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"Post-1977 Bangladesh and Pakistan have often been compared. But the jihad now being waged in Bangladesh against culture is linked to the grand Deobandi-Wahabi consensus in the post-1996 Afghanistan today enveloping Pakistan as a jihad blowback"
Eliza Griswold wrote in The New York Times (23 January 2005): '(Radical Islam) was not supposed to be the fate of Bangladesh, which fought its way to independence 34 years ago. While its population of 141 million is 83 percent Muslim, the nation was founded on the principle of secularism, which in Bangladesh essentially means religious tolerance. After the guiding figure of independence, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was assassinated in 1975, military leaders, seeking legitimacy, allowed a return of Islam to politics.
With the return of fair elections in 1991, power became precariously divided among four parties: the right-leaning Bangladesh National Party (BNP), the mildly leftist Awami League, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami and the conservative Jatiya. The two leading parties are led by women: the BNP by the current prime minister, Khaleda Zia, widow of the party's murdered founder; the Awami League by Zia's predecessor as prime minister, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, herself the daughter of the assassinated founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman.'
Harkatul Jihad al Islami in Bangladesh: The two main parties hate each other somewhat like the PPP and the PMLN in Pakistan. The Jamaat-e-Islami, which agitated against independence in 1971 and remains close to Pakistan - and was banned after independence for its role in the war - has slowly worked its way back to political legitimacy thanks to the BNP. Since 2001, Jamaat-e-Islami has been a crucial part of a governing coalition dominated by the BNP. In 2001, as Pakistan started outlawing the militant jihadi organisations, Bangladesh began its tilt into tough Islam. It is obvious that it was the returning jihadis from Karachi in 2001 who added the latest edge to the Islamic sweep in Bangladesh.
The dreaded Harkatul Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), whose leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar was arrested from Dubai for his involvement in the attempt to kill Pakistan's president Musharraf in 2003 and prime minister Shaukat Aziz in 2004, has been active in Bangladesh since 1996, as a part of the policy of regional jihad radiating from Kandahar under the patronage of Mullah Umar and Al Qaeda. Because of the impunity offered to HUJI by the state, other vigilante groups like Bangla Bhai in the north and Jangi Bhai in the south, are now in the field for creating their own domains of power. Six years ago when HUJI tried to kill a poet named Shamsur Rehman, the government had to clamp down on HUJI. Around 44 members of HUJI were arrested. Two men, a Pakistani and a South African, claimed they had been sent to Bangladesh by Osama bin Laden with more than $300,000, which they distributed among 421 madrassas. The seminaries in Bangladesh, now numbering 64,000, have been receiving Saudi funds and stiffening their brand of Islam.
Talibanisation of seminaries: As in Pakistan, in Bangladesh too seminaries flourish with foreign funding because of poverty and - and this few observers mention - profits to the organising clergy. Had the clergy been devoted to a higher cause they would have used the money to promote local Islam and not the hardline Saudi one now associated with the Taliban. Most of Bangladesh's madrassahs are now following the pattern of study of the madrassahs in Pakistan and have become Deobandi in their worldview. Hindus have been targeted, aided by the widespread belief that they should be expelled from the country. The jihad in Afghanistan brought in Al Qaeda money and training camps in Bangladesh began training warriors for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
'Mohammad Selimullah, the leader of a militant Islamist group based across Bangladesh's eastern border in Myanmar, was arrested in Chittagong early in 2001, and he admitted in court that more than 500 jihadis had been training under him in Bangladesh. On his computer, intelligence sources found photographs to be sent to donors showing Islamic soldiers at rest and at attention, armed with AK-47's and wearing shiny new boots. Selimullah said that his group received weapons from supporters in Libya and Saudi Arabia, among others'. In 2004 in Chittagong, 10 truckloads of weapons - the largest arms seizure in Bangladesh's history - were captured by the police.
The Karachi connection: Under pressure from the EU and US, the BNP government cracked down on two HUJI camps not far from Chittagong but the HUJI terrorists are still at large in the area. Dhaka's Islamists responded by coming out in the capital city chanting slogans about transforming Bangladesh into Afghanistan of the Taliban. LOJ is the alliance of the Islamists that most people in the country accept. It wants complete shariah imposed on the country. Its leader Mufti Fazlul Haq Amini sermonises at Dhaka's Jamia Qurania-Arabiyya and gathers 600,000 bicycle rickshaws around the mosque blocking traffic for hours. He writes in Bangla and Arabic but also knows Urdu which he learned at a seminary in Karachi during his days of jihad. His fatwas run into several volumes. It was his seminary in Chittagong that sent the HUJI attackers to poet Shamsur Rehman. Judging from the number of students he has in his Dhaka seminaries he can be called Bangladesh's Mufti Shamzai who was murdered in Karachi in 2004.
Unlike President Musharraf in Pakistan, BNP leader Khaleda Zia denies the presence of terrorist Islamic organisations in Bangladesh, mainly because her country is not targeted by UN Security Council Resolution 1373 under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter. Unless some way can be found by the UN committee under resolution 1373 to include punitive sanctions on Bangladesh, the BNP will use the Islamists to beat back its enemy party, the Awami League, whose leader Hasina Wajed was recently attacked and narrowly escaped death. Dhaka University has come under apostatising ('murtad') attacks too with professors receiving death threats and some of them paying their way out of certain assassinations. Journalists in Dhaka with secular leanings are frequently under fatwas of death. The Dhaka University Teachers' Association has staged protests to put the government on notice.
Threats accompanied with 'kafan': The first group to send death threats letters was Mujahideen al-Islam, accusing a group of 10 academicians and politicians of acting against Islam and consequently being the 'enemies of Islam'. The sinners were supposed to be killed under orders of the Quran. The other organisations sending death threats were Hizb al-Tahrir and Harkatul Jihad al-Islami, pledging the 'hoisting of the flags of Islam and Pakistan soaked in professors' blood' in Bangladesh. Ten other persons who received these threats included Communist Party of Bangladesh leader Mujahedul Islam Selim, Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal President Hasanul Huq Inu, Awami League leaders, Tofael Ahmed and Abdur Razzak, and writer and human rights activist, Shahriar Kabir. The government's state of denial has compelled intellectuals to say that the forces behind the threat letters are those 'whose aim is to merge Bangladesh back into Pakistan'.
Terrorists like Bangla Bhai and Jangi Bhai now send death threats in the name of Islam together with kafan (shroud) to those they declare as murtad (apostate). One professor Humayun Azad who wrote a book on the pro-Pakistan elements titled Pak Sarzamin Shad-Bad was also sent death threats, but the government plays down the strength of terrorist organisations. Opposition party Awami League should know because its leader Hasina Wajed nearly got killed after a grenade attack on her meeting on 21 August 2004 in Dhaka. This was to be expected because for the past five years left elements and Sufi Islam was steadily under terrorist attacks in the country. In March 1999 a musical group in Jessore was attacked, killing 10 dead. In October 1999, religious extremists attacked the Ahmedi mosque in Khulna, killing 8 and injuring many.
Hard Islam versus culture: In January 2001 a rally organised by the Communist Party was attacked in Dhaka, killing 7 people. This was followed by an attack in April 2001 on a musical soiree organized at Ramna Park in celebration of the Bengali New Year's day which is considered an act of apostasy by the Islamists. Again in June 2001, a church in Gopalganj was bombed, killing 10 worshippers. Christians have been living peacefully for centuries in Bangladesh but the incident reminds of the 'collateral' damage the Christians of Pakistan have to endure under intensive radicalisation of Islam. In October 2002, there was a simultaneous attack on four cinema halls in Mymensingh that left 21 people dead. It was the day of Eid-ul-Fitr.
In October 2002, there were a number of articles and letters in one of the Dhaka dailies urging people not to watch movies during Eid and asked the government to close down the cinema halls on Eid day. Mazars, the tombs of Muslim saints, are also coming under attack. The bombing in January 2003 at Faila Peer Mazar in Tangail left 7 dead. Next year, in January 2004, a bomb explosion at Hazrat Shah Jalal's Mazar in Sylhet left 5 dead. In both bombings, the fakirs, local Sufi singers, were the targets. There was a bomb attack again at Shah Jalal's Mazar again in May 2004. This time it was aimed at the British High Commissioner. He escaped with minor injury while 3 others died.
Denial as defence: Writing in Dawn (15 February 2005), Taj Hashmi (' Bangladesh: the Next Taliban State? ') makes a rather weak effort at debunking the New York Times article quoted above. He says the two violent bhais are just common thugs and nothing more. He seems to be defensive about the entire canvas of Islamic extremism: 'What Eliza Griswold has written about the "Islamist terror" in Bangladesh is grossly exaggerated, inaccurate, confusing and misleading'. While he concedes lawlessness, he denies its connection with Islamic extremism: 'It is frightening that even the prime minister has no control (sic!) over local godfathers and warlords who protect and promote "Islamist" thugs like the Bangla Bhai. The vast majority of Bengali Muslims do not believe in theocracy and terror. We have lessons to learn from the rise of fascism in Europe in this regard'. He will surely compare Bangladesh with Pakistan - where too people don't believe in theocracy and terror - sooner or later and learn the lesson from there, and not from the fascist states of Hitler and Mussolini.
Hashmi is surprisingly the man who
wrote a book Women and Tyranny and Islam in Bangladesh (OUP) some years
ago, reporting that after 1994, 3,000 women were killed annually through
fatwas by the village clerics. According to him in 1993 alone, 6,000 women
had committed suicide after being trapped in fatwa situations. He had even
then pointed to the US and World Bank-backed Grameen Bank Programme empowering
women as the fundamental cause, not the rising tide of Islam. But the BNP
government who went after the bhais in North and South Bangladesh in February
2005 did not have time to think of Hitler and Mussolini as it was under
pressure from the US and the EU!
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