A new force arrives

This revolutionary force rejects what obtains: a more or less secular democratic structure run by mainly conservative Muslim parties. What is desired to replace it is now no mystery. All orthodox Islamic schools of thought in the Subcontinent have now come to approve as truly Islamic what the Taliban did in Afghanistan -- establish a Caliphate. It was run by Mullah Umar whose word was final in all spheres of life: politics, religion, economy, and culture. He was the apex of decision-making and he may or may not consult anyone in arriving at any particular decision. A revolutionary new Islamic state in Bangladesh would have a local version of Mullah Umar as its Amirul Momineen, whose word would be final in politics, religion, economy, and culture. He would be above even the Chief Qazi and would establish total sway of Islam over the society, as he understands it.

Looked at closely, the Taliban Caliphate was a naked dictatorship of one man who had his usual human strengths and weaknesses, ranging from lust for power and greed to other venalities as well as the seemingly noble aim of enforcing Islam -- as an admixture of well-known Islamic punishments with local Afghan culture. The major preoccupation of the Bangladeshi Amirul Momineen will most likely be with the conduct of women. Most of his reforms will have to deal with women's dress and what they have to. Whether they have to observe purdah or not will have to be decided in the Bangladeshi cultural milieu.

Bangladesh is not alone in having to face such a problem. All Muslim states are now prone to it. Only India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka are immune from it. Why? Because (a) the majority population in India or elsewhere in South Asia is non-Muslim, and (b) such Muslims, qua minority, can scarcely conceive of an Islamic state in India or elsewhere. But Muslim religious types in India will applaud a Bangladeshi Islamic state. The reality is that the religious fanatics of Bangladesh are planning to institute an Islamic-seeming personalised dictatorship by exploiting a certain new interpretation of Islam. They call it Islamic state or Nizam-e-Islam. The question to be asked is what about the civic rights, guaranteed by their Constitution, of the people of Bangladesh that they enjoy today, being citizens of a largely secular democracy? Would they continue to have the same human rights and guarantees as now in a more thoroughgoing Islamic dispensation of this kind? These fundamental rights are the basis of all democracies and their absence means absence of democracy or self rule.

The question is when a Bangladeshi Caliph would control the administration and law enforcement agencies, what guarantees can his subjects have against harassment by a corrupt police or bureaucracy, especially as the Caliph will stand above the judiciary?

There were none in Mullah Omar's rule in Afghanistan. Indeed there cannot be if the Caliph is to be above every department of state.

What economic goals can an Islamic state strive to have is not known. All these Islamic revolutionaries are interested only in methods of conducting social operations and for that they hold the practices of over 1400 years ago to be worthy of copying now in a non-tribal society, vastly different from the city-state of Medina. People of Bangladesh and Pakistan now need proper economic development in which welfare of the common people has to be the main criterion. What an individual as a dictator will decide cannot be entirely predictable because there will be no checks and balances on him; his word would be law. The choice is crystal clear. Do we go for a naked dictatorship of one individual who has all the noble and ignoble characteristics of an ordinary human being, or do we opt to treat all citizens of a state as equal, giving them the ultimate authority to run their affairs as they think best?

But then these Islamic innovators claim Islam's sanction for their nostrums. How Islamic it is, is a difficult question on which to opine. The best way is to have a broad overview of history. This supposed requirement of Islam is a new construct. It is in contradistinction to old Islamic orthodoxies or sects. Old orthodoxies were able to co-exist with all manner of kings: good, bad, and indifferent. Old Islamic orthodoxies had no difficulty in adjusting to even foreign colonial rule. Islam was in no danger during the British rule over the Subcontinent for most scholars of all sects, for instance.

Exceptions there were, particularly in East Bengal. It did produce anti-British movements in the 19th century. But that was because East Bengali Muslim majority comprised tenants who were poor, while landlords exploited them to get rich. Tenants' economic conditions was conducive to supporting revolutionary ideas. While the social content of the Faraezi and other movements can be said to be modern and worthwhile, but most of their methodology and beliefs were half quixotic and half orthodox. In the Subcontinent, Islam, qua-Islam, was at peace with the British rule. Darul Uloom Deoband mostly produced Imams for village or neighbourhood mosques who actually survived on community charity. Their politics, by stretching, could only be described as making them nationalist Muslims like Maulana Hussain Ahmed Madani was. Deoband did not produce revolutionaries; it produced well-adjusted social conservatives, although generally poor.

This revolutionary Islam is a 20th century construct, mainly promoted by Jamaat-e-Islami and Muslim Brotherhood. It grew in the backwash of the Bolshevik Revolution and it too promised that no one will go hungry in a new Islamic state. It relied on imitating socialist catch-phrases and this went so far as the Jamaat organising itself like a communist party.

But we should note the inspiration of JI; it was a product of the climate of opinion created by earlier Muslim writers and poets in Urdu who moaned about Muslims' decadence and backwardness. They saw European colonialism as an enslavement and a calamitous development. Some poets wrote virtual dirges about the Muslims' decline everywhere. Let's remember also that pan-Islamism has had a particular appeal for the Subcontinental Muslims. Two eminent journalists of 20th century, viz. Maulanas Abul Kalam Azad and Muhammad Ali, wrote, as a rhetorical flourish, the slogan that "Islam provides for all eventualities from cradle to grave." That caught the imagination of all Muslims. More or less the common purpose was to enthuse all Muslims to overthrow western domination from the Islamic world, with special reference to India. But they were not simple communalists, talking to Muslims alone. Their wake-up call was for all Indians to gird up their loins and overthrow the hated foreign regime. They assumed the Hindus were anyway ready to join the struggle. Jamaat-e-Islami and the Muslim Brotherhood in other Islamic countries were exclusivists -- they talked only to the Muslims.

Islam gives no sanction to this new revolutionary Islam. This is a 20th century concept of doubtful parentage. Mainstream Islam everywhere was essentially apolitical; in practice it actually practiced the dictum of rendering unto Caesar what was his, while being good pious Muslims, observing prescribed rites -- jihad being hedged with impossible conditions. There was no collective duty other than offering prayers and performing other rites. This is what Islamic orthodoxies prescribed, while the Subcontinent's Sufistic tradition was humanistic and had no political implications other than the acceptability of a secular, composite Indian nationalism based on Indo-Persian civilisation. What we have here is a new heretical sect leading, in practice, the various orthodoxies.

The visceral enmity between Awami League and BNP is of course legendary and may become even bitter. One wishes to stay clear of old enmities. But people of Bangladesh should prevent that by being watchful. Democrats of both Bangladesh and Pakistan should forge friendly ties to fight the new menace of Islamic extremism.