Bangladesh - From A Secular State To An Islamic State, In Light Of Women’s Quranic Discussion Circles
By Samia Huq
16 Jan,
2021
Bangladesh’s
history is marked by the contestations between Bengali and Bangladeshi
nationalism, where the former is associated with secularism as a founding
political doctrine and the latter more openly acknowledging and engaging with
the nation’s religious identity and affinities as predominantly Muslim, but
also ethnically diverse.
While these
two forms of nationalism and their champions have fought for control over the
nation’s heart, the religion question has become increasingly salient in not
only blurring the boundaries between the two, but also for a reassessment of
what it means for Bangladesh to aspire to secularism. In recent years, as Islam
has increasingly become a pawn in political contests, it has also come under
securitisation in a bid to be tamed.
In such
conceptualisations, where Islam constructs the nation’s ethos, either
regressively or radically, how can the nation recast Islam to reimagine its
collective ethos? Are there embers of a “civil Islam” in Bangladesh that can
shed new light on political trajectories and possibilities? In order to answer
these questions, I look at the case of women’s religious discussion circles in
Dhaka, who had begun with an active stance to carve out a “new space” in the
religio-political terrain. In discussing these groups’ goals and aspirations,
their negotiations around norms of piety and their evolving fate under current
political conditions, I shed light on the relevance of an Islamic public and
its role in shaping a nationalist ethos that is critical and proximate to the
citizen’s experience of Islam as an integral part of her everyday life.
Secularism ‘Defiled’ and the Nation ‘Derailed’
Secularism,
as one of the founding pillars of Bangladesh’s constitution and the ethos of
the nation state, has gone through many ebbs and flows to land, 50 years later,
to a place of contestations and certain perceived irretrievable losses.
Secularism or dharmaniropekhota was enshrined in the constitution of 1972 as a
means of securing certain fundamental rights for citizens as well as to foster
an ethnic nationalism, born in opposition to the cultural and economic
marginalisation meted out by West Pakistan (Hossain 2013). As East Pakistan gave way to Bangladesh,
secularism thus intended to start the newly independent nation on a fresh
footing, where one’s Bengaliness was to unify all cleavages and prevent
cultural domination of any sort. It is in this homogeneous construction of the
category “Bengali” that constitutional debates and agreement over the term
“secularism” were forged (Siddiqi 2018). Bengali nationalism and a secular
anchoring that emerged through a removal of religion from politics was to steer
the course of the nation’s future.
The
massacre of 1975 and the subsequent era saw the word secularism pulled out of
the constitution and Islam made state religion. Thus, the prime modality of
secularisation of separating religion from politics was reversed and the
Jamaat-e-Islami (or the Islamic Society) and Muslim League were allowed to play
an active role in politics. Secular and liberal critics look upon this moment
as one that began to do away with secularism as a serious commitment
(Maniruzzaman 1990).
As
secularism in its original formulation dealt these blows, many argue that
Bangladeshi nationalism, which surfaced from thereon, did intend to be more
inclusive of ethnic groups as well as foreground the Muslim identity of the
majority, which allegedly remained submerged in an Indian Bengali, that is,
Hindu identity under Bengali nationalism. While, finally, an embrace of one’s
religious moorings pleased many, the escalating influence of Jamaat-e-Islami in
the public space, an inflow of money from the oil-rich Gulf states to fund
madrassas and other charitable projects, etc, left others worried that a Muslim
majoritarian ethos may be steering the nation’s course away from its
foundational tenets (Kibria 2011; Fair et al 2017).
The new
course charted through the introduction of Islamist groups resulted in the rise
of an Islamic public sphere, a cultural appropriation of Islam in daily life
and parlance, along with the emergence of ideas and groups unaverse to the
deployment of force and terror to make demands heard. Islam, thus, acquired a
place in nationalism and in national politics with consequences that are both
deep and far-reaching.
What we see in the transition from Bengali nationalism to Bangladeshi nationalism to contestations over a nationalist ethos where Islam acquires a certain force, is a swing to the right, whereby new Islamic players, such as the Hefazat-e-Islam have emerged and where Islam’s intractability from the public sphere and even public policy become increasingly noteworthy (Riaz 2017).
There are
certain features that mark Islam’s increasing salience. First, its public
presence has not led to its political ascendency. Second, its political place
has been secured not through its own innate motion, but through rivalry and
competition between secular parties who have found it expedient to reincarnate
Islam through different formulations and alliances, a political phenomenon present
in Bangladesh as well as in other parts of the world. We have seen the force of globalisation, that
is, transnational Islam to bear upon how Islam is placed in politics as well as
in the everyday (Riaz 2017). However, the cumulative effect of Islam in the
public space is difficult to gauge.
With regard
to its political salience, various aspirations notwithstanding, Islam has not
been able to be the formidable force standing for democracy, participation,
inclusivity, as it has been in certain other parts of the world such as
Indonesia (Hefner 2019; Riaz 2014; Lorch 2019). Nor have Bangladeshi civil
society platforms engaged Islam as a cultural value to ensure that the Islam of
the everyday remains relevant and moderate through an assessment of its practical
relevance and needs of communities, testing the extent to which Islamism is
amenable to moderation and what those mean in different contexts (Schwedler
2011). In the absence of these outcomes, authoritarian political parties and
governance in Bangladesh has in general promoted Islamisation by mobilising
certain kinds of visual politics to control crowds, thereby casting Islam
antithetically to civilised democratic impulses (Chowdhury 2019). Thus, even as
Hefazat is catered to by the ruling Awami League in many ways, the image and
affective politics that is mobilised through the imperatives of controlling
crowds and mass protests, places Islam in a negative mould as simultaneously
naïve, irrational, misogynistic and regressive—all the while focusing and
generating an incriminated figure of religious alterity (Chowdhury 2019:
180–87). But is there anything beyond
this image of alterity, and what kinds of real potential does Islam, as enacted
and experienced in the everyday, hold for the public sphere? I assess these
questions in light of women’s Quranic discussion circles that I observed during
2008–10 and have kept in touch with in the following years.
These
groups had become quite the neighbourhood phenomenon by the early 2000s. They
were part of the Islamisation facilitated by the Jamaat-e-Islami’s political
capital, influences of and relationships with Gulf states, and migration to
East Asia (Gardener 2001).
Of course,
this is not to say that Islamisation was solely extrinsic. The Islamic wave
came mostly as a social movement whose success rides on “frame resonance” which
secures a rooting of the discourse and the values it seeks to impart (McAdams
1994; Hart 1996 and Wiktorowicz 2004). These circles emerged largely through
transnational connections, and also locally as breakaway groups of the
Jamaat-e-Islami.
They
referred to themselves as Salafis, although they had no direct link with local
Salafi groups such as the Ahle Hadith. The groups preached conservative norms
and values, while being innovative, even revolutionary in affording women the
space and the means with which to become spokespersons for Islam (Mahmood 2005;
Ahmad 2009; Huq 2010; Huq 2011a).
Between Secular and Religious Nationalisms:
Lacunae or Possibilities?
The manner
in which Islam has lent itself to political appropriation and
instrumentalisation has resulted in a profanation of religious ideals, reducing
its scope of speaking to issues and in a manner that is beyond the pale of
power. The women’s discussion groups known as Islam class, Da’wa class, or
Tafsir class sought to reverse that profanation by first claiming an apolitical
stance, and second, from that position, religionising politics and forging a
symbiotic relationship between political events and personal lives (Huq 2011a).
Let me
elucidate how these get played out. Disavowing secular allegations that their
conservative position must align them with Islamists, the organisers of the
Islamic discussion circles never fail to emphasise their Salafi leaning that
leads to a desire to be free of affiliations with any political parties,
referring to piety as their sole motivation for bringing women together.
Suhaila, organiser of the Banani class, as well as a speaker in the Dhanmondi
class says, “What I am doing to touch and change the lives of family, friends
and other women looking for direction means too much to me.
The moment
I speak from a political platform, my message will get tainted. It may risk my
sermons positive impact and I may be thought to have an ulterior motive of
recruiting. I don’t want my words to lose credibility and to lose the audience
I have amassed.” Fariha, who began her class as a breakaway group from BCIS—the
girls’ wing of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami—signed a petition to hang Jamaati
leaders for crimes in 1971 on the grounds that the new generation believed in
the Bangladesh of today, free from the corruptions of their ancestors and their
wrongdoings through history. In claiming an apolitical position, the women seek
to bring to the Islamic public space a new perspective and generate a new
appeal towards Islam’s aspirations.
What does
this “newness” or “openness” that these classes represent for those who choose
to participate in them bring to the political space in Bangladesh? Can the call
for ethical and moral self-formation be thought of merely as the (disguised)
quiet and pietistic arm of Islamist mobilisation and its cultural
appropriation? Or, does the rhetoric push beyond existing Islamist narratives
to allow for alternate visions? Or, do they represent a post-Islamist movement
of being Muslim where, “Islamism becomes compelled to reinvent itself … by
emphasising rights instead of duties, plurality, instead of a singular authoritative
voice, historicity rather than scripture, and the future instead of the past”
(Bayat 2010: 243). For the discussion
circles, I argue that Islam’s public scope lies in between the pretence of
piety and post-Islamist emphasis.
These
groups need to be understood foremost for the transformations in personal lives
they seek and the manner in which they connect the private and the public. One
day after the BDR (Bangladesh Rifles) massacre in 2008, amidst many conspiracy
theories, the women in the discussion circles discussed the events to extricate
from them some moral learnings (Huq 2011b). For Shehnaz, the theory and indeed
the official conclusion to the event that discontent from disparity between the
high- and low-ranking officers resulted in the event, hit home at a personal
level, where her thoughts and actions were channelled towards the sense of
inferiority and deprivation of those under her care may feel. She told her
audience that she decided to assuage the sense of deprivation her domestic help
may feel by sitting them down and breaking up for them what they get from their
job, in addition to their salaries which are low. She narrated to the audience
that while salaries should be higher, those who work under us also need to have
a greater sense of worth in other ways by knowing that we care and that we must
care for them. Such an articulation where class cleavages are beyond monetary
compensation and have much to do with care and support, leave an address to the
discontents of the public space in a way that it is a site of learning,
reflection and personal transformation.
Others in
these groups allude to more structural factors in highlighting the requisite
remedies for personal and societal transformation. Working from the premise
that existing remedies to Bangladesh’s problems, such as micro-finance are
flawed, Fariha calls upon her group to begin by remembering God’s words and
reflect on the message of Islam to find “true” solutions to problems of peace
and public order. She says, “If society makes you discontent, remember Sura Rum
(Rise). The hour of change has come to glorify your lord and rise.” Mark
Jurgesmeyer (1996) argues that locating a religious problem and solution in
politics is the second step in the growth of religious nationalism.
He also
argues that most religious nationalisms flounder in their vision and direction
on how they should steer the nation state. In how these discussion groups
religionise politics and build self-transformation into the re-haul of societal
structures, we do see embers of a religious nationalism.
However, it
is important to understand that while the end point of the conversations taking
place in the discussion circles may have been a more profound religious
nationalism, the foundations of such a burgeoning nationalism lay embodied in
sedimented histories, and the unfolding of that nationalism cannot be gauged
without an understanding of affective attachments resulting from an
appropriation of, as well as, a negotiation with norms. Thus, as I
ethnographically observed, women’s religiosity did not grow in a linear manner.
For example, in how women came to wear the hijab (a head cover worn by Muslim
women), they staggered through stages, took into consideration the difficulties
of wearing it and even spoke of the impossibility of wearing it “fully” arguing
that an appropriation of the item of clothing and the ideal accompanying norms
must be one that matches “Bengali” signs of female propriety and modesty. What emerges in this conversation and the
contestation around the hijab, the primacy of interiority versus the
externalities that shape it and the question of modesty’s complicity in
culture, is a “heterogeneity of desire and subject production” (Hafez 2011:
60).
What we
find in the mouldings of the discussion circles and the bonds of sisterhoods
that are formed is that these Islamic women are complex and multifaceted
subjects whose lives and desires do not spell seamless narratives of
religiosity or secularity, but are rather “imbrications of religion and
secularism” (Hafez 2011: 16).
Islam in Discourse, Platforms and the Everyday
Thus, in
the contestation of Bengali and Bangladeshi nationalism, if indeed there are
sparks of a sense of nation that is motivated by religion, how is that to be
accommodated? By way of an accommodation of the early signs of a religious
nationalism, the government has deployed a range of strategies. It has built
new links and terms of appeasement with the traditionalists, that is, the
madrasa bloc. The secularist anxiety that this new relationship may increase a
religious sense of nation is offset by the policing of other groups, notably
transnational Islamist ones with a local presence. Especially in the wake of
acts of terror (that is, the blogger killings and the attack on Holey Artisan
Café), the government has clamped down on many groups that share ideas and/or
real ties with the Jamaat- e-Islami.
As an
extension of such security measures, the discussion circles have also drawn
their boundaries closer. While many preachers have “retired,” others have
embraced their new position of being quieter, more measured and speaking to
smaller numbers of people.
While these
security measures have appeased many, and curtailed terrorist links, others
worry that placing all transnational Islamic discourses, their overlaps
notwithstanding, under the same umbrella also leads to certain losses. The
conventional wisdom is that heightened force of securitisation stifles
expression and drives groups underground, rendering them angry and amenable to
unsavoury mutations. However, the loss that I would highlight is drawn from my
ethnographic exploration where religiosity was the product of certain needs
attained through affective change and embodied practices, and where women found
authority and agency and a life of meaning. When these spaces are securitised,
so are deeply held meanings and attachments. Is there another way to place
Islam in the public sphere beyond terror and security so that it can be a
vehicle and receptacle of growth?
Robert
Hefner argues that “discourse coalition” has been an important feature of how
“civic” Islam has grown in Indonesia and achieved some measure of success in
speaking for democracy and governance. Such discourse coalition, Hefner argues,
has been possible through Islam’s appropriation by civil society platforms. In
Bangladesh, beyond the tropes: terror and security, pawn in politics or
alterity representing an archaic Islam resistant to change (the madrasa bloc),
I throw light on the desire to create something new, embodied practices and
affective attachments to ask what to do with these as values that belie the
tropes. In other words, how do we assess Islamic platforms and their potential,
and what should we harness so that a lived Islam is actualised and realised
towards its fullest potential? Beyond the tropes, Islam has been mainstreamed
into some development activities beginning in the 1990s at the initiative of
USAID to train Imams to address family planning needs. One of the critiques
that the programme generated, that is, that women were not at the centre of
such a gender-sensitive campaign, was later addressed when the Asia Foundation
engaged Imams’ wives to address violence against women.
However,
there are concerns that questions concerning women’s bodies remain under the
umbrella of the guidance and patronage of their husbands. Thus, these platforms
are yet to demonstrate how they allow women to acquire positions of (religious)
authority that enables them to reflect on the vagaries of life and carve out an
Islam that is friendly towards their lives as women. Thus, there is scope to
think of ways to create platforms and build links across them so that people’s
desire to make sense of the private–public link in which Islam can remain vital
and relevant to everyday aspirations, can develop in capacious ways.
What public
Muslimness through a burgeoning religious sense of the nation may spell for the
political terrain in Bangladesh, is a complex question that must contend with
the various committed engagements and critical assessments through which the
religious self is formed, the various kinds of relationships that are forged
between individuals, groups, and associations, and the ways in which ideas can
be shared between them. Charles Hirshkind describes the moral call of the
Egyptian Islamic counter public as constituting the political not in the
conventional sense of influencing state policy or mobilising voting blocs
behind party platforms, but rather “in a way close to the sense Hannah Arendt
gives to the term: the activities of ordinary citizens who, through the
exercise of their agency in contexts of public interaction, shape the
conditions of their collective existence” (Hirschkind 2006: 8).
As educated
Bangladeshi women, young and old, set out to change the conditions of their
collective existence by questioning modernity’s myriad deliverances, state
policies and alleged conspiracies, are their ways of capturing their engagement
with Islam in a meaningful frame? In this article, I have argued that in order
to harness the “enabling” potential of the discussion groups created by and for
women, understanding the force and process behind the vitality and to allow
those elements to flourish openly through interaction, dialogue and exchange
may yield better outcomes for Islam’s footing in the nation’s psyche. To
explore the possibility of not bludgeoning the religious spirit, but to build
bridges across nationalisms, it may be useful to think beyond political
manoeuvring to seek opportunities of peacebuilding through the flow and cross
fertilisation of discourses.
As the
examples from the discussion groups show, religiosity does not unfold in a
vacuum and certainly not independent of secularity in thought, expression and
practice. Thus, the embers of religious nationalism will also do well to be in
conversation with constitutive elements of other nationalism for mutual
sharing, growth and relevance to the lives of the people who aspire to engage
with religious norms to take the nation forward.
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Samia Huq is an Anthropologist, Associate
Professor at the Department of Economics and Social Science and Research Fellow
at the Center for Peace and Justice at BRAC University, Dhaka.
Vol. 56, Issue No. 3, 16 Jan, 2021
Original Headline: Recasting Politics and
Reimagining Islam: Beyond Contested Nationalisms in Bangladesh
Source: EPW Engage
URL: https://newageislam.com/radical-islamism-jihad/bangladesh-secular-state-islamic-state,/d/124133
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