Lost in ‘post-secular’ Bangladesh
Badruddin Umer is upset because he sees that the Bangladesh Jamaat-e Islami party and “right-wing forces” have strengthened since last year’s student-led uprising. Speaking at a meeting celebrating that upheaval at the National Press Club in Dhaka, Umer lambasted the National Citizens Party (NCP), led by some of those students, for “mixing religion with politics.”
And he deplored the fact that Bangladeshi politics don’t reflect a struggle between the working class and the exploitative economic and political establishments. He has been doing so for more than half a century.
I have always admired Umer’s commentaries and activism, espousing democracy and opposing political repression. He vociferously denounced the brutal autocracy of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed, who was overthrown by the student-led upheaval.
The problem with Umer, however, is that he has been left behind by Bangladeshi society and culture, as well as the world at large. He began his career as a Marxist-Leninist activist, disdaining religious values and gearing up for a Marxist class struggle in what was East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, strands of the progressive politics in East Pakistan, as in much of the rest of the developing world, were underpinned by Marxist themes. In 1957, while a 10th grader at a Sylhet high school, I was almost recruited to an underground Communist organization by Mofiz Ali, a well-known Communist leader from Shamshernagar in Maulvibaza district.
Beginning in the Bengali Language Movement, Islamic expressions and idioms were despised in some elite circles in East Pakistan, who identified Islam with Urdu-speaking West Pakistani elites, who opposed the demand to make Bengali a Pakistani state language.
Communism and the idea of class struggle have since vanished in Bangladesh, as elsewhere, even though our Badruddin Umer still harps on it.
Western secularism, especially the French model, totally banishes religion and religious symbols from the public sphere. That brand of secularism has been alien to “Muslim Bengal,” which spearheaded the Pakistan movement, the harbinger of Bangladesh. Islam has been the bedrock of Bengalee Muslim, hence Bangladeshi, culture and politics. Without the Muslim League government in Bengal in 1946 under Prime Minister Husseyn Shaheede Suhrawardy, Pakistan could probably never have been born, and neither would have Bangladesh.
In the 1950s and 1960s, some Bengali political and cultural activists mimicked Western secularist conduct and rhetoric, disowning the Islam-oriented social and political values of our Bengalee Muslim society. This approach never worked and has since been abandoned by most people in Bangladesh. Bangladeshis view secularism (as does the Indian National Congress) as freedom to uphold religious values and practices in private and much of the public sphere. Philosopher Charles Taylor would refer to such an arrangement as “post-secular.”
Sheikh Mujibur Rahman founded a “secular, socialist” Bangladesh. Prime Minister Hasina, his daughter, used to launch her election campaigns with prayers at the shrine of the saint Hazrat Shahjalal in Sylhet. And she performed a widely publicized hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. On her return trip, she descended from the aircraft, mumbling prayers while holding a rosary with her outstretched right hand. All the same, she professed to be a secularist.
Badruddin Umer is a discordant voice of a failed ideological experimentation of the bygone era.
~Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog ‘mustafamalik.com’, is a retired American journalist who grew up in Bangladesh.