THE ILLOGIC OF JAMAAT-E-ISLAMI

      By Kazi Anwarul Masud( former Secretary and ambassador)

        FOR PUBLICATION ON FRIDAY THE 15^TH NOVEMBER 2013

The Election Commission of Bangladesh has declared Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami as ineligible for participation in parliamentary polls. The Commission found several clauses like its call for establishing the rule of Islam inscribed in its charter as contradictory to the Constitution of Bangladesh and Representation of People’s Order. Earlier in February 2010 Bangladesh Supreme Court barred the use of religion in politics. It is truly amazing that it has taken the country so long to put a ban on Jamaat’s political participation in parliamentary elections though the party was banned after the liberation of Bangladesh. The ban, however, was withdrawn after the assassination of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1975 and the installation of the military government which rehabilitated the leaders of Jamaat who had fled to Pakistan  and gave them ministerial posts.   It is to the credit of the people of Bangladesh that when then two super powers during the Cold War era not only tolerated and assisted military government in some developing countries and even engineered military coup d’etat e.g. Augusto Pinochet who killed democratically elected left leaning President Salvatore Salvador Allende in Chile in  1973, Bangladeshis  put their trust  in democracy and non-communal governance for the country. Definition of political parties have varied  from the time of Edmund Burke as “an organized assembly of men, united for working together for the national interest” to one that may not accept members from the minority community and insisted on establishing Khilafat. Indeed the head of the Hizb ul Tehrir (Bangladesh) publicly announced that “we always want to oust all governments in all Muslim countries in the world to establish Khilafat states”. The world has been  mired for decades in the militant activities of al-Qaeda operatives The conflict is not only inter-religious or intra-religious, the hydra headed Medusa has taken under development, poverty, tribal and cultural differences among people to unleash its fangs of poison. To be banned a political party does not have to be communal as Jamaat-e-Islami (Bangladesh) that refuses membership to people from faiths other than Islam. This should be a clear violation of fundamental rights under the UN and all other charters. While Jaamat-e-Islami collaborated with the Pakistani occupation army in 1971 and some of whose leaders have been found  guilty of crimes against humanity  Jaamat leaders trial could not be held earlier perhaps  because one of the reasons being   that  the Genocide Convention which came into force as international law in 1951 was ratified by only two of the permanent members of the UN Security Council and it was not until after the last of the five permanent members ratified the treaty in 1988 and the Cold War came to an end, that the international law on the crime of genocide began. As such an international tribunal never investigated allegations of genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. Had it not been so then Jamaat would have found itself on the dock along with Slovodan Milosevich and Rwandan war criminals, and perhaps, in future some for the crimes committed at Darfur in Sudan. Christopher Hitchens in his book The Trials of Henry Kissinger used the term “genocide” as appropriate for the war crimes committed in Bangladesh in 1971 and castigated Henry Kissinger for downplaying the aspirations of the Bengali nation for independence. Susan Brown Miller and Pierre Stephen and Robert Payne in their books Massacre and Against Our Will and the Archer Blood telegrams to the US State Department (now declassified) documented the genocidal acts by the occupation army and Jamaat’s anti-liberation wings namely Razakars, Al-Badr, Al- Shams etc.  Fusion of military and spiritual authority and Quranic literalism as opposed to the concept of the separation of the Church and the State is intrinsic to Jamaat’s political philosophy. Problem with Islamic political parties like Jamaat in Bangladesh is “the persistence of ambiguity” suffered by Islamists almost everywhere. Marina Ottaway and others define this ambiguity as “tensions remaining between the old goals of creating Islamic states and enacting uncompromising versions of the Sharia and the new goal of becoming influential players in a pluralistic, democratic system”. Jamaat’s spiritual Guru Maulana Maududi described the movement’s purpose “to initiate the deen in the form of a movement so that religiosity does not become static in our personal lives, but we struggle to implement this deen and also try to crush those forces that are against its implementation”. On another occasion Maulana Maududi declared “we take a person in Jamaat when he understands the meaning on Kalima-e-Tayyiba and makes it mandatory that he fulfills the minimum criteria of Islam”. Evidently Jamaat’s philosophy does not allow inclusiveness of other religions or democratic norms. This partly explains Jamaat’s initial opposition to the Muslim League’s demand for a separate homeland for the Muslims in British India, and its opposition to Bangladesh liberation movement can be seen from Jamaat’s perspective as dismemberment of a Muslim state caused by the machination of a Hindu India. The brutalization by  the occupying Pakistani army of  Bengali Muslims (along with Hindus) was seen as “collateral damage” that must be borne if the Bengali Muslims were to be freed from the contagion of Hindu influence. The political party who had allied itself with Jamaat dismissed Eliza Griswold’s report in New York Times (January 23, 2005) raising the possibility of Bangladesh giving birth to the next Islamist revolution. Griswold wrote about the alleged attempts by Bangla Bhai( now hanged for murdering innocent people) to bring about Talibanization in some parts of the country bordering India through violent means. In Griswold’s eyes Bangladesh politics had never strayed far from violence and thuggery has been a constant feature of Bangladesh politics.  Traveling through Bangladesh she concluded “The global war on terror is aimed at making the rise of regimes like that of the Talibans impossible, in Bangladesh the trend could be going the other way”. Equally Bertil Lintner’s article in the Far Eastern Economic Review (April 2002) warned about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh. Time magazine and the Asian Wall Street Journal alleged of sanctuaries given in the past to transnational Islamists elements. Zeal of the Islamic fundamentalists found expression in the Friday sermon of the head priest of a prominent mosque at Dhaka accusing President Bush of being a “terrorist” while addressing a gathering of people who had gone to the mosque to offer their prayer, branding two judges of the High Court as enemies of Islam because they had suo moto given a judgment declaring illegal religious edicts passed by village priests, and declaring a prominent lawyer of the country as “murtad” because he was defending in a court of law a case on behalf of the Ahmadiyya community who were  being persecuted by the religious zealots. The brutal atrocities perpetrated by Jamaat in collaboration with the occupation Pakistani army for which the International Crimes Tribunals have tried and sentenced several leaders of Jamaat while some others are still going through the process of trial apart it has been noted that the 8/21 assassination attempt on now Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was possible due to a combination of political expediency and ambivalence over whether to ride the tiger of religious intolerance or to confront it”. Some analysts warned against the propagation of “an intolerant arabicised brand of Islam that was alien to Bangladesh’s secular culture”. It was  not the first time that Bangladeshi authorities had been upbraided by domestic and foreign media and institutions for their inability to contain the virus of religious intolerance and for its increase in recent days. Eliza Griswold hazarded a guess that it could be because then BNP  government was “in any case divided on precisely the question on how much Islam and politics should mix”. The emergence of religious intolerance in Bangladesh (corrected largely in the last few years), documented by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and US State Department among others, should be seen in global context. If the Muslims are to prove historian Bernard Lewis wrong that “Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other forms of worship, and that the centuries old rivalry between Christianity and Islam is no less than a clash of civilizations—the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both”, then the Islamic world would have to adorn itself with all the traits of modernity. The Islamic world would have to dismiss fatwa like death sentence for writing Satanic Verses, stoning and imprisoning of rape victims, public flogging, stoning and decapitation of criminal offenders. Globalization is no longer a choice; it is a reality that all countries have to deal with. In this game the West has a decided advantage over the Muslim world, particularly the least developed among them. Countries like Bangladesh will remain dependent on the developed economies and international financial institutions if they are to transform their societies into more advanced ones. This quest is fraught with difficulties that should not be further compounded by inviting religious extremism, however politically expedient such a move may be.