Bangladesh: Unbelief in an age of death squads
by Mahmud Rahman (Scroll.in - 7 June 2015)
How can free thought, science, and humanism in Bangladesh best be
defended? What should you do when you know that the state cannot
protect you?
The death squads of fundamentalist Islam have taken the life of yet
another Bangladeshi blogger. This time it was Ananta Bijoy Das in
Sylhet who also edited a rationalist journal named Jukti. Some months
back, Avijit Roy and Washiqur Rahman were killed in in Dhaka while
Rafida Ahmed Bonya survived with serious injuries.
The champions of death promise more. Two years ago, the
Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamist movement based in madrassas, delivered to
the Home Ministry a list of 84 atheist bloggers they wanted punished
for blasphemy. The crime of those included: they used words that
offended the self-appointed guardians of Islam. Despite their belief
in an all-powerful Allah, the death squads were not ready to leave
judgement in his hands – what this says about their own belief in a
supreme being is a contradiction they never address.
Though narrow and frequently precarious, there has long been room for
free thinking and unbelief in Bangladesh. But with the country
entering a time when more and more people are murdered for what they
think and speak, I fear for the land of my birth. A certain opening
that has existed for 20 years is closing.
Fundamental differences
The latest killing has brought forth a range of reactions.
Among those who knew Ananta and his work or value free speech, there
is sadness for sure but, beyond that, considerable dismay at the
realisation that the Bangladeshi state, despite claims to a certain
kind of secularism, cannot protect the lives of those who hold
dissident beliefs about religion.
There are others, though, who believe the bloggers went too far and
that if they stop intruding into public space, peace will return.
That hope, however, is undermined by the bloodlust among many who
celebrate these deaths. Right after Ananta's murder, his Facebook page
was riddled with comments applauding his death. There have also been
comments and posts that pledge death for other so-called apostates,
such as Shias or Ahmadiyyas. It may be hard to believe, but there are
people who believe today's Pakistan, with its routine killing fields,
should be the future of Bangladesh.
When an Islamist takes a cleaver to the head of someone for what they
think, there seem to be people who are attracted to this, who say to
themselves that they want to be the kind of men who step into those
shoes. But isn't it the case that there are perhaps more humans who
recoil from such cruelty, asking, if this be religion, I want none of
it?
For many like me who came of age in the 60s, the shocks of 1970-71
moved us away from religion. In 1970 the terrible Bhola cyclone took
away over a 100,000 lives. People who went to do relief work came face
to face with scenes of massive destruction and bodies stripped of
skin. The war of 1971 brought even more brutality, this time from
soldiers of Pakistan carrying the banner of Islam.
Quite often it is death, either unexplainable by religion or committed
by the religious, that drives people away from religion.
Free thought
In Bangladesh, freethinkers have lived among a largely conservative,
religious-minded population. Most are private and many go about their
lives through one or another kind of compromise with the dominant
culture. Besides unbelievers and skeptics, the country is of course
home to a larger humanist population that draws inspiration from the
Bauls or Tagore instead of organised religions.
At the same time, there have always been atheists in the public sphere
for whom unbelief is a cause. Reacting to the harmfulness of
superstitious thinking and believing in science and reason, they
believe that this needs to be addressed in books, articles, or
lectures. Some have found homes in academia. Others were affiliated
with communist groups, though in the main communists tended to keep
their notions about religion to themselves.
At least one remarkable skeptic emerged from village society.
In early 1991, when society opened up after the fall of the dictator
Ershad, I was visiting Dhaka and attended a gathering in Purana Paltan
at the office of a communist-affiliated writers group. The meeting
celebrated the life of a self-taught free thinker, Aroj Ali Matabbar.
This was the first time I had heard of the man.
Matabbar began to look at religion with a critical eye after a
distasteful encounter with the mullahs. His mother died when he was in
his teens. Wanting a memory of his mother he took a photo of her dead
body. The mullahs refused to perform the janaja for her. He found it
unfair that his mother would be punished for an action he had
committed. This experience led to a lifetime of questioning. Aroj Ali
wrote a couple of books that were eventually published after
Bangladesh became independent. He had been persecuted in the Pakistan
period
For many years, Matabbar was mostly known to a small group of people.
Since the 90s, his books have been published by a mainstream publisher
and also released in English translation. He became an inspiration for
newer generations of free thinkers.
The democratic opening after the fall of Ershad also brought other
voices of unbelief into the public arena. Taslima Nasrin, who had
started to publish even before the dictator fell, came into conflict
with religious zealots. They forced her into exile.
Within a few years, the internet emerged as a new way for people to
communicate with one another and with the public. Freethinkers who had
started communicate on electronic mailings lists soon launched the
website Mukto-Mona.
Public atheism
As we entered the 21st century, new books on religion were published,
some original and others in translation. In 2006-9 when I was on an
extended stay in Dhaka, I browsed bookshops and book fairs and found
books by Aroj Ali Matabbar and Ahmed Sharif who had been a professor
at Dhaka University. I also discovered a book titled Why I do not
believe in religion, a translation of Bertrand Russell's Why I am not
a Christian. There were also dystopian novels that imagined a country
taken over by Islamists: Humayun Azad's Pak Sar Zamin Shad Bad and
Masuda Bhatti's Banglastan. Anisul Hoque's Ondhokare Eksho Bochhor
appeared in the 90s, but it remains out of print. More recently books
and translations on evolutionary biology and other scientific topics
have also come out.
With the end of the military regime and the election of the Awami
League in 2008, the explosion of blogs and social media led to the
emergence of an active public atheism from within the blogging
community. This also coincided with a time when internet access became
widely available, especially through mobile phones.
Some had been inspired by Mukto-Mona. But this new atheism was more
combative and visible to a larger population because of the spread of
internet access.
Reality bites
Among some of them, mockery of religion became common. Partly this was
the result of youthful fervour that seemed to take pleasure in scoring
points against fundamentalists. Partly it was triggered by the scale
of evil perpetrated worldwide these days by religious followers as
well as the memory of atrocities committed by the Pakistanis and their
collaborators in 1971. There seemed to be a feeling among some
atheists that they had carved out a secure space within Bangladesh.
Since the Awami League government had initiated war crimes trials and
sometimes talked about secularism, there seemed to be a belief that
now the state would offer an umbrella for all those raising voices
against political Islam and religion in general.
Reality has turned out different.
The state has shown that it cannot ensure security to bloggers. In a
public statement, the Prime Minister's son, himself an adviser to the
government, indicated that the ruling party is nervous that its
support for secularism might imply closeness to atheists. This appears
to be a formula to defend inaction.
Beyond that, the state has long shown that it cannot ensure security
of life even more generally. Most murders that involve some type of
controversy, usually involving people or groups with power, go
unsolved. This is testimony to both the weakness of crime solving
among police institutions and the lack of political will.
Even more insidiously, the state itself has set an example of
extrajudicial murder through 'crossfire' killings by police forces
that have been given a license to kill. Somehow the state believes
that this is solving the problem of crime. Instead the stakes are
raised and the country becomes the scene of even more gruesome crimes.
Sometimes the police forces themselves are implicated in crimes
carried out for the benefit of private circles.
Yes, pressure needs to be maintained on the state to defend the right
to life and expression. But it's also necessary to look squarely at
how things have turned out. We have entered a time when bloggers and
writers, publishers and bookshop owners, all have to deal with the new
reality of blogger murders. What should you do when you know that the
state cannot protect you?
This isn't just a question for individuals as they sort out how they
will approach self-preservation and their public roles. There is a
broader issue: how can free thought, science, and humanism in
Bangladesh best be defended in an age of death squads? The times call
on freethinkers and humanists to take a longer strategic view. Each
person needs to ask what they want to achieve. What kind of writing
and expression are essential? How can the internet and social media
best be used? This is a discussion that needs to take place within the
larger humanist community.
source: http://scroll.in/article/731166/women-are-being-illegally-detained-in-shelter-homes-for-falling-in-love-yet-nobodys-getting-punished
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