Muslims and Liberals

The Austin American-Statesman
2003

A.B. Mohammad Musa was my boss at the Pakistan Observer newspaper in the East Pakistani capital of Dhaka. He almost never prayed, and he recoiled at the word “Islam.” He and many other East Pakistani Muslims carped about West Pakistanis dominating them in the name of Islamic brotherhood. By 1971, East Pakistan had had enough of the “Islamic republic” of Pakistan and seceded to become the “secular, socialist” nation of Bangladesh.

Musa told me over a recent lunch at the Dhaka press club that he writes his column “after my fajr (dawn) prayer.” In his writings, however, he castigates the Islamists. And he criticizes “aggressive” American policies in the Muslim world, which he says have sparked Islamic revival in Bangladesh and elsewhere.

After an official experimentation with secularism, Bangladesh has taken on an Islamic tinge. Prayer congregations at Dhaka’s Baitul Mukarram mosque have more than doubled in size in three decades. The veil, once scorned by educated Bangladeshi women, is a common sight on Dhaka University campus. A new constitution has dropped secularism and socialism as principles of national ideology.

As Islam began to revive, Islamists plunged into the country’s political process, adapting to social needs and political exigencies. The Islamist party Jamaat-i-Islami, has, for the first time, joined a ruling coalition, having won 17 seats at the 2001 parliamentary elections. Maulana Motiur Rahman Nizami, the industries minister and head of the Bangladeshi Jamaat, is working with secular politicians and corrupt bureaucrats his party used to despise. In the 1960s, Jamaat literature presented Islam as a better alternative to democracy. The other day, Nizami said, “The alternative to democracy is disaster.”

Many secular politicians who once shunned Islamists are courting them. M. Morshed Khan, the foreign minister from the secular Bangladesh Nationalist Party, said Bangladeshi Islamists have become “moderate.” He bristled at the question of whether the Jamaat’s participation in government is compromising democracy. Religious forces, he argued, play a greater political role in India, Israel or the United States, where the religious right forms the core of ruling political parties.

Bangladeshi society, too, has been changing from the spread and evolution of Islam, which betrays an anti-American edge. In the old days, a majority of worshipers at Dhaka mosques were old pious men and students of Islamic schools who abhorred corrupt social practices. Today, most of them are young and middle-age workers and businessmen who lie to customers, skip prayers on hectic days and skimp on giving Islamic alms known as zakat. And they applaud at a radio news bulletin: “Another American soldier has been killed in Iraq.”

I have been lax about practicing Islam. My brother’s children, six bright students at Bangladeshi colleges and universities, pray regularly, and Islamic publications take up half their bookshelves. But they resist the segregation of the sexes and women’s subjugation, supported by most practicing Muslims of my generation. And conversations with them often turn to the “perils” of the American domination of the Muslim world.

Many Bangladeshi intellectuals share Musa’s view that America’s “anti-Muslim” policies are reviving Islamic consciousness among Bangladeshis, 88 percent of them Muslim. Muslims everywhere, they say, are part of the umma (global Muslim community), and the U.S. occupation of Iraq, support for Israel and “hegemony” over many other Muslim societies have ratcheted up their Islamic sentiments.

Obeid Jaigirdar, an insightful writer and tea planter, adds that Hindu cultural threat from neighboring India is heightening those sentiments. Bangladeshi children, he says, are picking up Hindi words and Hindu idiom from watching Indian movies and TV news, and Indian imports are squeezing out indigenous goods. Bangladeshis are reacting to this cultural challenge by affirming their Islamic values.

Bangladesh’s per-capita income is $350, and I think that a deeper cause of poverty-ridden Bangladeshis’ quest for the security of their faith and umma is their disenchantment with the modern world in which they don’t feel they have much of a stake.

Even though cultural challenges and economic hardships are stimulating Islamic spirit and practices among everyday Bangladeshis, the Islamic tradition is evolving under the effects of their everyday social and political lives. It couldn’t do so in the days the faith was the preserve of the pious establishment.