Islam and Politics in Bangladesh

The Followers of Ummah

Mubashar Hasan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9789811511158
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811511165
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian Politics

This book conceptualizes the politics of Bangladesh through an Islamic concept called ummah or the global brotherhood of Muslims. It demonstrates that, against the backdrop of geopolitics, capitalism and free flow of ideas, localization of this global religious concept at individual level, institutional level, major party platforms and state has cemented the current political condition in Bangladesh in which religiosity, religious intolerance, Islamization and extremism take place. By exploring the effects of ummah in Bangladeshi politics, this book shows how major political parties have mainstreamed political Islam in the country. The book rejects the long standing scholarly claim of religious-secular distinction in Bangladeshi politics and argues that with most Muslim-dominated states, there are no major secular parties in Bangladesh. There are only Islamic parties, which are more or less Islamic. The purely 'rational' domain of politics in Bangladesh is long lost, andpolitical Islam sets the framework for politics in the country. The reason behind this logic of Bangladeshi politics is formed, contained and expanded by ummah. 

© The Author(s) 2020

M. HasanIslam and Politics in Bangladeshhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-1116-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Mubashar Hasan¹

(1)

University of Oslo, Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Mubashar Hasan

Keywords

Ummah BangladeshSecularismSouth AsiaReligion

End Abstract

In the post-9/11 world, discussions about the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West, Muslim identity,¹ jihadism, multiculturalism, Islamophobia, and terrorism are highly publicized and reproduced in various popular media outlets as well as in academia. For an ordinary person, it has become difficult to weave through the many narratives to reach a conclusion about the relationship between Islam—a religion with 1.8 billion followers—and politics. Some narratives claim that Islam is a religion of peace, whereas others argue that Islam is a fascist religion that supports terrorism and sharia law, inhibits women rights and democracy, and persecutes homosexuals. In short, the existing debate on Islam and politics divides scholarship and popular opinion, but it is a necessary debate, given the size of the world’s Muslim population and its potential impact. An analysis of the situation in Bangladesh and how it has developed can help to shed light on this.

This book explains why Bangladesh—a country born as a secular state in 1971—now upholds Islamic politics, undermines liberal democratic values, and does not tolerate atheism. Contrary to the dominant scholarly narratives about Bangladesh that express surprise or alarm about rising influence of religion into politics, increasing social religiosity, religious intolerance, and terrorism, this book argues that Bangladesh’s political development is predictable. There should not be any surprise in Bangladesh’s political outcome. While scholars have described religious intolerance and extremism in Bangladesh, they have not been successful analysing the context upon which religious politics takes place. This book argues that certain conditions that have emerged within a contextual framework or concept establish the discourse of politics in Bangladesh or any other country.

My book conceptualizes the politics of Bangladesh through the Islamic concept of ummah, or global brotherhood of Muslims, and demonstrates that despite the backdrop of capitalism and free flow of ideas, ummah at the level of the individual, institution, major party platforms and state has set the current political condition in Bangladesh in which religiosity, religious intolerance, Islamization and extremism take place. However, this book argues that while the core aim of ummah is to form solidarity among Muslims, the Bangladesh case shows that localization of this global religious-political concept produces multiple ummahs (liberal, radical, and extremist ummahs ) that set the framework for political contest and conflict in Bangladesh.

In this chapter, I will set the stage for the discussions to come in the next six chapters. First, I will present a short case study that illustrates the contests and conflicts taking place in what started as a democratic, secular country followed by a brief overview of the context that makes the seeming contradictions understandable. This is followed by an analysis of why Bangladesh is a valuable country to study for scholars and the general public who desire to understand Islamization, a brief overview of the political parties in Bangladesh, and a review of the current literature in the field. Finally, I will describe my background and methods used in gaining the insights in the subsequent chapters.

1.1 A Case Study of the Evolution of Religious Politics in Bangladesh

It was a quiet morning on May 6, 2013, in the Motijheel area of Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Motijheel is known as the business hub of the city where all major banks, and the Dhaka Stock Exchange, are located. That silence that morning was, however, abnormal. It was a result of several hours of mayhem that took place the night before as the area turned into a battlefield. Hundreds of paramilitary and police forces were deployed by the government of Sheikh Hasina to disperse over 500,000 conservative Muslim activists who were part of a movement called Hefazat e Islam (HI), or protect Islam. They staged a sit-in in Motijheel, demanding acceptance of a 13-point petition that included enactment of an anti-blasphemy law with provision for the death penalty for writers who offend Islam and a ban on men and women appearing together in public. Hundreds of law enforcement agents, including the police, paramilitary force Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) and Border Guards of Bangladesh (BGB), fired hundreds of rounds of bullets and tear gas shells and used physical force to evict the stubborn illiberal groups from Motijheel. Many of the HI activists were injured and at least 50 were killed.

Such brute force action led many observers to laud the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed as a leader who would turn Bangladesh into a ‘secular country’. Those opinions were not entirely unfounded, as Sheikh Hasina had set up a special tribunal to prosecute several top leaders of an Islamist party Bangladesh Jamaat e Islami (BJI ) for committing crimes against humanity during Bangladesh’s independence war against Pakistan in 1971. Those top leaders of Jamaat were executed as a result and their party lost its registration at the Election Commission (EC). However, in 2018, a few months before another general election, those jubilant supporters of a ‘secular Bangladesh’ were disappointed to see Sheikh Hasina shaking hands with Allama Shafi, the spiritual leader of the HI movement who called the sit-in in 2013 and was behind the 13-point petition and was chairing that program. With hundreds and thousands of conservative Bangladeshis cheering, she announced that her government would build 560 model mosques across the country and establish a new Islamic university with Saudi funding. She also asked for their blessings for the upcoming election of 2018 and further said, ‘If Allah wishes, surely he will give me the opportunity to serve the people of Bangladesh again, and if Allah does not want, he will not give me that opportunity and I would not have any regret because I leave everything upon Allah’ (Hasina 2018). Before this meeting, Hasina saw through the enactment of a digital security law that made ‘offending’ religious sentiments a criminal act and stipulated 7–14 years in jail for committing such crimes. While this shift in policy was likely influenced by a desire to appeal to voters before the 2018 election, there are more complex factors at work in Bangladesh that remain underexplored and less understood. Clearly opposing HI’s stubborn demands and crushing BJI leadership did not directly translate to the Awami League (AL) being secular or Bangladesh being non-Islamic. Rather, in my view, the events in the history presented earlier that the AL may disagree with the more hard-line versions of Islam propounded by HI and BJI, it still espouses an Islamic identity for Bangladesh, the party, and the party leadership.

Commentators such as Nasr (2005), Khasru (2016), and Gowen (2014) have lauded Bangladesh as a model Muslim country where secularism, democracy, and Islam work in tandem. However, the national government’s zero tolerance towards defamation of Islam; promotion of Islam through party platforms and the state machinery; and periodic killings of secular and atheist writers, publishers, bloggers, Westerners, liberals, Sufis, and non-Muslims by extremists have cast doubt on such claims. The support of hard-line illiberal Muslim conservatives, as mentioned previously, who are known for promoting a rigid worldview in which liberal values are strongly criticized, further undermines the idea of Bangladesh as a ‘model’ secular democratic country. Against the backdrop of this debate, widespread suppression by the Hasina-led Bangladeshi government of human rights civil liberties and political opposition have chipped away at Bangladesh’s image as a liberal-democratic state. Critics have even wondered whether Bangladesh is turning into a new Afghanistan (Karlekar 2005).

Riaz analysed political liberalism in Bangladesh from 1990 to 2013, using such indicators as electoral competitiveness, democratic quality, press freedom, religious freedom, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Sources included the Polity IV database, the index of democracy of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), the World Value Survey (WVS), the press freedom index of the Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House’s survey and the US State Department’s reports on Bangladesh (Riaz 2014: 120–121). Riaz concluded that ‘the country remains stubbornly beset by democratic deficiencies’ (Riaz 2014: 120). His conclusions were worrying enough but, from 2013 onwards, Bangladesh’s political state has only worsened. For example, a 2018 report by the German-based research organization Bertelsmann Stiftung called Bangladesh a ‘new autocracy’, although the government of Bangladesh refuted this claim (Stiftung 2018). However, after the massively rigged 2018 election (e.g., see Dalton 2018; Hasan and Ruud 2019), there is little scope to accommodate the government’s claim. Fair (2018), rightfully downplaying Bangladesh’s secular democratic portrayal, argues that ‘this view never rested on strong empirical ground’.

Set against this backdrop, this book explains that one should not be surprised to see Bangladesh’s democracy move towards political Islam,² as opposed to liberalism. It will criticize those post-Islamist scholars who argue that democracy necessarily transforms Islamists to post-Islamists (i.e., democracy moderates Islamists’ demands). While this claim may be true in some cases, Bangladesh has remained outside of this post-Islamism scenario. The logic of Bangladeshi politics is best explained not through Western experiences, but through an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Beyond Clash of Civilizations and Post-Islamism: Ummah(s) and the Muslim World
• 3. Geopolitics of Ummah(s) in Bangladesh: A Historic Narrative
• 4. Awami League, Ummah, and Political Islam
• 5. The BNP, Ummah, and Politics in Bangladesh
• 6. Islamization, Ummah Consciousness and Mass Support for Political Islam
• 7. Globalization and Transnational Ummah(s) in Contemporary Bangladesh
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter