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