I looked at the FB profile of one of the terrorists (Nirbas Islam) in Gulshan attack in Bangladesh. Nirbas looks perfectly normal teenager coming from affluent family and his profile shows no inclination that he is at all a radicalized religious youth. However, it is quite clear the guy had a deep interest in international politics. He shared a post, which was apparently made to protest against refugee policy of the Europe, describing how Europeans flooded to North Africa for safe shelter during second world war. There is no doubt, a kid like him was deeply influenced more by International politics and religion served him a purpose to the concerns he had for something he found unjust.
In 2003, when I started writing in Mukto-Mona forum founded by Avijit Roy, we thought Internet will dawn a new civilization of knowledge, wisdom and rationalism in our part of South Asia which is deeply buried under ignorance and toxic influence of religions. We thought now that knowledge is made free, wisdom will flow like a free flowing river. We hoped people will adopt to science and rationalism over superstition and fictional tale of religion. Least we knew, within a decade, it would turn out to be other way around. Internet will spread more radicalization of Islam. ISIS will use social media more effectively to radicalize gullible Muslim youths who are already soft to Islamic cause given their family culture which may not be hardliner but surely believes in all sort of conspiracy theories for injustice meted out to Muslim populations in Middle East, India and Myanmar.
However, I am deeply introspecting everything I thought and preached about rationalism. Did I miss something? I think I did. For once, I never thought root cause is religious text unlike many of my friends in MM forum but I was sure it was more political than religious. Most likely, I failed to understand deep empathy created by religious culture for fellow religious people-they call it brotherhood. It defies all rationalism when someone seating in Bangladesh feels more strongly for a suffering Muslim in Syria or in Palestine ignoring probably half of the Bangladeshi people are suffering a lot more living in abject poverty.
Empathy for the people suffering from illness, political persecution, poverty is the at the heart of all religions and very basic reason why religion is still surviving despite most of it is merely fairly tales and fictional prophets. However, when such a blind sighted empathy is created, when you can only see suffering of the people of your religion while ignoring people who are living in slum next to your palace, clearly such empathy has been manufactured by media, family culture and politicians who aspired to profit from such blindness.
Children of internet age are vulnerable to media propaganda. We need to encourage critical thinking from very childhood. Let them be critical of each and everything we tell them to be true and traditional. They must be enabled to handle information with their critical mind so that they can easily find inadequate logic and ill reasoning in every propaganda and every thought presented to them. They must be taught to understand there can be several contradicting truths of same reality. For example, if we blame America for suffering of people of Iraq, it will again be a half baked truth. Fact is –such suffering is a combination of multiple things starting from feudal Islamic culture of the Middle East to imperial design of the West.
Nirbas, like many Muslims ( and many leftists) were only convinced of imperial design of the West while forgetting stagnated Islamic culture is also equally responsible for not having democracy in that part of the world. You can blame West as much as you want and West won’t mind. But you can’t conveniently forget Mullahs in Iran think democracy is a sham, and men should have no power to make law when Allha made Sharia laws for them. If anything, West gave them a complete opposite kind of governing system in the form of liberal democracy.
When kids like Nirbas turns to radical political ideology, I am not surprised. Most of the Muslims in South Asia hail radical preacher Zakir Naik as a hero whose knowledge will not surpass that of a class 4-th grade student. For me that is the real concern when even highly educated Muslims are unable to comprehend unscrupulous nature of radical preaching because formal education failed to build a foundation of critical mind.
Practically I don’t see a solution to the problem of Islamic terrorism unless and until we all admit, we need to change our school education system for developing a more scientific and critical mind. Cry as much you want, speak as loud as you want, roar as thunder as you want against terrorism, denounce as hard as you can -but Islamic terror will only escalate. Unless we all understand, we are not doing a good job to develop critical, rational and scientific mind in schools and homes so that our kids are not vulnerable to radical preachers in the Internet. It is already late. There are too many radical preachers and millions of vulnerable kids getting ready to be next Jihadi John. None of us are safe.
@Mr. Roy. Thanks. I wanted to mean that decades of anti -Indian propaganda has created an environment of anti-Hindu feelings in the general psychology of the Bangladeshi people. It was just a starting point of hate brewing since August 1975……and it continued to receive succor from Islamism, Pakistani conspiracy, and very lately from the ISIS. It was one of the reasons why “our kids” were misguided and took violent Islam as a means to remove Hasina from Power and replace democracy with Sharia!
I was shouting since long that rampant and blind anti -India feeling is detrimental to the intellectual growth of a nation. Nobody was interested to buy my logic. As India has been equated with Hindu, anti- India politics was equated with pro Muslim nationalism (BNP plus /minus Jammat). The scenario became even more destructive because of inept, inefficient, confused, and ineffective politics of Sheikh Hasina and her political party. Her decisive solitude and her faith in Islam in the face of killings of Hindus and destruction of Hindu temples, killings of the bloggers only paved the way for more violence and more destruction.
Among others, I also must mention that the catastrophic failure of often misguided and dubious role of the left leaning parties, pro Chinese communist parties that played roles in the irrevocable social degeneration of Bangladesh.
In such a clumsy and confusing socio political narrative, some youths would take up arms and bombs to destabilize the country in the name of some obsolete and violent ideology.
This is why we saw Guslhan carnage on 1/7, and in Sholakia terror on 7/7. If the intellectual growth of a nation remains retarded, violent extremism is sure to fill the vacuum.
Bangladesh must decide NOW whether the country would like to move as a pluralistic, secular and liberal democracy or as a quasi-theological state! There is no middle way.
Bangladesh is lost forever as a Bengali nation unless a Bangla spring happens with 1971 like armed revolution. Thanks again!!
@Chandrika:
I think Islamic terrorism in Bangladesh has nothing to do with India, but everything to do with the ease of uncontrolled propaganda for political Islam coming to everyone through the internet.
Bangladesh can survive only with Bangalee Jatiotabad, and only Awami League can establish it in Bangladesh. But, it will require generations, and, I don’t think people are willing to give Awami League that much time. As you said, there is a meager chance of Awami League to remain in power even in the next election in 2019. This situation indicates people prefer Muslim-identity more than Bengali-identity. I guess, people of this country must have forgotten now that – our ancestors have paid a huge price for preserving our Bangali-identity. This is a sad turn of event for Bangladesh. Political Islam is engulfing this country, as in other Muslim countries around the world, which appears to be unstoppable due to the ease of propaganda through internet, and the democratic political system is not capable of stopping this progress.
Dada, Let me add something as a continuation of your thoughts ( to answer your Q)
1. Rise of Islamic fundamentalism is not a recent phenomenon in Bangladesh. However, this extreme form is certainly new. As the vast majority of Bangladeshis are poor and are in general Islamic minded and quite conservative, these educated youths provide a platform of their ultra-conservatism. The new kids are the expression of a dysfunctional society and dysfunctional political institutions. Politically, Bangladesh is still a very immature country. Whatever democracy is there is for the good of the privileged section of the society. Now who are they; They are either rich by unfair means or are rich Bengali Muslims that migrated to Bangladesh in the aftermath of 1947. As the Hindu intellectual class left Bangladesh for India (Kolkata particular), these migrated, feudals took over the intellectual role of the society. These people are communal minded and are opportunists. These folks along with the neo rich are in fact ruling the country either as BNP or as Awami League or as pro Pakistani and pro Jamati.
2. To me the most critical issue of the country is the extreme form of identity crisis. The Bengali soul is burning for decades in order to internally negotiate the conflict between an Islamic identity versus the Hindu-blended Bengali identity.
3. India is a problem: I firmly believe that in general Indians are very sympathetic to Bangladesh and through my personal diplomatic sources I have investigated and have found that India (Govt. of India) does not have any evil design whatsoever to harm Bangladesh. Problem is, India at times behave like a big brother and is rather unwilling to solve some problems (many are solved now, except the Teesta water sharing). On the cricket front, many Bangladeshi youths are agitated towards India for some valid reasons as well as for some silly reasons. Now, these minor irritations on some fronts between the two countries are extrapolated, distorted, and perverted in a way that a brotherly conflict of minor grade becomes a serious communal issue with political and religious ramifications. Indian businessmen definitely want to do business with Bangladesh but the terms are not quite favorable (actually, nowhere in the world trade is always 50-50; there always will be some mismatch (imbalances) between volume of imports and exports either way. However, these trade issues become politicized by the vested quarters that pollute the social and political atmosphere. Hindus pay a severe price for this ugly socio-political reality.
4. This social corruption by vested quarters get amplified many fold by the religious (Islamic) hooligans of the country. Not a single Imam in the country has any scholarly background. They have been preaching shit for decades and decades and these shits are fed into the mouths and brains of the moderate Bengali Muslims (very shameful indeed)
5. The perennial identity crisis between a Muslim identity and a Bengali identity turns away many youths from the core values of Bengali culture created mostly by Rabindranath. I heard many times that some children of the Dhaka upper middle class consider Rabindranath as a Hindu.
6. This climax has reached so far that the educated youths do not find it intellectually comfortable to identify as Bengalees holding the Bengali culture and identity dearly into their heart. They see and feel “Hindu smell” (Indian smell)in anything that is Bengali.
8. Awami Politics. Many now agree that Awami Leagues is a pseudo- secular party and its “secularism” is as much worse as BNPs party policy of “Bangladeshi nationalism” which in fact is Muslim nationalism imported from Pakistan, funded by Pakistani ISI.
9. Now we are in a catch 22 situation about Hasina. If she is gone who will take over? I can challenge that if there will be an election tomorrow Awami League would be wiped out because people are very angry for right or wrong reasons, particularly after the Gulshan carnage. If BNP and Jamaat come to power by popular votes what would happen then??? Hasina fails to understand that she is digging her own grave as well as digging the grave of the entire nation. Like you I have no idea where the solution lies really. In one tiny part of myself I see that a military intervention is the best way to militarily suppress the virus of Islamic faith. The growing militancy has no political solution. Militancy must be dealt with military might (or by a massive and ground breaking social revolution, A “Bangla Spring”, that is quite far reaching as of today).