earlier writings I addressed how the political ideology of nationhood in Bangladesh has enduringly denied the very existence of indigenous minority cultural entities. In this section, I would rather concentrate on the most brutal conflicts centering on religion that continues to occur and perhaps would adopt a more drastic and violent shape obstructing our nation building process in the days to come. I suggest that linguistic, religious, or ethnic differences are potential threats to the political stability of the state and as obstacles to be overcome during the nation-building process in Bangladesh.
Neither language nor cultural difference served as a basis for national political boundaries in most part of the known history of pre-industrial world civilization. A shared culture was not available to serve as a plausible basis for the formation of political units. Nationalism is a political ideology that insists on congruence between the state and the nation (Gellner), and emerged as one of the defining institutional innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bangladesh, after independence in 1971, wanted to blend its diverse people into a new national identity to constitute a unified nation state. But now we are in such a situation that forces us for a painful reassessment of what went wrong in what had once appeared to be a successful nation building effort but moved eventually following a different trajectory.
The mainstays of Bangladesh have pervaded by a plethora of disintegration between the socio-cultural groups and have accelerated conflicts about particular rights and of the rights of "particular" people: a real conflict between individual vs. collective rights and national vs. ethnic rights. This is rooted in the politico economic history of this region along with other concomitant processes that gradually shaped and formed the ideology behind classification schemas. Islam and language played historically significant role in mobilizing common interest and public consciousness leading towards the processes of polarizations through forming opposing and contested categories. The emphasis on Muslim identity and the Hindu-Muslim distinction ultimately led to the creation of the Islamic state of Pakistan in 1947 of which the present day Bangladesh was a part and, going ahead further, the emphasis on a common Bangali identity led to the liberation war and finally, to the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign nation-state.
The pre-eminent and overpowering decisive role of religion in defining nationhood in this sub-continent was rather an induced apparatus, a colonial implant, for mobilizing public sense of belongingness during the colonial era. Instead of having any instances of animosity, during pre-colonial period, the recorded history of this region testifies the validity of sustenance and retention of relative tolerance and peaceful co-existence amongst the two communities. Even during the first war of independence in 1857 against colonial power, the Hindu and Muslim soldiers mutinied together sharing common motivations and nationhood transcending religious boundaries. The colonial rulers gradually replaced the secular spirit of the common people with a contended relation overpowered with religious spirits among the two communities. The soldier’s insurrection in 1857 shook the very foundations of British colonial rule in India. Hence, they consciously and deliberately adopted measures exclusively designed to provoke animosity and hatred between the Hindus and Muslims. The Secretary of the State for India in London advised the Viceroy, Lord Elgin (1862-63), to activate the division of religious feelings,
“We have maintained our power in India by playing-off one part against the other, and we must continue to do so. Do all you can, therefore, to prevent all having a common feeling."
The internal strife between the two wings– thousands of miles apart with a disdained enemy in between– of Pakistan have facilitated the people of East Pakistan to invent their differences with the West Pakistan particularly with reference to the languages they speak. The differences in mother tongue were again translated into cultural differences and were gradually been magnified while the people of East Pakistan invented more commonalities with their neighbors in West Bengal of India than West Pakistani people. The sense of Bangali nationhood was formed within this politico-historical context, and shaped in several episodes of revolts and protests against the onslaughts of West Pakistan of which the language movement in 1952 was perhaps the most substantial in setting the Bangali nationhood in motion. During this whole period insurrections prior to the independence war in 1971, the people of the then East Pakistan learnt and oriented to make ‘self-other’ prototypic distinction between Bangla speaking Bangali people and those who do not speak Bangla i.e. non-Bangali people.
I would go onto argue that our liberation war was co-opted a counter-liberation political ideology based on the Islamic sense of brotherhood that transformed Islamic culture with the state. The political motivation for the rise of nationalism in Bangladesh has developed as a reaction against the political and cultural (Urdu language) hegemony of East Pakistan. It was the coincidence of economic and democratic change that energized an Islamic sense against foreign domination and induced the emergence of nationalism as a dominant political ideology in recent days in Bangladesh. The democratic and economic formation after long autocratic military government eroded the political and economic resources available to the cultural homogeneity based political leadership and transferred both political and economic resources in to the hands of Islamic brotherhood based political leadership.
The institutions and the motivations including political leadership that facilitated the emergence of Bangladesh began to lose their authority. The resulting sense of loss of cohesion and order created an opportunity and provided the grounds for the Islamic ideology based intellectual and political leaders to emerge. The emergence of the realization that the collective religious belongingness of the people may be mobilized as the essential base for the ordered political life of the nation provided an opportunity for political entrepreneurs to practice the symbolic politics of Islamic nationalism. It became their role to create consciousness by deliberate social action that the present economic and political constraints in Bangladesh are mainly due to the significant loss in or anti-Islamic religious values on which the old order rested. The concept of Islamic nationalism in the political life of the nation as the expression of the collective Islamic brotherhood is the essence of our present political romanticism.
This historical backdrop along with other concomitant processes at the regional and international level have triggered and sensitized religion and language as influential concerns for the Bangali people. We, therefore, see that Bangla language and Islam-based consciousness continue to represent a vital political force in Bangladesh. And the prospect of further fragmentation of Bangladesh i.e., the prospect for redrawing the national political boundaries has been substantially a source of uneasy contemplation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. The idea that ‘any people, simply because it considers itself to be a separate people has the right, if it so desires, to create its own state, remains a revolutionary idea’ (Connor). At a time when nation states have acquired greater capacity to limit external aggression they continue to repress the legitimate political interests of their constituent religious and ethnic minorities.
I would also prioritize the need to addresses the economic considerations involved in state integration and disintegration. We have many examples suggesting that forms of symbolic or physical cruelty may lead to national disintegration through driving latent nationalist sentiment to become overt and imposes a substantial burden on economic growth. Development of effective formal legal and governance institutions can overcome the national disintegration. In a poor country Bangladesh achieving a political consensus on the design of economic and political institutions is the essential need for nation building. Hence, if needed, the constitutional system or the laws of the states should be open to very substantial modification in order to accommodate the civic and economic needs of the citizens.
The issue of constitutional design in multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious states or the successor states that emerged following the disintegration of linguistically diverse states is the greatest challenge for nation building in countries like Bangladesh. The constitution is to be designed based on a normative political ideology, which addresses the design principles appropriate to preventing political evils of violence against ethnic minorities, and state protection of small and stigmatized minorities and religious minorities, and cruelty directed by fundamentalist leaders against members who desire to assimilate into a rational culture. The institutional accommodations and arrangements which make up the separation of religious ideology and state and the protection of freedom of religion are the model that should be followed, at least in spirit if not in particulars, in designing institutions to accommodate all citizens.
Nothing to Kill or Die For....
A Plea for Greater Tolerance
My vision of the future, however, differs dramatically from the vision of a fortress Islamic Bangladesh dominated by violent or radical Islamic fundamentalists. The old links between religion and culture, and between ethnicity and culture, have retain their viability not only at the personal but also reinforced at the civic level. For the first time in the history of Bangladesh a high Islamic culture becomes the pervasive operational culture of an entire society. The essay intends to shed light on the formation of violent fundamentalism impairing the enjoyment of people’s fundamental freedoms in Bangladesh.
The Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh states that “every citizen has the right to profess, practice or propagate any religion," and that “every religious community or denomination has the right to establish, maintain and manage its religious institutions" (Article 41). The ideal of Constitutional provisions for promotion and protection of human rights have been made inoperative, in reality, by the silencing power of the authoritarian regimes charged with religious motivation. In the last few decades, Bangladesh witnessed the growth of Islamic movements seeking to strengthen their collective sense of uniqueness, belongingness, autonomy, identity, distinctiveness, and self-determination. Such representations of dissonant conditions necessitate the humanist appeals to create a common language and culture to realize common humanity, and to liberate the universal qualities of human beings from the narrow confinements of prejudge and preference based on religion. I, however, have begun a longstanding overdue discussion on the essentiality of developing powerful tools that might be put to use to eliminate all forms of religious violence in Bangladesh.
The Pakistan state, during the independence war of Bangladesh in 1971, deployed symbolic power embedded in Islam in opposition to power of Bangla language that crystallized the war. The state, as monopolizing agent of legitimate violence, defined and activated the potential capacity of religion, as a form of capital remaining under cultural guise, to (re)produce profits through retaining the operation of colonial economy. After independence, the state in order to retain the sense and sentiment of independence war activated the potential power of Bangla language, as another form of capital, to develop national solidarity as well as economy. During both pre- and post-independence period, the power of state legitimized and naturalized Islam as the primary forms of capital camouflaged under cultural guise and made it exist in the objectified, public, and formal state. This religious form of cultural capital function in contemporary Bangladesh society as an important means of reproducing the social hierarchy and it has the significant ability to transmit social hierarchy from generation to generation, and legitimize, through the effective operation of learning system, the basis for life chances to differ on the basis of one’s parentage as a counter to egalitarian claims.
The broader socio-political and historical forces in Bangladesh have defined the value of religion producing distinct Islamic fundamentalist political parties. Resurgence of religiously motivated fundamentalists at the regional (India and Pakistan) as well as reemergence of anti-liberation religious force at the national level coupled with their representations in the government have produced state-sponsored terrorisms and armed conflicts, though at different scales and extents, through out the country. The gradual Islamization of the Bangladesh government, and their political commitment of developing Islamic society, has produced official classifications to eliminate whatever is considered as non-Islamic. The proliferation of religious parties, under the auspices of the State, at both the national and the local levels, exacerbated contention and conflict between secular and religious politicians.
The spirits of Islamic political parties in Bangladesh are not only intolerant of the non-Muslim religious minorities but also are they violently aggressive against everyone, regardless of being Muslim or not, who do not share their prejudices and orthodox views. Therefore, they organize a rather comprehensive mode of operations in identifying and targeting their enemies including even the followers of minority Muslim sects, the Ahmadiyas for instance, and NGOs working for socio-economic transformation in Bangladesh. The activation of fundamentalist systems has impeded the foundations of inter-communal harmony, tolerance, and pluralism that evolved through the intermingling of both Hindu, rooted in the pre-Islamic past, and Muslim values and symbols, which in essence represented in our rich cultural heritage and socially tolerant values in the civilization of the sub-continent and as such, the popular culture of rural Bangladesh.
This essay is intended as a brief sketch, or at best a prolegomena to a comprehensive understanding and empirically grounded analysis of mental and material roots of fundamentalism in Bangladesh. What is dismaying, in terms of the grounded realities in Bangladesh, is that the emergent forms in national politics are gradually being stimulated with religious motivations, while devoicing regards for tolerance, difference, and diversity. Encountering difference and diversity and getting to know one another requires a certain degree of tolerance on relationality, on relativity and on the value to the subject of otherness. The perpetual intolerance underlying Islamic fundamentalism everywhere and the impulse of so-called Islamic activist in the context of Bangladesh bypasses the lesson of the Koran, the very source of their obsessive ideological engagements, explicitly manifested in the verse (Chapter 49: verse 13), that implicates the significance of tolerance and diversity: ‘Oh Mankind, we have created of you male and female, and have made you peoples and tribes, that you might come to know one another.’
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