"Secularism" and its discontents

With Huntington's half-baked "Clash of Civilizations" thesis being bought wholesale by neocons and jihadis alike, Turkey in turmoil over its national character, and bombs going off in Bangladesh, there cannot be a better time to contemplate the place of religion in our body politic.

I hate disclaimers. Especially before writing. But this is one topic from which people are more likely to make snap judgements about you than any other. So, full disclosure: I'm a non-practising Muslim. I fast occasionally, pray twice a year and currently have no Muslim friends I can call "close" in both senses of the word. My family are all Bangalis, two freedom-fighters among them, no rajakars, highly non-political, and evenly-spread out over the AL/BNP divide. Most people would consider that too much information to give out to anyone with a computer and a modem. But then, most people are not about to say that secularism, 71-style has failed and then expand on why.

An essential part of "Ekatturer Chetona" was communal harmony. By which was meant that people of different religions would get along, hopefully on the basis of language. Here one notes that linguistic-ethnicities other than Bangalis were thus screwed, leading to the CHT insurgencies and Choles Ritchil's recent demise.

When the time came for implementing this noble vision, the aim was essentially short-term. The biggest threat to communal harmony was undoubtedly religion-based parties such as the Jamaat. Thus to short-circuit them, we banished all politics based on religion and wrote in "secularism" into our first, much-lamented constitution.

The mistake here is the befuddling of a "communal" and a "religion-based" party. Taj Hashmi's article here is worth a read on this point. And whatever else you might say about Hashmi, you can't say that he's an Islamist apologist. Communal parties are those that appeal to the voter's religious identity, not his sense of religiosity. Religion-based parties do the opposite. Of course, Jamaat is a mixture of both, and has been for some time. But more on that later.

An interesting aside here is to look at the emergence of Pakistan in '47. The Muslim League and the Jamaat-e-Islami: at that stage, their very names gave away their nature. The League was a communal organization, emphasizing "Muslim" identity over "Islamic" religiosity as the Jamaat did and still does. Thus, it should not come as a surprise, via Advani of all people, that Jinnah was a secular man. Of course the heavy drinker and ham-sandwich eater was a secular man in the sense that he did not practise his religion and did not force it down anyone else's throat! That did not stop him from having a "Muslim" identity and galvanising an entire generation. And here let me note, that our Bangali Muslim forefathers were among the most passionate of his supporters till his "Urdu and only Urdu" shot in the foot and his sidelining of Fazlul Haq.

Jamaat's moral bankruptcy is of course evident in this tale. How to explain why they shed blood (and apologists, they did!) for a state that only 25 years earlier they had opposed? Bloodlust, pure bloodlust. That too in the name of Islam! And it must be noted that in the process, they turned from a pure religion-based party to a mixture of the two: a religio-communal party.

After '71, instead of targetting just the intolerance bred by the communal aspect, we targetted the religious motivation in an effort to pull the rug right underneath Jamaat's feet. This had the unforeseen effect of alienating a substantial portion of (non-rajakar) Bangalis who, for good or bad, had a deep faith in their religion even if they would never vote Jamaat. Furthermore, rightly or wrongly, (and in my opinion, very wrongly!) some saw this as an attack on their religion. And no, I'm not arguing that these alienated ones are those joining the JMB, so hear me out!

The story then becomes a bit more complicated. "Secularism" is used to denote the separation of religion and politics. All well and good. But secularist policy does not denote one unique thing and comes in different flavours. For instance, in France and Turkey, it means that religion is absolutely abolished from the state. So, no yarmulkes, no gold crosses, no kirpans and no headscarves in public institutions. (Although let me note cynically here that this did not stop France from flying the flag at half-mast for Pope John Paul II. I'm almost sure that Bangladesh did not, but they should have!).

The U.S. and Canada does it differently, allowing private citizens their religion even on state property but ensuring that the state apparatus is non-religious. India again does it completely differently by including every religion within the state system, instead of excluding all of them. The mirror image of Turkey and France if you will. Thus, all religions are valid within the Indian state system, holidays are granted for all major religions and DD will carry an awfully goody-two-shoes movie to celebrate your puja, eid or dharamsala retreat. (Has anything really changed in the subcontinent over the last 2000+ years?) And yes, obviously these are over-simplifications but I have more or less conveyed the gist of these systems.

To this day I have not had a clear-cut answer to which version we wanted to implement. Perhaps we wanted to implement our own version and we just might, given the khaki rhetoric these days. Furthermore, I still do not see how secularism stops the persecution of minorities, religious or otherwise. Turkey has it's Kurds (as did Iraq), India it's Muslims and Sikhs, Indonesia the East Timorese and, lest we forget the most secular of them all, the Soviet Union their Jews. It's the last that is the most clear-cut case for the utter disconnect between secularism and tolerance, because even "Godless Marxism" failed to reverse the deep-rooted anti-Semitism in Russia. Secularism did nothing for these tragedies.

And even though I said "wrongly" before, the very word "secularism" carried some disturbing connotations to Bangali Muslims who had rough ideas about Kemal's anti-religious views (and these were no doubt exaggerated by Islamist forces) and were highly unconvinced by India's secularism with it's Oshok Sthombos and increasing tolerance for Hindutva parties. One can make a case that "secularism" was not "marketed" properly for their consumption. And because it was not so marketed, it ended up being counter-productive to the goal of harmony among the different religious groups in Bangladesh.

Making the case worse on a micro-level was the fact that the biggest adherents of "secularism" not only had vague ideas about what they meant (India? Turkey? U.S.? Soviet? All?), but were among the most Westernised of elites who pooh-pooh-ed religion as either "the opium of the masses" or "not made for advanced industrial societies". Much worse, they used evidence that is dicounted (if not discredited) even in the West nowadays on account of having been "Orientalist" at best and downright racist at worst. So far, to my limited knowledge, the only person who has tried to bring this issue to the fore is Tarek Masud. In "Matir Moina", the uncle of the boy is walking with friends over fields and streams, and they are all debating over whether Communism or Democracy is "authentic" or not and whether Islam is an "import". That scene is a must-watch not only for those concerned with what Bangalis see as culturally authentic but also for those who think that the mythical "average Bangali" cannot debate hard topics, but is passionate, easily mis-led and of course a coward who sits around all day. Tellingly, the uncle dies resisiting the Pakistani army and thus his concerns are lost.

Again on the micro-level, the secularists did not lose the moral high ground by preaching tolerance, but they did lose the "culturally authentic" ground to Islamists by adopting unfamiliar idioms, such as "Human Rights" and "false consciousness", with no attempts to indigenize them. They ended up being simply yet another (mostly urban) set with Western ideas to be resisted. And it is this resistance that is fuelling the current batch of militants, not some ideological affinity with the concept of "Pakistan" as in '71. Also on the micro-level is the initial mistake I point to: secularism is not the opposite of communalism, tolerance and respect for others are. If those two things were achieved, it would matter little whether a believer (whatever religion, organised or personal) or a secularist were in power.

Some say that globalization is to blame. It probably is. Less in the purely economic sense, but in a more holistic sense that it rewards and promotes elites, whether political, economic or intellectual, who are "culturally unauthentic" and only too happy to be so. The day secularism is sold as both authentically Bangladeshi (yes, this still needs to be done!) and Islamic is the day this resistance will fade. That however, needs getting down to the nitty-gritty, talking to madrassahs and using their own arguments, their own language and their own historical touchstones. Less the glories of secular Turkey and more the glories of Andalus. Arabic lessons anyone?

(And for those of you who are interested, I'll be doing another piece sometime this week titled "Islamism and its discontents". Not to retain some sort of "balance", a la CTG treatment of BNP and AL, but because it's something I'm genuinely interested in.)