Pahela Boishakh has emerged as a significant national celebration in the recent years. The commercial motives that drive the media frenzy whenever Boishakh arrives every year are nonetheless condemnatory but what makes this occasion unique is the fact that it comes as a relief to many who have been fighting the increasing Islamization of an otherwise secular society. 14th April of the Gregorian calendar is the day when the Bengalis celebrate the Bengali New Years Day. The day in this regard is one that is culturally inclusive, a day of Bangaliyana largely synonymous with 14 April, a day in the Christian calendar.
The other aspect Pahela Boishakh is the egalitarian nature of the celebration. People from all walks join in the celebration. Bangladesh’s ever increasing class disparity, despite playing a role in the mass celebration, hardly dents its spirit. Perhaps the festival’s larger socio-economic role is worth evaluating at a time when the vapid hisses of Islamism threatens the equanimity of Bangladesh.
Just a few years back when the right-wing BNP-Jamaat coalition government was ruling Bangladesh, a reign of terror ensued, with the massive pogrom of indoctrination and pillaging of the minority communities. As soon as the coalition took over, a blood-bath rinsed the soil of Bengal. Hindus were the prime target with the houses gutted and their women raped in the rural areas of the country.
At that critical juncture, an article “BANGLADESH: A cocoon of terror” was published in the Far Eastern Economic Review. Bertil Lintner’s article was a grim reminder of the realities of a country otherwise hailed by development activists as a moderate Muslim nation. He wrote:
A REVOLUTION IS TAKING PLACE in Bangladesh that threatens trouble for the region and beyond if left unchallenged. Islamic fundamentalism, religious intolerance, militant Muslim groups with links to international terrorist groups, a powerful military with ties to the militants, the mushrooming of Islamic schools churning out radical students, middle-class apathy, poverty and lawlessness-all are combining to transform the nation (Lintner 2002).
The argument made above seems polemical if read out of context. The Bangladesh of 2000-2007 was indeed a period when this Islamist reign of terror had the potential for bursting out of the cocoon to a full-blown threat. Examples galore in the form of the Udichi Bomb blast in Jessore, the Ramna Batamul Bomb blast in 2001, a series bomb blast in the 63 (out of 64) districts of the country in 2005 and finally the gruesome attempt on the life of Sheikh Hasina, the current prime minister, on 21 August, 2004. The State at that time was reluctant to trace such carnage; in some cases it blamed the Indian intelligence, while others thought of ISI (the Pakistani Intelligence Agency).
The grim reality of the bomb blasts point to one terrible truth, that is, something was/is wrong in the state of Bangladesh. Peoples indoctrinated in the politics of violence claimed to have drawn endless inspirations from the Holy Book. Their imprisonment and subsequent punishing did bring an end to the menacing terror they unleashed but it failed to answer a very significant question that is the role of religion, specially the impact of conservative indoctrination on our society.
But to understand the conservatism that imbues the psyche of ordinary Bangladeshi Muslims, the global perspective needs to be taken into consideration. Muslims all over the world have embraced conservatism and a narrow interpretation of the great religion in the 21st Century. Though this process of Islamization and recoiling into the shell of conservatism has occurred throughout the 20th century, the September 11 attack has redefined ‘conservatism’ in the Islamic societies.
This conservative movement within Islam has a very long tradition with the establishing of Wahabism in Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Jamaat Islami in the Indian sub-continent. The movements since the time of their initiation were deeply conservative and with their “simplistic reductiveness” only offered the adherents “recourse to a hazy fantasy of seventh century Mecca as a panacea for numerous ills in today’s Muslim world …” (Said xv).
Ziauddin Sardar has been exploring the various ills that plague the Muslim societies of today. Sardar argues that the fanaticism of a few is costing the large section of Muslims across the world. In the essay “Is Muslim civilization set on a fixed course to decline”, Sardar analyzes the mind-deadening Saudi Wahabi fundamentalism, which he deems problematic and offensive to the global Muslim community. Wahabi ideology maintains that “Everything had to be found in the Koran and the Sunnah … Nothing can be read metaphorically or symbolically … in modern Wahabism, there is only the constant present. There is no real past and there is no real notion of an alternative, different future” (Sardar 2004). Such analysis provided by Sardar speaks much about the conservative movements within Islam that continues to affect Bangladeshi Muslims also.
More importantly, Sardar exemplifies how Wahabism sees the different cultural manifestations of Islam as deviant, hence, unacceptable. Hence, Muslim Spain or Mughal India and the rich cultural diversity they represent are nothing but akin to heresy in the eyes of a Wahabi-indoctrinated Muslim: “The history/ culture of Muslim cibilization, in all its greatness, complexity and plurality, is totally irrelevant; indeed it is rejected as deviancy and degeneration” (Sardar 2004). Such a rigid and over-simplified understanding of Islam, a religion that inspired humanity’s greatest achievements in the arts and sciences, is indeed pernicious and essentially anti-modern. What Wahabi Islam ends up becoming is what Rushdie identifies as “god and Mammon … unified at last”, consequently, creating a religiocentric fiefdom simultaneously producing bird-brained Mullahs and pot-bellied stock-traders.
Interestingly, the West had repeatedly pointed out to the fundamentalist tendency of a few as emblematic of the Muslim people across the world. Consequently, a dangerous form of essentialization and objectification of Islam has been perpetuated in the West that deliberately lumps Iranian nationalistic inspirations with that of Mammon-ridden Saudi fundamentalism. Even more tendentious an attempt is presenting the Palestinian liberation struggle as nothing but an Islamic propaganda to dismantle Israel.
Edward Said in his articles, books, and lectures have consistently exposed the Western hypocrisy in dealing with the Muslim world. In Orientalism (1978), now considered as a seminal work in understanding Western representation of the East, Said has depicted in details how the West has presented the Orient as the static Other awaiting European civilization to be discovered and authentically presented. In his latter books, Culture and Imperialism, and Covering Islam, Said explores further the Western misrepresentation of the Orient, in particular Islam for spreading its own brand of civilizing mission/mission civilisatrice. What this civilizing mission entails, Said argues, is an absolute annihilation of the Other cultures.
As a result, Islam that has immensely contributed to the European Renaissance is stripped off its civilizational dimensions, and is highlighted as backward, anti-Enlightenment and anti-Christian. Thus, Orientalization not only becomes a political tool of the West but also a self-degrading device for the born-again Muslim who continues to ‘orientalize’ himself/herself to remain distant from the West (which it sees as evil) and at the same time, tries to construct an imaginary picture of Islam devoid of history and cultural relevance. Analyzing Said and Sarder’s arguments regarding the West and Islam, we can see that there are two main developments regarding what has been a pressing problem for the Muslims of today’s world.
One is that Islam is an aporia that cannot be essentialized as several ruptures have taken place since Islam began its journey in Arabia in the seventh century AD. However, the Islamists in today’s world refuse to accept that Islam like all other major religions of the world “is by its nature multiform … has led myriad different cultural lives, at different times and locations” (Ahmad 290). While refusing to accept the cultural hybridity of Islam, he is befuddled by the glory of the Islamic empires of the past and constructs an imaginary concept of an existence of a priori religiously sanctioned pure communal living. Thus he either attempts to radicalize the world by spreading an inflamed message of religiosity or withdraws from the humdrums of quotidian existence to a world of self-pride.
Whether choosing to be a rebel or a recluse, the Islamist zealot fiercely disapproves of the West, since he reckons the West to be the enemy of a traditional Islamic existence. If read in context, we see that European colonization, specially British and French colonization have had an enormous impact on the lives the Muslims living in the British and the French colonies. It had led to the disorientation of the authority traditional clergy used to have in the pre-colonial times. The traditional clergy would later contest for power when the de-colonization process kicked off in the mid-twentieth century. However, the secular nationalism in modern Turkey and Arabia would eventually end Western colonization in the Middle-East. The Islamists felt they would loose control of the authority they were gradually beginning to gain when Western colonization was fading. The palpable ire of the Islamist would not go away and it is in the Saudi Wahabi tenet that we see the most horrid manifestation of such rage.
It is necessary to mention that religion played a vital role in some of the decolonizing movements though the Turkish and Arab nationalisms were predominantly secular in nature. The birth of Pakistan, a state culled out of mighty India as a nation for the Muslims of the sub-continent is one such example. In fact, the case of Pakistan is of special relevance to us since the birth of Bangladesh is inextricably related to Pakistan and its Islamicist ideology.
And, this is the second major development within which is placed the answers to many of the problems with which the Muslim world is grappling with today. Nationalism as Benedict Anderson has told us was the result of communities imagined to be able to live together in harmony. In the past or during the times of medieval Islam or Christianity such imagined community often forged the idea of nationhood in the people’s consciousness, a fact pointed out by Salman Rushdie in his essay “In God we trust”. Pakistan was such an imaginary community fusing Muslims from East Bengal with the belligerent Punjabis from the North to form a nation who would solely exist based on their religious ordination.
The birth of Pakistan finally established Islam as a powerful determinant of national consciousness among the Muslims of Bengal. However, this Islam-inspired nationhood would suffer a catastrophic defeat with the emergence of Bengali nationalism which was linguistically inspired, hence, secular in nature. This new breed nationalism inspired Bengalis-predominantly devout Muslims in private life-to oppose the imagined Islamic nation of Pakistan who would eventually fight a war to break free of Pakistan. Yet, a group of Bengalis who would still identify with Islamic nationalism opposed the dissection of Pakistan. Blaming Bengali nationalists as anti-Islamic and poodles of Hindu India, they would wage the most vicious opposition to our Independence and brandished an unprecedented reign of terror by means of killing and raping.
Many theories have so far been presented as to what led the religious Right to oppose the creation of Bangladesh. For answer, we have to revert to Ziauddin Sarder’s poignant analysis of Wahabi fundamentalism since the Islamic state of Pakistan conceived in 1947 was nothing but an attempt to re-create another Saudi state in the sultry subcontinent, but with the slightly dilutions of Wahabi principles in the form of Moududi-devised Islamism. The Right, as previously argued, was able to taste power in the new state of Pakistan. In fact, such an intimation of power was only delusional since the Pakistan state was controlled by the elites and the military. It is the same elite and the military who would provide the simulated orchestration of the breakdown of the Islamic republic which the mullahs grabbed with considered naïveté. Maulana Moududi’s supporter in Bangladesh, the Jamaat-i-Islami saw in the creation of a Bengali state a greater diminishing of their stakes. Hence, they virulently opposed Bengali nationalism.
It was only in 1971 that their ideology was won over but it did not go away from the hearts and minds of a few Bengalis who saw Pakistan as emblematic of Islamic nationhood in the subcontinent. After 1971, the feverish tide of Bengali nationalism momentarily suppressed the Islamists but with the killing of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975 and the successive military dictatorships that followed enabled the Islamists to regain space in the national political discourse of Bangladesh. Interestingly, it is only after the demise of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman that Saudi Arabia recognized Bangladesh which is suggestive of Wahabi Islam’s disapproval of Bangladeshi secular nationalism. With Saudi funding and mentorship, Islamism continued to rise in Bangladesh threatening the long standing tradition of syncretism existing in the Bengal region with regards to matters of religion and culture.
Throughout the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, Islamism continued to threaten the tolerant social fabric of Bangladesh as mullahs continued to gain strength from continuing state support. However, intellectuals and cultural activists did put up a strong resistance against Islamism and Wahabi-inspired acculturation of Islam. Things become worse following the September 11 attacks when Islamists from the UK and home-bred Islamists initiated a vile propaganda to Islamize the entire nation. Citing examples of American invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and consistent Israeli brutality against the Palestinians, the Islamists gained widespread sympathy. However, theirs was a Wahabi-style Islamic preaching, urging people to re-read the Koran and the Hadith to resist Western oppression of the Muslims across the globe.
Alarmingly, the Islamists were able to convince many in Bangladesh since the media image they got of the treatment meted out to the Muslims everyone was very negative. They were indoctrinated overnight. Not only did Bangladesh experience terrorism perpetuated by the religious fanatics but the overall social fabric turned upside down with the upper and middle echelon of the society embracing Islamism wholeheartedly. The Islam that flourished is undoubtedly the Saudi-inspired one since conservatism and religion started running hand in hand in Bangladesh.
The other dimension of this religio-centric, regressive progrom is how the BNP-Jamaat alliance government, the government holding state-power at that time suppressed liberal and leftist intellectuals and individuals by labeling anti-Islamic. In order to establish an Islamic polity, several attempts were made, including the politicalization of the judiciary, radicalization of educational institutions and also the Islamization of the ever-growing bourgeoisie.
But such attempts did not turn Bangladesh into an Islamic state overnight though likelihood of such Islamic polity were not over-ruled by many during the time Bangladesh went through this peculiar crisis. Already discussed previously, a further analysis of the intellectual and national movements undertaken by the Bengali people will make it clear any attempt at Islamization of Bangladesh will not be able to compete with the long secular tradition that has enabled the creation of the Bangladesh of today. Despite, whenever the magical years of 1952, 1971 or the dates of 21 February, 26 March or 16 December are spoken of, a few stomachs churn. For the Islamist, 14 August 1947 is the moment of glory when Islam was revived and it happened with the formation of Pakistan, the reason behind the idolization of Pakistan having already been stated.
Thus, the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971 is a strong evidence of the futility of the Islamist ideology of a united Muslim nationhood. Bangladesh’s emergence is also significant in the sense that it had punctured the religious nationalism, the core of Pakistani statehood. More importantly it had addressed the calls of the Bengali people who have been colonized for ages. Ahmed Sofa in his “Bangali Jatee Ebong Bangladesh Rashtro” (the Bengali people and the state of Bangladesh) argues that the simplistic notion of identifying the birth of Bangladesh with the language movement of 1952 hides the complex factors that are at work in the creation of a nation. He identifies certain factors such as the people’s willingness to disentangle from the Islamist Pakistani nationhood, the rallying capability of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and also the political atmosphere of the time that had contributed to the emergence of Bangladesh. Sofa writes that to emerge as a real nation Bangladesh must strive to become a “secular society” though Islam and its influence on the Muslim majority is immensely significant (Sofa 259).
The secularism that Sofa envisions in his essay has continually been threatened in Bangladesh with the two successive military regimes playing Russian roulette with our constitution. Hence the national identity has never attained a strong secular nature, however, the constitution of 1972 had defined secularism as one of the main pillars of Bangladeshi nationhood. With the de-secularization, a narrow, fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that had swept the backward Muslim societies of the world has had a profound impact on the Bangladeshi society also. Serajul Islam Choudhury, a noted Marxist intellectual has made similar arguments in his writings. In his work “Sangskritir Protipokho, Vetore Ebong Baire” he opines that ‘tension’ persists in the cultural milieu of Bangladesh with the Ijtema, a Islamic gathering pulling crowd in the form of the common folks while the bourgeoisie youth revel in a Bonnie M concert at the Army Stadium. For him the cultural seeds of the Bengali people lie far deeper than mere mimicking of the Arabs or the West.
Despite the recent halting of the fundamentalist zeal, it continues to lurk ominously in each and every corner of our society, threatening the composite social fabric of our nation. Pahela Boishakh comes each year with the message that a mass gathering can be inspiring sans the fanatic zeal that accompanies religious gatherings. Mohit ul Alam, Professor of English and columnist for the well-known Daily Prothom Alo argues in his article “Sangskritir Missron: Shamghad O Bikalpa” (Prothom Alo 2011) argues that the Bengali culture has always been composite despite there have been attempts to impose religion. He thinks the attempt to impose middle-eastern conservative culture has utterly failed as has the attempt to impose the Bollywood culture. He writes: “… the signs of an advancing society are that it is able to locate its own culture, create links with other cultures and also is able to produce and reproduce the native cultural elements socially and economically. These processes are in full swing in Bangladesh” (my trans.).
If we take ul Alam’s argument into account we will see that heterogeneity is an integral aspect of our culture. More importantly Islam, the religion of the majority today, came as a religion of peace to heal the ever dividing social gaps between the upper-caste and lower-caste Hindus. Instead of becoming the opium of the masses, it had come to the masses as an emancipatory cultural force. It had inspired a great cultural revival, fostered and nourished the agrarian communities of the Ganges plain. However, the Islam that Bengal found itself to be a new cultural force was socially and economically complex with the language and class barriers separating the rulers and the ruled.
Hence an oversimplified notion of Islam that the right wing parties of Bangladesh try to impose is not only devoid of history but also a threatening fascistic tendency that is to be rejected at all costs. Just as it is important to acknowledge the overwhelming impact of Islam on our culture, it is equally important to understand that the Bengali culture has a strong historical precedent dating back to the arrival of Islam in the subcontinent. A critical stance towards all forms of simplification or essentialization is urgent today, be it the evaluation of the role of Islam in our society today or be it the idea of nationalism or national consciousness as a privilege uncritically celebrated or taken advantage of.
Pahela Boishakh’s reminds us of our cultural and anthropological heterogeneity. We should continue to celebrate it without any zeal yet with a passionate understanding of the different forms of cultural elements that the Bengali people have picked throughout ages not only from the Hindu, Buddhist and the Islamic past but also from the English colonial past. The end result is amalgamation, hybridization, the birth of a nation-state that is culturally rich yet fighting to survive the ills of decolonization that quasi-modern nation states are still enduring with the ending of Anglo-Franco colonization. With
Pahela Boishakh instilled as our
Praner Uthsab (festival of our heart) we can at last say that we have been able to ward off the ghost of reductive theocratic culturalization from our national consciousness.
Works Cited:
Ahmad, Aijaz “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality” in Padmini Mongia (ed) Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Oxford, 2007. Print.
Choudhury, Serajul Islam “Sangskritir Protipokho, Vetore Ebong Baire” in Bhuter Noy, Bhabisshater, Dhaka: Oitijjhya. 2002. Print.
Lintner, Bertil “BANGLADESH: A cocoon of terror” in Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong, April 4, 2002, pp. 14-17
Rushdie, Salman Imaginary Homelands. London: Vintage, 2010. Print.
Said, Edward Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Print.
Sofa, Ahmed “Bangali Jatee Ebong Bangladesh Rashtro” in Morshed Shafiul Hasan (ed) Ahmed Sofa: Nirbachita Prabandha (Selected Essays of Ahmed Sofa). Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2002. Print.
Ul Alam, Mohit “Sangskritir Missron: Shamghad O Bikalpa”, Prothom Alo, 2011.
