Obsession with the West

. PHOTO: AFP

Many of us believe that developed countries like the UK, for example, close everything down and people stay at home during the weekend. On the contrary, Saturdays and Sundays are actually the most profitable and busiest days of the week for businesses. A few years back, Sundays used to be very quite, people used to go to church or stay at home. But now they all go shopping!! So if we are serious about doing business, we can easily do that because those guys on the other sides of the world are open and ready to do business - unlike us, who prefer to shut down our country in the middle of good working day and then fight about doing business on our Friday holiday.

Tradition is not killing our poor country, we are killing it by putting some of the most unsuitable and incompetent people to run this country. The first thing one needs to do when solving a problem, is to understand the problem. Sadly, a lot of us believe that we are poor because of our tradition, huge population and natural disasters. While these factors do contribute to our miseries, Bangladesh is not the only country that faces these problems. We are poor not only because we have all these problems, but also because we don't want to solve these problems. Instead, we spend Tk 350 millions on building mausoleums while our people are dying of hunger. We pass special security bills for two people while millions of our people have no security. We spend years of our time and billions of our money fighting about what happened "thirty four years ago", but spend no money on research and education which is what we need "today". We are poor not because of Islamic Friday, or Christian Sunday, but because we have our priorities wrong. We have wrong people in the wrong jobs, spending our money pursuing wrong agendas. Blaming Islam and mullahs for diseases created by politicians is a fashion these days. According to Islamic teachings, long before this 34-years old Bangladesh was born, the West was created, this planet, Heavens, Adam and Eve were created; Allah created Muhammad (peace be upon him). And it is through Muhammad (pbuh) that we have Friday. To suggest that Friday is just a tradition of some Bengalis and Arabs is a rather short-sighted representation of God's creation.