Hefazat-e-Islam’s uninvited arrival onto the political scene in Bangladesh, while certainly alarming, isn’t much of a surprise. They’re old news actually. Many of their demands have antecedents in some form or another, strewn out over the last decade or more.
Recent history
In 1998 a new education policy was met by stiff resistance from religious groups who claimed the policy interfered with an Islam-oriented education in its attempt to reform the Qawmi madrasa system.
In March 1999, a cultural troupe was attacked in Jessore killing 10 people, and in October of the same year an Ahmadia Mosque was attacked in Khulna, which left eight people dead.
In 2001, bombs went off during Bengali New Year celebrations at Ramna Park killing 10 people, and a church was attacked in Gopalganj, also killing 10.
In 2002,cinema halls in Shatkhira and Mymensingh were targeted, killing 24 people.
In 2003 attacks on Sufi shrines began, with seven people killed at a shrine in Tangail that year.
Shahjalal’s shrine in Sylhet was attacked twice in 2004, killing eight people and injuring many others.
In 2005, nearly 459 time bombs went off simultaneously in 63 districts, which killed 2 people and hurt more than 200.
In 2008, a proposed Women’s Empowerment Bill led to days of clashes between hard-line religious groups and the police.
In 2012, the Buddhist community in Ramu was viciously attacked, although a connection to the Islamist agenda hasn’t yet been established.
There have been other attacks as well, on the judiciary, on minorities, and on political figures, all of which, like the ones listed, have some relation to the 13 points being championed by Hefazat-e-Islam.
In other words, some version of this radical ideology has been making itself known in Bangladesh for quite some time now.
Who are they?
To understand who, or rather, what Hefazat-e-Islam is, and what sort of people belong to it, you have to begin at thinkers like Ibn Tayymiah, and the Hanbali Madhab of Islamic jurisprudence.
As Madhab’s go, the Hanbali school is the youngest and among the more dogmatic. Madhabs are Islamic legal, social and ethical systems or schools of thought. The two second-generation ones, Malik Anas’s Maliki school and the Hanafi school are broader in their approach to diversity. The Hanafi school also places a high value on personal judgement. Shaafi and Hanbali are a generation younger, of which Hanbali is the school that most eschews reason and philosophy.
It’s worth mentioning that the Hanbali school came into being after Ibn Hanbal, a soldier turned dogmatic scholar, was persecuted in the Minha - Caliph al Mamun’s rationalist totalitarian purge.
The Muta’zilas, or philosophers, otherwise reasonable people who represented the intellectual and secular strand in Islam, began forbidding beliefs that they considered fallacious – such as the notion that reason can’t complement revelation in the seeking of knowledge.Al Mamun had a Muta’zila world-view and Ibn Hanbal was an orthodox jurist.
His Madhab was the intellectual inspiration for scholars like Ibn Tayymiah, who sometime around 1299, after the Mongol invasion had ended the Islamic Age, began a revivalist creed based on the Hanbali tradition.
Philosophical poverty followed the Mongol destruction of libraries and universities, and so Tayymiah’s creed was necessarily simplistic and one-dimensional. He didn’t particularly like Sufism, and was intolerant of other religions. A purist, conservative streak ran through his philosophy, probably a symptom of the times he lived in.
700 years into the experience, Islamic civilisation had matured and diversified, enriched by bits and pieces of other cultures and civilisations it encountered along the way. Men like Ibn Tayymiah resented these developments, blaming them for the community’s inability to resist invasionand felt Islam was losing its authenticity. It led him to develop an Amish-like attitude to change and foreign influence.
Coupled with this, the Khans in central Asia who had become Muslims,ruled, often harshly, over local Muslim populations in the countries they colonised - essentially most of the Eastern Muslim Empire, and its heart, Baghdad.
Nastiks
Tayymiah considered Mongol Muslims “nastiks” because they followed their cultural Yassa Law and not the Sharia, something that Tayymiah saw as sacrilege. He pronounced a jihad against them, and made it mandatory for his followers to resist their authority. Alongside, he encouraged an idealised Muslim personality, which, in his mind equated to rigorous, regimented dogma.
The Khans imprisoned him a number of times for his hostile views, which only strengthened his resolve. At the time of his death he had more than 50,000 followers, and though IbnTayymiah said some sensible things, like denouncing a blind reliance on clerics, and also developed an economic theory that emphasised social welfare and charity, his enduring legacy is an orthodox, regulation-based school of thought.
It is political, anti-Mysticism - with a particular dislike for the writings of the IbnArabi, the Spanish Sufi whose universal approach to divinity is echoed in the writings of Omar Khayyam, Hafez and Jalaluddin Rumi, and much later in the music of Lalon Shah, the Bangali mystic. It is anti-syncretism and anti-ziyarat (the practice of visiting the shrines of great men, including the Prophet), but also anti-superstition, and anti-oppression.
Ibn Tayymiah coined the term “Salaf,” meaning “ancestors,” as a reference to the very first three generations of Muslims, whom he believed represented the best qualities of Islam. His teachings are the ideological framework for the Salafists, popularly known as Wahabbis, who arrived on the scene in the 18th century and, with support from the House of Saud, became the dominant form of Islamic expression on the Arabian Peninsula, successfully supplanting the indigenous culture with their own statist ideology.
This is where the plot thickens.
Shortly after Abdul Wahhab and the House of Saud had established the first Saudi stateand commenced infusing it with a dressed-down, austere interpretation of Islam - destroying shrines and relics and forbidding numerous cultural and spiritual practices - an 18 year-old pilgrim called Shariatullah, went from Faridpur in Bangladesh to Mecca, to do his Hajj. The year was 1799.
Haji Shariatullah stayed on in Arabia for 19 years, learning Arabic and Persian, along with Salafi teachings. He was heavily influenced by this brash, revolutionary doctrine, which, like any sort of revolution anywhere, was taking over a territory and remaking it in its own image. The Saudi state, in an arrangement of mutual patronage with Wahhab and the Salafiyyah (also called the Ahle Sunnat) invented an Islamic kingdom, one of the first in the modern era.
For a young, impressionable man, this revolutionary spirit was infectious, and Haji Shariatullahtook to it with a passion, drawing parallels with Bengal and Arabia in terms of what he saw as a fall from Islamic grace.
Abdul Wahhab’s book, the Kitab-at-Tawhid, became a foundation text for the Salafist movement, and the name “Tawhidi,” was sometimes used to describe people who adhere to its tenets. By the time the first Saudi state collapsed in 1818, Haji Sharitullah, was thoroughly Tawhidi in his beliefs.
The first Salafiyyah country was destroyed by the Ottomans who invaded it from Egypt after the Salafis called the Ottoman Caliph illegitimate and Turkish Islam heretical. Their capital was destroyed, their king beheaded, and the Salafists scattered to the winds. Their revolution was temporarily over, but in the 74 years that they ruled the Arabian peninsula, they stamped out practices that had been integral to an Arabian understanding of the Divine for centuries. These have never been revived since.
Salafists in Bengal
Haji Shariatallah returned to Bangladesh in 1818, after his beloved Salafi state had been utterly destroyed. He may not have returned alone, since the Salafists were now homeless and looking for places to regroup.
Haji Shariatallah came back to a Bengal firmly in British hands. His resentment for oppressive colonial practices led him to conclude that the absence of a proper Islamic system of governance was ultimately to blame for it, and like his contemporary and fellow Bengali, Titu Mir, whose famous bamboo fortress or “basher kella” became the site of a formidable last stand, Shariatallah began to organise a resistance movement which would strive to achieve two things:
1) A purging to foreign and “un-Islamic” influences from Bengali Muslim culture, along the lines of the Salafi purge in Arabia, and
2) The establishment of a Muslim answer to the questions of statehood.
The Faraizi Movement, named for the word “farz” or obligatory, was begun by Haji Shariatullah as a parallel administrative structure and gained momentum in Dhaka, Faridpur, Bakerganj, Mymensingh, Tripura, Chittagong, Noakhali and Assam.
It spread mostly because of its promise of emancipation and because it stressed on justice, social equality, and the universal brotherhood of Muslims - things which a subjugated and isolated population can’t help but find exceedingly appealing.
The movement enjoyed a limited amount of success under Shariatallah’s son Dudu Miah, when it turned to militancy and began attacking British as well as Hindu zamindari establishments. It managed to convince large numbers of people in rural Bengal to boycott British courts and authorities in favour of Islamic equivalents.But the Faraizi “state within a state” petered out eventually and after Dudu Miah’s death became a non-entity in the political landscape of pre-partition India.
However it’s influence on the Islamic culture of Bengal has been far-reaching and permanent.Just as IbnTayymiah saw the Khans as “nastik” or only half-Muslim at bestand the Salafists thought of the Turks as heretics, so too the Farazis thought of Bengali Islam as a sub-standard version of the faith because of its proximity to both Sanskritic and Sufi culture.
Syncretic values make Salafists uncomfortable
Bengali Islamic culture is heavily relianton Sufi thought. It is also syncretic in its nature, having absorbed both Buddhist and Hindu mystic traditions. Since the arrival of Islam on the delta and during the Bengali Sultanate Era in the 14th and 15th centuries, Islam in Bengal underwent a process of indigenisation where it became embedded into the larger local context. By the end of it, it developed a sort of seamlessness with its surroundings that encouraged inter-communal cohesion. For hundreds of years, Muslims in Bengal, and in India generally, lived with people of other faiths as fellow inhabitants of a common Sanskritic space.
Both Sufi and syncretic traditions were anathema to the Faraizis who sought to put an end to what they say as the erosion of Islamic purity. “Borrowed” rites and ceremonies pertaining to birth, death and marriages, such as “chillas” and “gaye-holuds” were explicitly forbidden, along with Sufi practices like the “urs,”“milads” and the visiting of shrines. Sufi music was completely out, as was the “Bengali” penchant for colourful celebrations.
Put simply, the movement ran completely contrary to Bengali Muslim culture’s natural leanings.
The Faraizis had very few takers among urban, affluent Muslims, who actively resisted them and sided with both the Hindus and the British to drive them out of the cities, but they managed to gather a following among a disenfranchised and largely disadvantaged rural population, sowing seeds that would later be watered by newer Salafist movements.
It would be fair to mention that the dynamics of colonisation and resistance in India strengthened the notion of an “Islamic emancipation,” and 19th century Indian society was pregnant with various versions of this idea. One of them was the Deobandi movement, of which the Qawmi madrassa system, Hefazat-e-Islam’s academic base, is a direct offshoot.
Maududi’s Jamaat-e-Islami, though much younger, and ideologically at odds with the Deobands, is also of this strain. Even the modern reformist movements like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh Muslim University-centric one, which tried to bring Indian Muslims out of their entrenched anti-Western position, subscribed to this idea, leading, ultimately, to the Two-Nation Theory, which cleaved India in half along religious lines.
East Bengal’s decision to support this theory instead of the theory of a Single Indian Nation, which the Republic of India is based on, is telling in terms of where its ideological leanings had moved on to by 1947.East Bengal’s leadership at the time was nearly unanimous in its decision to join Pakistan, and while this may not have reflected the wishes of the entire population of the province, the fact there were no significant stirrings against the choice, means that, tacitly at least, it was a popular one. And even though the founding of Pakistan was not a Salafist experiment, its was predicated on principles – pan-Islamism, religion as the sole identity, and the need for an Islamicpolity – that are central to the Salafist creed.
The unfinished revolution
Salafism is the fastest growing version of Islam today. The house of Saud, which still maintains its allegiance to the Wahabbi school of thought, is its biggest proponent and has spent untold billions propagating Salafism abroad over the last two decades.
Most of this funding goes to mosques, madrasas, and other religious institutions that preach their particularly austere version of Islam. They also support imam trainings and publishing outlets, as well as the distribution of textbooks. Salafi khutbas are read out during Jumma prayers at many mosques around the Muslim world.
Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Jamaat-e-Islam, Hefazat-e-Islam, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Hamas, Ahle Sunnat, Ahle Hadith and various other radical organisations - regardless of the differences between them-subscribe to a Salafist world-view. Their raison d’etre includes the replacing of indigenous Islamic cultures with a strict, literalist interpretation of Islam, which is hostile to Sufis, Shias, Ahmadias, Ismailis and virtually every other expression of Islamic thought.
Salafism is statist and believes in political control, seeking to challenge secular governments by positioning itself as the defender of socially and politically weaker groups against powerful ones. In fact, this has always been the case. Salafism was forged in the furnace of resistance and has always held that an “undiluted” totalitarian Islam is the only route to liberation. They have successfully made Salafism synonymous with Islam to the point that most mainstream Muslims measure their piety and their faith by the stringent standards set by the Salafists.
Our national presumption that the likes of Hefazat-e-Islam and their allies are something new and “alien” to our otherwise liberal, secular environment is quite naive actually. They are in fact very local, albeit with foreign support, and have been part of the Bengali Muslim story since at least as long as Salafism has been around.
They are a much larger part of the mainstream than we are comfortable acknowledging, and it wouldn’t be a complete stretch to say that, in the modern era at least, secular liberalism is the actual newcomer.
The values of the Kolkata-centric Bengali Renaissance that produced Bangla nationalism as we know it today, and the Sultanate era Sufi Islam, which infused our culture with a broadness of spirit and an appreciation for diversity, are certainly inviolable elements of our social orientation.
But it would be blinkered to ignore the fact that Salafism has been with us for a long time as well, and is unlikely to disappear just because we find it intolerable. In fact our intolerance of it, especially if expressed violently, will probably make it stronger.