Bangledesh is just the sort of place where the Jihad will grow in the future. This article does a great job of explaining how it is happening.
Magazine > The Next Islamist Revolution?" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/magazine/23BANG.html?ex=1107463938&ei=1&en=40a2becb0f7ba9ca">The New York Times > Magazine > The Next Islamist Revolution?
Foreign journalists in Bangladesh are followed by intelligence agents; people that reporters interview are questioned afterward. Nonetheless, it is possible to travel through Bangladesh and observe the increased political and religious repression in everyday life, and to verify the simple remark by one journalist there: ''We are losing our freedom.'' The global war on terror is aimed at making the rise of regimes like that of the Taliban impossible, but in Bangladesh, the trend could be going the other way. In Bangladesh, ''Islam is becoming the legitimizing political discourse,'' according to C. Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan, federally financed policy group in Washington. ''Once you don that religious mantle, who can criticize you? We see this in Pakistan as well, where very few people are brave enough to take the Islamists on. Now this is happening in Bangladesh.'' The region, Fair added, has become a haven where jihadis can move easily and have access to a friendly infrastructure that allows them to regroup and train.
Complete Article
The Next Islamist Revolution?
January 23, 2005
By ELIZA GRISWOLD
Before dawn one morning this past November in Bagmara, a
village in northwestern Bangladesh, six puffy-eyed men
gathered beneath a cracked-mud stairwell to describe a man
they consider their leader, a former schoolteacher called
Bangla Bhai. The quiet was broken now and then by donkey
carts clattering past, as village women, seated on the
backs of the carts, were taken to the market. The women
wore makeshift burkas -- black, white, canary yellow -- and
kept their heads down, and this, the men explained, was
Bangla Bhai's doing.
Last spring, Bangla Bhai, whose followers probably number
around 10,000, decided to try an Islamist revolution in
several provinces of Bangladesh that border on India. His
name means ''Bangladeshi brother.'' (At one point he said
his real name was Azizur Rahman and more recently claimed
it was Siddiqul Islam.) He has said that he acquired this
nom de guerre while waging jihad in Afghanistan and that he
was now going to bring about the Talibanization of his part
of Bangladesh. Men were to grow beards, women to wear
burkas. This was all rather new to the area, which was
religiously diverse. But Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh,
as Bangla Bhai's group is called (the name means Awakened
Muslim Masses of Bangladesh), was determined and violent
and seemed to have enough lightly armed adherents to make
its rule stick.
Because he swore his main enemy was a somewhat derelict but
still dangerous group of leftist marauders known as the
Purbo Banglar Communist Party, Bangla Bhai gained the
support of the local police -- until the central
government, worried that Bangla Bhai's band might be
getting out of control, ordered his arrest in late May.
''There used to be chaos and confusion here,''
Siddiq-ul-Rahman, one of Bangla Bhai's senior lieutenants,
said through an interpreter that morning in Bagmara. The
sun was coming up and a crowd was gathering.
Siddiq-ul-Rahman boasted that police officers attend Bangla
Bhai's meetings armed and in uniform. The Bangladeshi
government's arrest warrant doesn't seem to have made much
difference, although for now Bangla Bhai refrains from
public appearances. The government is far away in Dhaka,
and is in any case divided on precisely this question of
how much Islam and politics should mix. Meanwhile, Bangla
Bhai and the type of religious violence he practices are
filling the power vacuum.
Bangladeshi politics have never strayed far from violence.
During the war for independence from Pakistan, in 1971,
three million people died in nine months. Thuggery has been
a consistent feature of political life since then and is
increasingly so today. This has made it difficult to get an
accurate picture of phenomena like Bangla Bhai. Under the
current government, which has been in power since 2001 and
includes two avowedly Islamist parties, journalists are
frequently imprisoned. Last year, three were killed while
reporting on corruption and the rise of militant Islam.
Moreover, 80 percent of Bangladeshis live in villages that
can be hard to reach and are under the tight control of
local politicians. Foreign journalists in Bangladesh are
followed by intelligence agents; people that reporters
interview are questioned afterward.
Nonetheless, it is possible to travel through Bangladesh
and observe the increased political and religious
repression in everyday life, and to verify the simple
remark by one journalist there: ''We are losing our
freedom.'' The global war on terror is aimed at making the
rise of regimes like that of the Taliban impossible, but in
Bangladesh, the trend could be going the other way.
In Bangladesh, ''Islam is becoming the legitimizing
political discourse,'' according to C. Christine Fair, a
South Asia specialist at the United States Institute of
Peace, a nonpartisan, federally financed policy group in
Washington. ''Once you don that religious mantle, who can
criticize you? We see this in Pakistan as well, where very
few people are brave enough to take the Islamists on. Now
this is happening in Bangladesh.'' The region, Fair added,
has become a haven where jihadis can move easily and have
access to a friendly infrastructure that allows them to
regroup and train.
Another close observer of Bangladeshi politics, Ali Dayan
Hasan of Human Rights Watch, told me recently: ''The
practical effect of politics along religious lines is that
you start to accept a religious identity and reject every
other. It's absolutely crucial to understand that this is
happening in Bangladesh right now.''
This 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 Rahman, 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 (B.N.P.), the mildly leftist Awami League, the
Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami and the conservative Jatiya. The
two leading parties are led by women: the B.N.P. 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 Wazed, herself the daughter
of the assassinated founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.
Zia and Sheikh Hasina, as she is known, have a legendary
antipathy toward each other. Each of their parties
regularly accuses the other of illegal acts. When Sheikh
Hasina very narrowly escaped assassination last August,
B.N.P. activists all but accused her of staging the attack
in order to acquire political advantage. Zia's government
has been unable to identify the assassins -- who lobbed
grenades into a party rally, killing at least 20 and
wounding hundreds -- and Sheikh Hasina has refused even to
discuss the investigation with the prime minister, saying:
''With whom should I meet? With the killers?''
The political breach between those two parties is being
filled primarily by Jamaat-e-Islami, which agitated against
independence in 1971 and remains close to Pakistan. The
group was banned after independence for its role in the war
but has slowly worked its way back to political legitimacy.
The party itself has not changed much -- it was always
socially conservative and unafraid of violence. The
political context, however, has changed enough to give it
greater power. Since 2001, Jamaat-e-Islami has been a
crucial part of a governing coalition dominated by the
B.N.P. The two parties have ties dating to the late 1970's,
but it is only since 2001 that a politically aggressive
form of Islam has found, for the first time since
independence, a strong place at the top of Bangladeshi
politics.
It has found a corresponding position at the bottom of
Bangladeshi politics as well, in the social scrum that
produces figures like Bangla Bhai. (Opposition politicians
have linked Bangla Bhai to Jamaat-e-Islami, a tie that
Jamaat and Bangla Bhai have both denied.) The border
provinces have, since independence, harbored a
proliferation of armed groups that either Bangladesh,
India, Myanmar or Pakistan, or some region or faction in
one of those countries, has been willing to support for its
own political reasons. By the early 1990's Islamist groups
began appearing, mainly at the periphery of the jihad
centered on Afghanistan. The most important of these has
been the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Huji), which has been
associated with Fazlul Rahman, who signed Osama bin Laden's
famous declaration in 1998 endorsing international,
coordinated jihad -- the document that introduced Al Qaeda
to the larger world. But Bangla Bhai's group and others
have since emerged and are making their bids for power.
''Bangladesh is becoming increasingly important to groups
like Al Qaeda because it's been off everyone's radar
screen,'' says Zachary Abuza, the author of ''Militant
Islam in Southeast Asia'' and a professor of political
science at Simmons College in Boston. ''Al Qaeda is going
to have to figure out where they can regroup, where they
have the physical capability to assemble and train, and
Bangladesh is one of these key places.''
Six years ago, Huji chose its first prominent target:
Shamsur Rahman, who is Bangladesh's leading poet. Recently,
at his home in Dhaka, Rahman began telling me the story of
the attack as he pulled a sheaf of papers from a pigeonhole
in his writing desk, on which sat a bottle of black-currant
soda and a copy of Dante's ''Inferno.'' Above the desk hung
an ink sketch of the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet,
Rabindranath Tagore, as well as a yellowing photograph of
Rahman's father.
Rahman, who is 75, is birdlike and wears his hair in a
fluffy white pageboy. Most of his poems are love poems, but
some address the rise of militant Islam in his country. ''I
am not against religion,'' he said, smiling wryly. ''I am
against fanaticism.'' He reached for his mug of hot water.
It was the holy month of Ramadan, and Rahman's family had
just broken the day's fast.
Downstairs, four policemen were eating a meal prepared by
Rahman's daughter-in-law Tia. Rahman has lived under police
protection since Jan. 18, 1999, when three young men
appeared at his house and asked for a poem. Tia refused to
let them in. The poet was resting, she said. But the men
begged for just a minute of his time, so Tia obliged.
Immediately one of the men ran upstairs and tried to chop
Rahman's neck with an ax. ''He tried to cut my head off,
but my wife took me in her arms and my daughter-in-law
too,'' Rahman recounted. The two women fended off the blows
until the neighbors, hearing their screams, rushed into the
house and caught the attackers.
Rahman gestured toward the women standing in the doorway.
Tia looked exhausted. The hair around her face was damp
from cooking. Rahman's wife, Zahora, not more than four
feet tall, held her diminutive hands in front of her and
smiled. (She understands English but cannot speak it.)
Rahman pointed out the shiny scar on her arm. Zahora patted
her husband and took his empty mug to the kitchen. ''They
wanted my head, not a poem,'' he said.
The attack led to the arrest of 44 members of Huji. 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, or
private religious schools. According to Gowher Rizvi,
director of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and
Innovation at Harvard and a lecturer in public policy, bin
Laden's reputed donation is ''a pittance'' compared with
the millions that Saudi charities have contributed to many
of Bangladesh's estimated 64,000 madrassas, most of which
serve only a single village or two. Money of this kind is
especially important because Bangladesh is one of the
poorest countries in the world. Out of 177 countries on the
United Nations' Human Development Index, Bangladesh is
ranked 138, just above Sudan. The recent tsunami that
devastated its neighbors hardly touched it -- a rare bit of
good luck for the country, as most catastrophes seem
somehow to claim their victims in Bangladesh.
In Bangla Bhai's patch of northwestern Bangladesh, poverty
is so pervasive that, for many children in the region,
privately subsidized madrassas are the only educational
option. For the past several years especially, money from
Persian Gulf states has strengthened them even more. Most
follow a form of the Deobandi Islam taught in the 1950's by
the intellectual and activist Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, who
was born in India in 1903 and defined Muslim politics in
opposition to Indian nationalism. While Maududi's original
agenda was reformist, the Deobandi model is now better
known from the madrassas of Pakistan, where it gave rise to
the Taliban in Afghanistan. Whether Maududi intended it or
not, his teachings have become synonymous with radical
Islam.
In November, in a shop in the Bagmara bazaar not far from
where Bangla Bhai used to hold his meetings, two young men
sat waiting to tell their stories about the cruelty and
repression of Bangla Bhai's movement. Everyone here wanted
to talk about this, they said, but were afraid of the
consequences. Several days earlier, Bangla Bhai's cadres
had beaten a university student caught smoking cigarettes,
another banned act.
''We weren't allowed to sell these,'' said one of the men,
a 20-year-old shopkeeper, holding up a pack of Player's
Gold Leaf he kept on a low shelf.
His friend, a thickset man in a white kurta -- a
long-sleeved shirt extending below the waist -- sat on a
carton next to the counter, with a blue mobile phone in his
hand. He played with the phone distractedly as he described
the announcements Bangla Bhai's men had made, beginning
last summer, over the loudspeaker, demanding that people
come watch public punishments. He told me that over the
past months he himself had seen more than 50 men hanged
upside down by their feet from bamboo scaffolding and
beaten with hammers, iron rods and the field-hockey sticks
that are commonly used in Bangladesh as weapons. He winced
for a second recalling these tortures, and then his fleshy
face lost all expression.
''In this place people live in fear,'' the shopkeeper said.
''They still punish people. If anyone is not keeping
Ramadan, even if it's a sick man and he's eating in a
restaurant, they treat them badly.''
The thickset man scanned the street over his shoulder and
added, shaking his head, ''They wanted the regime of the
Taliban here.''
Taskforce against Torture, a Bangladeshi human rights
organization founded three years ago, has recorded more
than 500 cases of people being intimidated and tortured by
Bangla Bhai and his men. One of them is Abdul Quddus Rajon,
a postmaster from Shafiqpur, a village near Bagmara. He is
42 and comes from a wealthy family of moderate Muslims.
Rajon was abducted early last May when two men in green
headbands showed up at the post office on a motorbike. They
forced him onto the bike and demanded his brother's phone
number. Abdul Kayyam Badshah, Rajon's brother and the
leader of a banned Communist Party, was wanted by the
government and being pursued by Bangla Bhai's men. Rajon
refused to give them the number, so they took his mobile
phone and drove him to one of Bangla Bhai's camps.
Rajon told me when I met him that he was held with 15 other
men in two rooms. ''For four days they tortured me,'' he
recounted. Every morning, his captors, who Rajon said were
not more than teenagers, took him to a cell and beat him.
Bangla Bhai's men demanded 100,000 taka for his release,
about $1,600. Rajon eventually agreed to pay. Before his
release, he said, his captors tried to intimidate him into
becoming more observant. ''They took me in front of a
mosque and told me to promise I would keep my beard and
pray five times a day, and to never tell anything about
Bangla Bhai's camp,'' he said. ''They wore beards and long
kurtas like religious men, but that was the only way in
which they were religious.'' He pulled up the cuffs of his
khakis to reveal deep black gashes in his shins.
''Eleven days later,'' he said, ''they caught my brother.''
At noon on May 19, Rajon was awakened by a loudspeaker.
Bangla Bhai's men were announcing that his brother's trial
would start the next day and he would be sentenced to
death. ''I tried to contact the state minister and the
superintendent of police by telephone,'' Rajon said.
''Because if Badshah was accused, he should be tried
according to the laws of the land. But they wouldn't talk
to me.'' (According to The Daily Star, Bangladesh's leading
English-language newspaper, the local government has been
accused of colluding with Bangla Bhai.)
The next morning, Badshah was found hanged by his feet from
a tree near a police station. He had been beaten to death.
Rajon first heard about it through whispering in the
village. ''A policeman was wandering around asking people
if they were glad my brother was dead,'' he said. In the
village and the surrounding districts, Bangla Bhai's spate
of killings and torture continued for another month. One
man was dismembered. Another, according to local
journalists and villagers who told me they heard him, had a
microphone held to his mouth while he was tortured so that
the entire village could listen to his screams.
Communists are just one target of Islamic militants in
Bangladesh. Most attacks have been carried out against
either members of religious minorities -- Hindus,
Christians and Buddhists -- or moderate Muslims considered
out of step with the doctrines espoused at the militant
madrassas. International groups like Human Rights Watch
cannot gather information freely enough to be certain of
the scope of the problem. Yet anecdotal evidence is
abundant. In Bangladesh, as part of the militant Islamists'
agenda, religious minorities are coming under a new wave of
attacks. One of the most vulnerable communities is that of
the Ahmadiyya, a sect of some 100,000 Muslims who believe
that Muhammad was not the last prophet. (The Ahmadiyya are
the subject of a Human Rights Watch report to be published
next month.) In Pakistan, the Ahmadiyya have been declared
infidels and many have been killed. In Bangladesh,
religious hardliners have burned mosques and books and
pressured the government to declare the sect non-Muslim.
Last year, the government agreed to ban Ahmadiyya
literature; earlier this month, however, Bangladesh's high
court stayed the ban pending further consideration by the
court.
But those who oppose the Ahmadiyya are not giving up. At a
recent rally in Dhaka, 10,000 protesters gathered outside
an Ahmadiyya mosque as one Islamic leader intoned from a
parade float, ''Bangladesh's Muslims cast their vote to
elect the current government, and the current government is
not paying any heed.'' Police officers in riot gear
tightened their formation protecting the mosque. ''Beware,
we will throw you out of office if you do not meet our
demands,'' he said. ''No one will be able to stop the
forward march of the soldiers of Islam in Bangladesh.''
The Ahmadiyya are hardly the only group at risk. ''For the
Hindus, the last couple of years have been disastrous,''
says Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. ''There are
substantial elements within the society and government
itself that are advancing the idea that Hindus need to be
expelled.'' On the ground, attacks against Hindus include
beatings and rapes.
''Minority communities in the country are feeling less
safe,'' said Govind Acharya, Amnesty International's
country specialist for Bangladesh. ''The Hindus, the
Ahmadiyya and the tribals in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are
all leaving. This demographic shift is the most problematic
for the identity and the future of the country.''
The permissiveness of at least some within the Bangladeshi
government and the police in allowing violent groups like
Bangla Bhai's to pursue their agendas has only increased
the political legitimacy of such groups. 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.
Last spring in Chittagong, 10 truckloads of weapons -- the
largest arms seizure in Bangladesh's history -- were
captured by the police as they were being unloaded from
trawlers. The tip-off most likely came from Indian
intelligence, which monitors the arms being sent to
Islamist separatist groups in India's northeast. Haroon
Habib, a leading journalist in the region, has written that
a leader of the government's local Islamist coalition was
helping to hide the weapons.
Several months later, under increased pressure from the
European Union and the United States to crack down on
terror, Bangladeshi security forces raided two camps in the
Ukhia area belonging to Huji. Local journalists say that
both camps, which were not far from Chittagong, have now
been destroyed, but no one can get close enough to be sure.
What is certain is that the attack didn't drive the
militants out of the region. Four months ago, five more
members of Huji were arrested in Chittagong.
In this environment, Bangladesh's radical leaders have
ratcheted up their ambitions. Responding to the American
invasion of Afghanistan, supporters of the Islamic Oikya
Jote (I.O.J.), the most radical party in the governing
coalition and a junior partner to the Jamaat-e-Islami,
chanted in the streets of Chittagong and Dhaka, ''Amra
sobai hobo Taliban, Bangla hobe Afghanistan,'' which
roughly translates to ''We will be the Taliban, and
Bangladesh will be Afghanistan.''
The I.O.J. is considered a legitimate voice within
Bangladeshi politics. The I.O.J.'s chairman, Mufti Fazlul
Haque Amini, who has served as a member of Parliament for
the past three years, says he believes that secular law has
failed Bangladesh and that it's time to implement Sharia,
the legal code of Islam. During our two hourlong meetings,
the mufti -- a welcoming and relatively open man with a
salt-and-pepper beard and teeth dyed red from chewing betel
-- asked if he could take photographs and pass them along
to the local press to show his constituents that he is so
powerful the Western press now comes to him.
The mufti presides over his father-in-law's mosque and
madrassa, Jamiat-Qurania-Arabia, in Dhaka, where the
traffic caused by 600,000 bicycle rickshaws, more than in
any other city in the world, is so intense that it can take
hours to travel fewer than 10 miles from Louis Kahn's
ethereal Parliament -- a relic of a more hopeful period in
Bangladesh's democracy -- to the warren of lanes in the old
part of town where the mufti is based. At the mosque, he
almost overfills the armchair in which he stations himself.
He admits that as an Islamic state, Bangladesh still has
far to go.
''As we are Muslim, naturally we want Bangladesh to be an
Islamic state and under Islamic law,'' the mufti said.
Amini is the author of books in Arabic, Bangla and Urdu.
(He learned Urdu while completing graduate work in a
madrassa in Karachi, Pakistan.) He recently completed a
multivolume set of laws and edicts, or fatwas. The mufti is
renowned for his fatwas, which, he said, he issues almost
every day when people come to him with questions about the
application of religious law. The mufti has also issued
fatwas against the secular press when they investigate the
rise of militant Islam in Bangladesh. When he advocates
punishment for those who offend Islam, he said, he does not
intend to preach violence. The young men of Huji who
attacked the poet Shamsur Rahman were studying in one of
his madrassas in Chittagong.
The mufti said that the only reason he is not a government
minister is that the current regime snubbed him out of fear
as to how his appointment would look. The West would see
both him and Bangladesh as too extremist. The mufti has
been named in Indian intelligence documents as a member of
the central committee of Huji (itself linked to Al Qaeda),
an association he would, of course, deny. He is also
rumored to have close friends among the Afghan Taliban,
which he denies, while adding that it's better not to
discuss the Afghan Taliban, as they are so frequently
misunderstood. Besides, he says as the corner of his mouth
twitches into a smile, the Taliban are running all over his
madrassa, as the word ''talib'' means only student.
Outside his office, the sound of boys' voices reciting the
Koran rises and falls. Fifteen hundred students study at
the madrassa, and the mufti's party, the I.O.J., sponsors
madrassas all over the nation; how many, he claimed not to
know. Financing, the mufti said, comes mostly from
Bangladesh itself, but some money also arrives from friends
throughout the Arab world.
Of all his political influence, the mufti is most proud of
his fatwas, which, he said, give him a means to speak out
against those who violate Islam. ''Whoever speaks against
Islam, I issue a fatwa against them to the government,'' he
said. ''But the government says nothing.'' He shook his
head, frustrated. That's next on his agenda: to pressure
the government to recognize his religious injunctions.
''It's possible,'' he said, ''now more than ever.''
Eliza Griswold is a writer based in New York.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/magazine/23BANG.html?ex=1107463938&ei=1&en=40a2becb0f7ba9ca
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