Bangladesh’s Fundamentalist Challenge
APR 14, 2015
NEW DELHI – In
February, while returning from a book fair at Dhaka University, Avijit
Roy, a Bangladeshi-American blogger known for his atheism, and his wife
were dragged from their rickshaw and hacked with machetes.
The book fair, held annually to commemorate the 1952 protests that
culminated in the Pakistani military opening fire on students at the
university, is a typically Bengali response to violence. To turn the
Nazi leader Hermann Göring’s notorious barb on its head, when Bengalis
hear the word “gun,” they reach for their culture.
But Roy’s brutal
murder (his wife was maimed, but survived) – together with the fatal
stabbing of another atheist blogger, Washiqur Rahman, barely a month
later – exposes another force at work in Bangladesh, one that is
subverting the country’s tradition of secularism and intellectual
discourse. That force is Salafist Islamic fundamentalism.
The change in
Bangladesh is stark. The irreverent secularism and thoughtful inquiry
reflected in the works of Roy and Washiqur have long been a hallmark of
Bengali writing. A generation ago, their views would have been
considered perfectly acceptable, if not mainstream, in the vibrant
intellectual culture of Bengal (the Western portion of which is the
Indian state of West Bengal).
That is no longer
true. Backed by lavish financing from abroad, Salafist fundamentalism –
an intolerant version of Islam at odds with the more moderate
Sufi-influenced variant that prevailed in India for centuries – has been
spreading across Bangladesh in recent years. While Bengal’s long
secular tradition, which drove its efforts to break away from Pakistan,
is still alive and well, the corrosive impact of the radical Islamists –
who use force to silence those with whom they disagree – is undeniable.
Roy and Washiqur are
far from the first Bengali intellectuals to face the Islamists’
particular brand of censorship. The writer Humayun Azad was severely
injured in an attack at the annual book fair in 2004. (He survived, but
died later that year in Germany.) Last year, the atheist blogger Ahmed
Rajib Haider was, like Roy, hacked to death in Dhaka. Why engage in
theoretical debates with your ideological opponents, the Islamists are
saying, when one can simply shut them up for good?
Many Bangladeshi
intellectuals have seen the writing on the wall and fled the country,
sacrificing daily contact with their rich cultural heritage for the sake
of self-preservation. The novelist Taslima Nasrin went into exile in
1994 to escape death threats from Islamist radicals; she now lives in
Delhi. Daud Haider, a journalist and poet, languishes in Berlin.
Public intellectuals
are not the only people in danger. Ordinary secular Muslims who turn to
atheism are more vulnerable to charges of apostasy and, worse,
blasphemy. In the old days, such charges might have attracted a fatwa or
two and, at worst, social ostracism. Today, the threats – say, being
murdered in cold blood on a crowded street – are more viscerally
compelling.
For Muslim-majority
Bangladesh, this struggle within Islam amounts to a battle for the soul
of the country. But it is not an entirely new battle. Bangladesh has
long faced the claim that, in accordance with the logic of the 1947
Partition of India, which produced what was then East Pakistan, it
should be more Islamic. Others, opposing this claim, insist that the
country must live up to the legacy of its 1971 secession from Pakistan,
in a revolution that proclaimed Islam insufficient grounds for
nationhood and asserted the primacy of Bangladesh’s secular culture and
Bengali language over its allegiance to Islamabad.
This conflict is also
reflected in the country’s often bitterly divisive politics. Each camp
has taken its turn controlling the government, under two formidable
female leaders: the Awami League’s Sheikh Hasina Wazed, the current
prime minister, and her two-term predecessor, the Bangladesh Nationalist
Party’s Begum Khaleda Zia.
Though the
secularists are currently in power, Zia retains wide support, including
among the Islamists. Her party boycotted the last election, and has
provoked political violence that has claimed more than 100 lives this
year and left hundreds more injured.
The recent killings
have inflamed public opinion, sparking mass demonstrations to demand
justice for the victims and more effective government protection of
secularist writers. HT Imam, a senior adviser to Hasina, squarely
challenged the police for their inaction on Roy’s murder, telling top
police officers to “identify the black sheep among the force and bring
them under law and justice to uphold your image.”
Bangladesh is a
democracy that upholds freedom of expression, but within limits. Though
the government is seen as sympathetic to liberal intellectuals, it is
also anxious to maintain law and order and avoid provoking the
extremists. As a result, the government has not hesitated to try to
curry favor with the Islamists by using legislation that prohibits
“hurting religious sentiments” to harass and arrest atheists and
liberals. The Islamists, however, want the government to pass a
blasphemy law like that in Pakistan, which decrees death for religious
dissent. Though the government has so far stoutly resisted this, its
weak-kneed defense of secularism has raised fears that its resistance to
theocratic pressure could collapse under sustained pressure.
It must continue to
do so. Hasina – the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the “father” of
independent Bangladesh who was assassinated in 1975 – knows that
compromising with the Islamists will get her nowhere; she will never be
acceptable to them. Her government must not succumb to the temptation to
accommodate the extremists in the name of good governance (or in the
cause of political survival).
The principles for
which Bangladesh bled when it won its independence from Pakistan must
not be compromised. If Hasina gives in to the machete-wielding
Islamists, she will sacrifice the Bangladesh that her father fought to
free.
Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian
Minister of State for Human Resource Development and Minister of State
for External Affairs
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