RELIGIOUS
EXTREMISM AND NATIONALISM IN BANGLADESH
By Bertil Lintner
[The paper was presented in an international
workshop on Religion and
Security in South Asia at the Asia Pacific Center for Security
Studies in
Honolulu, Hawaii. August 19-22, 2002]
INTRODUCTION
When East Pakistan broke away from the main Western part of the
country to form Bangladesh in 1971, it was in opposition to the
notion that all Muslim areas of former British India should unite
in one state. The Awami League, which led the struggle for
independence, grew out of the Bangla language movement, and was
based on Bengali nationalism, not religion. At the same time,
independent, secular Bangladesh became the only country in the
subcontinent with one dominant language group and very few ethnic
and religious minorities.
It is important to remember that a Muslim element has always been
present; otherwise what was East Pakistan could have merged with
the predominantly Hindu Indian state of West Bengal, where the
same language is spoken. The importance of Islam grew as the
Awami League fell out with the country's powerful military, which
began to use religion as a counterweight to the League's secular,
vaguely socialist
policies (many hardline socialists, however, were opposed to the
idea of a separate Bengali state in Bangladesh, which they
branded as "bourgeois nationalism.") The late
Bangladeshi scholar Muhammad Ghulam Kabir argued that Maj.-Gen.
Zia ur- Rahman, who seized power in the mid-1970s,
"successfully changed the image of Bangladesh from a liberal
Muslim country to an Islamic country."
M.G. Kabir also points out that "secularism" is a hazy
and often misunderstood concept in Bangladesh. The Bengali term
for it is dharma nirapekshata, which literally translates to
"religious neutrality." Thus the word
"secularism" in a Bangladeshi context has a subtle
difference in meaning from its use in the West.
In 1977, Zia dropped secularism as one of the four cornerstones
of Bangladesh's constitution (the other three were democracy,
nationalism, and socialism, although no socialist economic system
was ever introduced) and made the recitation of verses from the
Qur'an a regular practice as meetings with his newly formed
political organization, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP),
which became the second biggest party in the country after the
Awami League. The marriage of convenience between the military -
which needed popular appeal and an ideological platform to
justify its opposition to the Awami League - and the country's
Islamic forces survived Zia's assassination in 1981.
In some respects, it grew even stronger under the rule of
Lt.-Gen. Hossain Muhammad Ershad (1982-90). In 1988, Ershad made
Islam the state religion of Bangladesh, thus institutionalizing
the new brand of nationalism with an Islamic flavor introduced by
Zia. Ershad also changed the weekly holiday from Sunday to
Friday, and revived the Jamaat-e-Islami to counter secular
opposition. The Jamaat had supported Pakistan against the Bengali
nationalists during the liberation war, and most of its leaders
had fled to (West) Pakistan after 1971. Under Zia, they came back
and brought with them new, fundamentalist ideas. Under Ershad,
Islam became a political factor to be reckoned with. Ershad was
deposed in December 1990 following anti-government protests, and
was later convicted of a number of offences and jailed. But this
did not lead to a return to old secular practices. Zia's widow
and the new leader of the BNP, Khaleda Zia, became prime minister
after a general election in February 1991. This was a time when
the Islamic forces consolidated their influence in Bangladesh,
but it came to a halt when the Awami Legaue, led by Sheikh Hasina
Wajed, the daughter of Bangladesh's founding father, Sheikh Mujib
ur-Rahman, won the 1996 election. Five years later, an electoral
4-party alliance led by Khaleda Zia's BNP came to power - and the
new coalition that took over included for the first time two
ministers from the Jamaat, which had emerged as the third largest
party, capturing 17 seats in the 300- strong parliament.
The BNP rode on a wave of dissatisfaction with the Awami League,
which many perceived as corrupt, but the the 4-party alliance was
able to win a massive majority - 191 seats for the BNP and 23
seats for its three allies - only because of the British-style
system with one winner per constituency, and the alliance members
all voted for each other. The Awami League remains the single
biggest political partyin Bangladesh with 40% of the popular
vote, but it secured only 62 seats (or 20.66% of the MPs) in the
election (it now has 58 seats because four were relinquished due
to election of MPs from more than one seat). Expectations were
high on the new government, which many hoped would be
"cleaner" than the previous one. In June 2001, the
Berlin-based organization Transparency International had in its
annual report ranked Bangladesh the world's most corrupt country.
But since the new government took over in October 2001, very
little has changed in that regard. Further, violence has become
widespread and much of it appears to be religiously and
politically motivated. The Society for Environment and Human
Development (SEHD), a well-respected Bangladeshi NGO, quotes a
local report that says that non-Muslim minorities have suffered
as a result: "The intimidation of the minorities which had
begun before the election, became worse afterwards."
Amnesty International reported in December 2001 that Hindus - who
now make up less than 10% of Bangladesh's population of 130
million in particular have come under attack. Hindu places
of worship have been ransacked, villages destroyed and scores of
Hindu women are reported to have been raped. While the Jamaat may
not be directly behind these attacks, its inclusion in the
government has meant that more radical groups feel they now enjoy
protection from the authorities and can act with impunity. The
most militant group, the Harkat-ul- Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI, or the
Movement of Islamic Holy War), is reported to have 15,000
members. Bangladeshi Hindus and moderate Muslims hold them
responsible for many of the recent attacks against religious
minorities, secular intellectuals and journalists. In a statement
released by the US State Department on May 21, 2002, HUJI is
described as a terrorist organization with ties to Islamic
militants in Pakistan.
While Bangladesh is yet far from becoming another Pakistan,
Islamic forces are no doubt on the rise, and extremist influence
is growing, especially in the countryside. According to a foreign
diplomat in Dhaka: "In the 1960s and 1970s, it was the
leftists who were seen as incorruptible purists. Today, the role
model for many young men in rural areas is the dedicated Islamic
cleric with his skull cap, flowing robes and beard."
THE RETURN OF THE
JAMAAT-E-ISLAMI
The idea that the Muslim-dominated parts of British India should
become a separate country was articulated for the first time in a
short essay written in 1933 by an Indian Muslim student at
Cambridge, Rahmat Ali. He even proposed a name for the new state
- Pakistan - which was an acronym based on the nations that would
compose it: the Punjab, Afghan (the Northwest Frontier), Kashmir,
Indus (or Sindh) and BaluchiSTAN. The new name also meant
"the Land of the Pure."
However, the acronym did not include India's most populous Muslim
province, East Bengal, and, at first, most Islamic groups opposed
the idea of religious nationalism. The most prestigious Islamic
university in the subcontinent, the Darul Uloom, was located at
Deoband in Saharanpur district of what now is Uttar Pradesh in
India, and its leaders strongly supported the Indian nationalist
movement led by the Congress. The Jamaat-e-Islami, which was
founded in 1941 by Maulana Abul Ala Mauddudi and had grown out of
the Deoband Madrassa (as the university became known) went to the
extent of "alleging that the demand for a separate state
based on modern selfish nationalism amounted to rebelling against
the tenets of Islam."
But gradually, the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, won
support for the Pakistan idea, and when India became independent
in August 1947, two states were born: the secular but
Hindu-dominated Union of India - and the Islamic state of
Pakistan, which consisted of two parts, one to the west of
India and the other to the east. The Jamaat became one of the
strongest supporters of the Pakistan idea, and, somewhat
ironically, the Deobandi movement through its network of
religious schools, or madrassas, developed into a breeding ground
for Pakistan-centered Islamic fundamentalism. Over the years, the
Deobandi brand of Islam has become almost synonymous with
religious extremism and fanaticism.
The Deobandis had actually arisen in British India not as a
reactionary force but as a forward-looking movement to unite and
reform Muslim society in the wake of oppression the community
faced after the 1857 revolt, or "Mutiny" as the British
called it.
But in independent Pakistan - East and West - new Deobandi
madrassas were set up everywhere, and they were run by
semi-educated mullahs who, according to Pakistani journalist
Ahmed Rashid, "were far removed from the original reformist
agenda of the Deobandi school."
Much later, it was from these madrassas Afghanistan's dreaded
Talibans ("Islamic Students") were to emerge. The
Jamaat was from the beginning inspired by the Ikhwan
ul-Muslimeen, or
the Muslim Brotherhood, which was set up in Egypt in 1928 with
the aim of bringing about an Islamic revolution and creating an
Islamic state. When they had come to accept Pakistan as that
Islamic state, Bengali nationalism was totally unacceptable. The
Jamaat's militants fought alongside the Pakistan army against the
Bengali nationalists. Among the most notorious of the Jamaat
leaders was Abdul Kader Molla, who became known as "the
Butcher of Mirpur," a Dhaka suburb which in 1971 was
populated mainly by non-Bengali Muslim immigrants. Today, he is
the publicity secretary of Bangladeshi Jamaat, and, despite his
background, was granted a US visa to visit New York in the last
week of June, 2002. In 1971, he and other Jamaat leaders were
considered war criminals by the first government of independent
Bangladesh, but they were never prosecuted as they had fled to
Pakistan.
The leaders of the Jamaat returned to Bangladesh during the rule
of Zia and Ershad because they were invited to come back, and
they also saw Ershad especially as a champion of their cause.
This was somewhat ironic as Ershad was - and still is - known as
a playboy and hardly a religiously-minded person. But he had
introduced a string of Islamic reforms - and he needed the Jamaat
to counter the Awami League, and, like his predecessor Zia, he
had to find ideological underpinnings for what was basically a
military dictatorship. The problem was that the Jamaat had been
discredited by its role in the liberation war - but, as a new
generation emerged, that could be "corrected." Jamaat's
Islamic ideals were taught in Bangladesh's madrassas, which
multiplied at a tremendous pace. The madrassas fill an important
function in an impoverished country such as Bangladesh, where
basic education is available only to a few. Today, there are an
estimated 64,000 madrassas in Bangladesh, divided into two kinds.
The Aliya madrassas are run with government support and control,
while the Dars-e-Nizami or Deoband-style madrassas are totally
independent. Aliya students study for 15-16 years and are taught
Arabic, religious theory and other Islamic subjects as well as
English, mathematics, science and history. They prepare
themselves for employment in government service, or for jobs in
the private sector like any other college or university student.
In 1999, there were 7,122 such registered madrassas in
Bangladesh.
The much more numerous Deobandi madrassas are more
"traditional"; Islamic studies dominate, and the
students are taught Urdu (the national language of Pakistan),
Persian and Arabic. After finishing their education, the students
are incapable of taking up any mainstream profession, and the
mosques and
the madrassas are their main sources of employment. As
Bangladeshi journalist Salahuddin Babar points out: "Passing
out from the madrassas, poorly equipped to enter mainstream life
and professions, the students are easily lured by motivated
quarters who capitalize on religious sentiment to crate fanatics,
rather than modern Muslims."
The consequences of this kind of madrassa education can be seen
in the growth of the Jamaat. It did not fare well in the 1996
election, capturing only three seats in the parliament and 8.61%
of the votes.16 Its election manifesto was also quite carefully
worded, perhaps taking into consideration the party's reputation
and the fact that the vast majority of Bangladeshis remain
opposed to Sharia law and other extreme Islamic practices. The
23-page document devoted 18 pages to lofty election promises, and
only five to explaining Jamaat's political stand. The party tried
to reassure the public that it would not advocate chopping off
thieves' hands, stoning of people committing adultery, or banning
interest - at least not immediately. According to the NGO SEHD:
"The priority focus would be alleviation of poverty,
stopping free mixing of sexes and thus awakening the people to
the spirit of Islam and then eventually step by step the Islamic
laws would be introduced."
It is impossible to determine how much support the Jamaat
actually had in the 2001 election as it was part of an alliance
whose various members voted for each other against the Awami
League, but its 17 seats in the new parliament - and two
ministers in the government - suggest a dramatic increase. Its
youth organization, Islami Chhatra Shibir (ICS), is especially
active. It is a member of the International Islamic Federation of
Student Organizations as well as the World Assembly of Muslim
Youth and has close contacts with other radical Muslim groups in
Pakistan, the Middle East, Malaysia and Indonesia. One of its
main strongholds is at the university in Chittagong, and it
dominates the Deobandi madrassas all over the country, from where
it draws most of its new members. It has been implicated in a
number of bombings and politically and religiously motivated
assassinations.
On April 7, 2001, two leaders of the Awami League's youth and
student front were killed by ICS activists and on June 15, an
estimated 21 people were killed and over 100 injured in a bomb
blast at the Awami League party office in the town of
Narayanganj. Two weeks later, the police arrested an ICS activist
for his alleged involvement in the blast.18 A youngish Islamic
militant, Nurul Islam Bulbul, is the ICS's current president, and
Muhammad Nazrul Islam its general secretary.
For many years the mother party, the Jamaat, was led by Gholam
Azam, who had returned from Pakistan when Zia was still alive and
in power. He resigned in December 2000, and Motiur Rahman Nizami
took over as the new Amir of the party amid wide protests and
demands that he be put on trial for war crimes he committed
during the liberation war as the head of a notorious paramilitary
force, the Al-Badar. In one particular incident on December 3,
1971, some members of that force seized the village of
Bishalikkha at night in search of freedom fighters, beating many
and killing eight people. When Nizami's appointment was made
public, veterans of the liberation war burnt an effigy of him
during a public rally. In October 2001, Nizami was appointed
minister for agriculture, an important post in a mainly
agricultural country such as Bangladesh. His deputy, Ali Ahsan
Muhammad Mujahid, became minister for social welfare. The
terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, occurred
during the election campaign in Bangladesh, when the country was
ruled by a caretaker government. But the outgoing prime minister,
the Awami League's Sheikh Hasina, and then opposition leader
Khaleda Zia of the BNP, condemned the attacks and both, if they
were elected, offered the United States use of Bangladesh's air
space, ports and other facilities to launch military attacks
against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanstan. Many Bangladeshis
were moved by the loss of as many as 50 of their countrymen in
the attacks on the World Trade Center. While some of them were
immigrants working as computer analysts and engineers, most seem
to have been waiters at the Window on the World restaurant who
were working hard to send money back to poor relatives in
Bangladesh. A Bangladeshi embassy official in Washington branded
the attacks "an affront to Islam
an attack on
humanity." Jamaat's stand on the "war against
terrorism," however, contrasts sharply to that of the more
established parties. Shortly after the US attacks on Afghanistan
began in October 2001, the Jamaat created a fund purportedly for
"helping the innocent victims of America's war."
According to the Jamaat's own announcements, 12 million
Bangladeshi taka ($210,000) was raised before the effort was
discontinued in March 2002. Any remaining funds, the Jamaat then
said, would go to Afghan refugees in camps in Pakistan.
2. THE RISE OF THE
HARKAT-UL-JIHAD-AL-ISLAMI (HUJI) AND OTHER EXTREMIST GROUPS
The growth of the Jamaat during the Ershad regime paved the way
for the establishment of even more radical groups when the BNP
returned to power in 1991. According to Bangladeshi journalists,
in the early 1990s Bangladeshi diplomats in Saudi-Arabia issued
passports to Pakistani militants in the kingdom to enable them to
escape to Bangladesh.22 Other extremists from Pakistan - and
perhaps also Afghanistan - appear to have been able to enter
Bangladesh in the same way during that period.
These men were instrumental in building up HUJI, which was first
formed in 1992, reportedly with funds from Osama bin Laden. The
existence of firm links between the new Bangladeshi militants and
Al-Qaeda was proven when Fazlul Rahman, leader of the "Jihad
Movement in Bangladesh" (to which HUJI
belongs), signed the official declaration of "holy war"
against the United States on February 23, 1998. Other signatories
included bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri (leader of the Jihad Group
in Egypt), Rifa'i Ahmad Taha aka Abu-Yasir (Egyptian Islamic
Group), and Sheikh Mir Hamzah (secretary of the
Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan). HUJI is headed by Shawkat Osman aka
Maulana or Sheikh Farid in Chittagong and, according to the US
State Department, has "at least six camps" in
Bangladesh. Like the ICS it draws most of its members from the
country's Deobandi madrassas, and, also like the ICS, the group
has shown that it is capable of extreme violence. Bangladesh's
Islamic radicals first came to international attention in 1993,
when author Taslima Nasrin was forced to flee the country after
receiving death threats. The fundamentalists objected to her
critical writings about what she termed outdated religious
beliefs. Extremist groups offered a $5,000 reward for her death.
She now lives in exile in France. While Nasrin's outspoken,
feminist writings caused controversy even among moderate
Bangladeshi Muslims, the entire state was shocked when, in early
1999, three men attempted to kill Shams ur-Rahman, a well-known
poet and a symbol of Bangladesh's secular nationhood. During the
ensuing arrests, the police said they seized a list of several
intellectuals and writers, including Nasrin, whom Bangladeshi
religious extremists branded "enemies of Islam."
Bangladeshi human rights organizations openly accuse HUJI of
being behind both the death threats against Nasrin and the
attempt to kill Rahman. The US State Department notes that HUJI
has been accused of stabbing a senior Bangladeshi journalist in
November 2000 for making a documentary on the plight of Hindus in
Bangladesh, and the July 2000 assassination attempt of then prime
minister Sheikh Hasina. As with the Jamaat and the ICS, HUJI's
main stronghold is in the lawless southeast, which includes the
border with Burma. With its fluid population and weak law
enforcement, the region has long been a haven for smugglers, gun
runners, pirates, and ethnic insurgents from across the Burmese
border. The past decade has seen a massive influx of weapons,
especially small arms, through the fishing port of Cox's Bazaar,
which has made the situation in the southeast even more dangerous
and volatile. Typically, the winner in the 2001 election in one
of the constituencies in Cox's Bazaar, BNP candidate Shahjahan
Chowdhury, was said to be supported by "the man allegedly
leading smuggling operations in [the border town of]
Teknaf." Instead of the regular army, the paramilitary
Bangladesh Rifles was deployed in this constituency to help the
police in their electoral peacekeeping. This was, according to
the NGO SEHD, "criticised by the local people who alleged
that the Bangladesh Rifles were well connected with the smuggling
activities and thus could take partisan roles." In one of
the most recent high-profile attacks in the area, Gopal Krishna
Muhuri, the 60-year-old principal of Nazirhat College in
Chittagong and a leading secular humanist, was gunned down in
November 2001 in his home by four hired assassins, who belonged
to a gang patronized by the Jamaat. India, which is viewing the
growth of Bangladesh's Islamic movements with deep concern, has
linked HUJI militants to the attack on the American Center in
Kolkata (Calcutta) in January 2002, and a series of bomb blasts
in the state of Assam in mid-1999. On May 10-11, 2002, nine
Islamic fundamentalist groups, including HUJI, met at a camp near
the small town of Ukhia south of Cox's Bazaar and formed the
Bangladesh Islamic Manch Association). The new umbrella
organization also includes one purporting to represent the
Rohingyas, a Muslim minority in Burma, and the Muslim Liberation
Tigers of Assam, a small group operating in India's northeast.By
June, Bangladeshi veterans of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan
in the 1980s were reported to be training members of the new
alliance in at least two camps in southern Bangladesh.
3. THE PLIGHT OF
THE ROHINGYAS
The Arakan area of Burma was separated from the rest of the
country by a densely forested mountain range, which made it
possible for the Arakanese - most of whom are Buddhist - to
maintain their independence until the late 18th century. Contacts
with the outside world had until then been mostly to
the west, which, in turn, had brought Islam to the region. The
first Muslims on the Arakan coast were Moorish, Arab and Persian
traders who arrived between the 9th and the 15th centuries. Some
of them stayed and married local women. Their offspring became
the forefathers of yet another hybrid race, which much later was
to become known as the Rohingyas. Like the people in the
Chittagong area, they speak a Bengali dialect interspersed with
words borrowed from Persian, Urdu and Arakanese.There is no
evidence of friction between them and their Buddhist neighbors in
the earlier days. Indeed, after 1430 the Arakanese kings, though
Buddhists, even used Muslim titles in addition to their own names
and issued medallions bearing the kalima, or Muslim confession of
faith. Persian was the court language until the Burmese invasion
in 1784. Burmese rule lasted until the first Anglo-Burmese war of
1824-26, when Arakan was taken over by the British along with the
Tenasserim region of southeastern Burma.
When Burma was a part of British India, the rich ricelands of
Arakan attracted thousands of seasonal laborers, especially from
the Chittagong area of adjacent East Bengal. Many of them found
it convenient to stay since there was already a large Muslim
population who spoke the same language, and, at that time, no ill
feeling towards immigrants from India proper - unlike the
situation in other parts of Burma, where people of subcontinental
origin were despised. At the same time, Buddhist Arakanese
migrated to East Bengal and settled along the coast between
Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar. The official border, the Naf river,
united rather than separated the two British territories.
But the presence of a Muslim minority in Arakan became an issue
after Burma's independence in 1948. The Buddhist and Muslim
communities had become divided during World War Two; the
Buddhists had rallied behind the Japanese while the Muslims had
remained loyal to the British. Some Muslims, fearing reprisals
from the Buddhists once the British were gone, rose up in arms,
demanding an independent state, and the Burmese army was sent in
to quell the rebellion. Predominantly Buddhist Burma never really
recognized the Arakanese Muslims - who in the 1960s began to
refer to themselves as "Rohingya," a term of disputed
origin - as one of the country's "indigenous" ethnic
groups. As such, and because of their different religion and
physical appearance, they have often become convenient scapegoats
for Burma's military government to rally the public against
whenever that country has been hit by an economic or political
crisis.
In March 1978, the Burmese government launched a campaign
code-named Naga Min (Dragon King) in Arakan, ostensibly to
"check illegal immigrants." Hundreds of heavily armed
troops raided Muslim neighborhoods in Sittwe (Akyab) and some
5,000 people were arrested. As the operation was extended to
other parts of Arakan, tens of thousands of Rohingyas crossed the
border to Bangladesh. By the end of June, an approximately
200,000 Rohingyas had fled, causing an international outcry.35
Eventually, most of the refugees were allowed to return, but
thousands found it safer to remain on the Bangladesh side of the
border. Entire communities of "illegal immigrants" from
Burma sprung up along the border south of Cox's Bazaar, and a
steady trickle of refugees from Burma continued to cross into
Bangladesh throughout the 1980s.
The immensely wealthy Saudi-Arabian charity Rabitat al Alam al
Islami began sending aid to the Rohingya refugees during the 1978
crisis, and it also built a hospital and a madrassa at Ukhia
south of Cox's Bazaar. Prior to these events, there was only one
political organization among the Rohingyas on the
Bangladesh-Burma border, the Rohingya Patriotic Front (RPF),
which was set up in 1974 by Muhammad Jafar Habib, a native of
Buthidaung in Arakan and a graduate of Rangoon University. He
made several appeals - most of them unsuccessful - to the
international Islamic community for help, and maintained a camp
for his small guerrilla army, which operated from the Bangladeshi
side of the border.
In the early 1980s, more radical elements among the Rohingyas
broke away from the RPF to set up the Rohingya Solidarity
Organization (RSO). Led by a medical doctor from Arakan, Muhammad
Yunus, it soon became the main and most militant faction among
the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and on the border. Given its more
rigid religious stand, the RSO soon enjoyed support from
like-minded groups in the Muslim world. These included
Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh and Pakistan, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's
Hizb-e-Islami in Afghanistan, Hizbe-ul Mujahideen in Kashmir and
Angkatan Belia Islam sa-Malaysia (ABIM), the Islamic Youth
Organization of Malaysia. Afghan instructors were seen in some of
the RSO camps along the Bangladesh-Burma border, while nearly 100
RSO rebels were reported to be undergoing training in the Afghan
province of Khost with Hizb-e-Islami Mujahideen.
2nd. September 2002