Politics of Religious Identity
Salma Sobhan*
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"Using religion as an excuse, men have tried to dominate women. Thus, I was obliged to enter into the fray." Rokeya Sakhawat ...................................................................................................................................If identity is defined as an awareness of self, national identity would appear to imply the awareness of self within a defined national context. It could also mean the use for political purposes -for exemple, mobilization for votes- of groups of people who identify themselves in a particular way. Identity, however, is not merely an internal awareness of self; it also has to do with an assertion of this self to those who are perceived as being outside this self. One aspect of this assertion is obviously to gather to oneself those whom one sees as being part of the corporate identity. The perception of belonging to the same can relate to any common factor; caste, class, religion, ethnicity, and gender are only the most obvious categories. However, there is not necessarily homogeneity within such groups. In this context gender is of particular interest. It is often found that those societies which most vigorously separate themselves externally from others on any one ground are also those in which, internally, gender segregation is likely to be present.
There are two manifestations of religious fundamentalism in Bangladesh -on the one hand, an orthodox or mainstream fundamentalism and a sort of syncretic fundamentalism on the other. There is also the issue of the politicization of religion which will need analysis. The historical origins of all three manifestations need to be traced briefly, as well as that of Bangladesh itself.
Historical background
While Bangladesh itself came into existence as a sovereign, independent state only in 1971, we can trace in its various historical incarnations the surfacing and submerging of different perceptions relating to its identity. As part of the unpartitioned sub-continent, the area that is now Bangladesh and was once East Pakistan was originally the eastern wing of a large province of eastern India -Bengal. Pakistan came into existence in 1947 when the British pulled out of India and the sub-continent became independent and was partitioned. The national struggle for independence from the British had originally united the sub-continent's Hindus and Muslims, but this common goal had not proved sufficient to keep the two communities together. Eventually a large section of the Muslim population in India, having struggled for autonomy within the context of an undivided India and having failed to reach agreement with the Hindu majority on this issue, had opted to form a separate state -Pakistan.
The formula for the creation of Pakistan, Muslim majority contiguous areas, meant, in practice, that the state of Pakistan consisted of two wings to the east and west of India but separated by several hundred miles of another country. The two wings of Pakistan soon found, therefore, that apart from religion they shared little in common. Further, for a number of reasons the west wing of Pakistan began to acquire dominance over the east wing. As a result the disaffected inhabitants of the east wing were soon asserting their ethnic Bengali identity against the predominantly Punjabi West Pakistanis where, earlier, they had asserted their religious identity against the Bengali Hindus. Pakistan broke up in 1971 after a bloody and bitter civil war. The west wing retained the name Pakistan, the east wing became Bangladesh.
The advent of Islam in Bengal
In undivided India, Islam was a newcomer. The first Muslims came to India in the eighth century and reached Bengal in the thirteenth century. They came to a country that had already absorbed a variety of different beliefs and settlers.
In his study of religion and development in Bangladesh, Abecassis reckons that in Bengal the first cultivators came from South Asia, bringing with them not only their skills, crop cultivation and their cattle (buffalo), but also their religious beliefs which emphasized the cult of the dead and grove worship. In 1000 BC, when people from the Gangetic plain began to spread into Bengal bringing with them, inter alia, Hindu beliefs and culture, these beliefs were subsumed rather than eradicated by them. The same happened to Buddhism nearly 1,000 years later when it reached Bengal. Abecassis quotes Ramkrishna Mukherjee: "Buddhism contended itself with superimposing a new religion upon the existing tribal societiesÉ from which it did not uproot animistic practices." Abecassis goes on to quote Maloney and others: "Thus Brahminical Hinduism, Vajrayana Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism from north India and Theravada Buddhism from Burma, all mingledÉ under the aegis of various kingdoms, while the peasant reverence for bamboo groves and ghosts of the dead continued at the village level." He adds, "The world view of the people at the time of the first coming of Islam was, therefore, the result of a continuous process of conflict and assimilation over the preceding millennia."
Various Muslim' conquistadors' slowly established their rule in India. At the same time the religion of the conquerors was being spread by the traders and sufis who brought Islam with them. The peculiar configuration of Pakistan into its eastern and western wings on the east and west coasts of northern India in testimony that Islam spread over India less by conquest than by conversion. The Muslim rulers brought with them an administrative system and a language, but apart from the isolated zeal of some, for most of them it was not part of the policy to convert the indigenous population.
The Islam that was preached by the Sufis was not orthodox. It emphasized a spiritual union with God and did not require its newest adherents to jettison their traditional beliefs and practice totally. Thus, in its early days, Islam in Bengal became part of the syncretic tradition of the area. It was only in the wake of the Islamic revivalist or reformist movements, which started in India from the sixteenth century and spread to Bengal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that the conflict between religion and custom arose for the Bengali Muslims. And this conflict has been truly resolved.
Gunga-Jamuna is the name given to a particular type of silverware in Bengal. One side of the object is goldwashed, giving a lustre to the silver and providing a pleasing contrast. The name derives from the two mighty rivers of Bengal, the Ganges and the Jamuna. Where these two converge it is said that the different confluences have identifiably different colors, hence the name of the gold washed silver. The Muslim Bengali psyche, too, can be likened to this phenomenon, for within it Islam and customs converge and flow together like the intermingled streams of the Ganges and the Jamuna. While these two streams contribute to the richness of the culture, they are also the source of an ambivalence which can, in its worst manifestations, be likened to a sort of schizophrenia. The malaise started with the reformist movements in Islam.
The Muslim reformist movement in Bengal
While the reformist movement in Bengal in the eighteenth century was aimed at cleansing from the body politic of Islam the syncretic practices it had absorbed, at the same time it had developed a very strong class bias which contributed to the organization of the peasantry against both the tyranny of the Hindu zamindar (landlord) and the British colonial power. The reformers preached a return to the pristine and austere doctrines of Islam. But while the reformers called upon people to discard those practices and superstitions they regarded as pagan, they did not feel it necessary (nor even desirable) to try to cut off the masses from their ethnic roots. Haji Shariatullah (1781 to 1840) -one of the most dynamic of these reformers- even translated the Koran into Bengali.
The reformists tied the tenets of religious reformation to confrontation with the Hindu zamindars whose exaction of feudal dues relating to Hindu festivals were seen as un-Islamic by the reformers and more simply as onerous by the Muslim peasantry. Confrontation with the British colonial power was also part of the reformist platform, not least because it was they who, in the interest of the regular collection of revenue had, through legislation which turned ertswhile revenue collectors into landlords, created this zamindar class. Thus religious identity was strongly reinforced among Muslim Bengalis by a consciousness of their class oppression. These two identities coexisted with and contradicted each other, not even fusing in the later independence movement. The momentum of the reformist movement was felt even behind the veil.
Emancipation of the Bengali Muslim Women
By the time the British had established themselves firmly in India and had begun to allow the inhabitants of the country a voice in running it, the Indian Muslims had dropped into second place in the race. This was because, after the abortive war of independence in 1857, there had been a conscious policy of discrimination against them, and also because they remained outside the mainstream education that was necessary to join the services of the Raj. Despite this marginalization, however, there was a sense of complacency about the status of Muslim women. Writers like Katherine Mayo (author of Mother India) had fostered such feelings. Whatever might have been the theoretical basis for this complacency, it has long been subsumed by reality.
The history of the emancipation of the Bengali Muslim women is inadequately recorded, not only in accounts of Indian women generally but also those of Bengali women. Reading some of these one might well suppose that the phenomenon had bypassed Bengali Muslim women altogether. That it did not owes not a little to the pioneering work of a handful of remarkable women, only some of whose names are known, such as those of Faizunessa Chowdhurani and Karimunessa Khan. There were others whose names have not survived, such as the Muslim woman who accompanied Miss Cook, an English social worker, on her rounds to bring Muslim girls to school. Even among these women, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's contribution is outstanding.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was born in 1980, in Rangpur, a province of North Bengal, to a middle-class Muslim family. Her father was interested in his daughter's education, and had encouraged Rokeya in her reading. She was fortunate in being married to an equally forward looking man, Sakhawat Hossain, who not only encouraged her to read and to think for herself but also encouraged her to write. Rokaya was eventually to focus her energies on education, but she began by recounting a series of anecdotes designed among other things to highlight the absurdity to which observance of the institution of purdah was carried. There was a great furor and Rokeya was, predictably, accused of being un-Islamic, of selling out, and, of course, of being influenced by outsiders. What was unforgivable was that all the stories she wrote were true, and drawn from life. Rokeya, however, persevered with her writing but saw very soon that it was the younger generation to whom she could most successfully address herself. Accordingly she set herself the task of founding a school for Muslim girls.
Rokeya Sakhawat never 'came out' of purdah. Widowed young, she devoted her life to education and had a profound influence on a whole generation of women. She remains the prototype of a devout Muslim who saw clearly the dangers of obscurantism. About religion she said, "Using religion as an excuse, men have tried to dominate women. Thus I was obliged to enter into the fray." This statement remains valid today.
Once the mental breakthrough was made about education, Muslim women all over the sub-continent were as eager as women anywhere to avail themselves of educational opportunities which were available to them. What died harder were social taboos. These, however, were rationalized, and swept away by the momentum of the independence movement only to return, unfortunately, once the game was won.
At that stage, it should be realized, both Hindus and Muslims had gone on the defensive on the issue of the status of women. The uninhibited social intercourse between the British men and women gave a misleading impression about the degree to which the British woman was emancipated, while the unequal social status of Indian women reconciled liberal British consciences to their own presence in India. Consequently, the women's struggle was strengthened in the wake of the national movement for independence.
Politicization of Islam
The consciousness of the vast Muslim peasantry of Bengali had originally been awakened by the reformists against the landlord or zamindar. This consciousness was turned towards the cause of political liberation from the British. The battle was fought on two fronts -not only for freedom from the British, which as time went on became a foregone conclusion, but also for freedom from Hindu domination. Muslim peasant against Hindu landlord became the basis of a mobilization that merged class and religion. Thus, during the struggle for independence from the British, much of Muslim Bengal asserted its religious identity very strongly. Part of this assertion was the acceptance by such Bengalis that their language belonged to the Hindus of Bengal, though spoken by both Muslim and Hindu Bengalis. Similarly Urdu, the vernacular of Delhi and Lucknow, (the political and cultural center of the Mughal dynasty overthrown by the British) was spoken both by the Hindus and Muslims of that region, but Urdu for a variety of political reasons was espoused as the language of the Muslims of north India. Pockets of Urdu-speaking Muslims all over India, even south India at Hyderabad and Mysore especially tended to reinforce this perception.
In the heyday of the Mughal Empire, Persian, the language of governance, was used by the upper class, Hindus and Muslims alike as later English was to be. Urdu (basically a mixture of Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish) began to be seen as a survival from the days of Muslim supremacy in India and politically sponsored as the language of Indian Muslims. Greetings and salutations became consciously Muslim. This view of the language was not appreciated in East Pakistan, where Bangla was in common use. It soon became clear that keeping Urdu as the sole national language would give powerful groups in West Pakistan an advantage, as it was more widely spoken there. It also alienated the Bengalis, whose mother tongue was Bangla.
Despite these efforts to bridge regional and linguistic dissimilarities, it was not a homogeneous movement for all. The call for an independent Muslim state, for example, was opposed by the fundamentalists on the grounds that nationalism was un-Islamic. It is not without significance that there was also a call for a United Bengal that would be a part of neither India nor Pakistan.
Throughout the period between 1947 and 1971, East Pakistan was strongly pulled by its ethnic and linguistic roots. The language movement, which reached its culmination just five years after the creation of Pakistan, was the most dramatic manifestation of these forces.
Notes:
1. D. Abecassis, Identity, Islam and Human Development, Dhaka, University Press Ltd., 1990.
* Salma Sobhan, a Barrister, is currently executive director of Ain O Salish Kendra, Dhaka.
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