Nineteen eighty-two. I had just appeared for my SSC exams and gone to my nanabari for vacation. It was a very cosy township and everybody knew everybody. I saw that the young people spent most of their time engaged in informal adda, outside of the educational institutions.
They didn’t seem very interested in completing their education. Almost all of them wanted to be contractors and make some quick money. Most of them couldn’t also succeed in becoming businessmen.
I had a cousin who also wanted to become a contractor but miserably failed after wasting some money that he had gotten from his father.
His father and my mama didn’t want his son to become a contractor; he wanted his son to complete his education first. But the son seemed adamant on not continuing his education any more. They were always fighting over the issue.
By the time I went there, my cousin was roaming around the town in his discotheque outfit and chatting away his time, smoking two packs of cigarettes everyday. He was bankrupt and wasn’t earning anything; yet, he needed money to continue his lifestyle. He, at university-going age, wasn’t into his studies and was unemployed.
One morning, I saw him quarreling with his father on a different issue.
He was demanding that he should be allowed to go to Palestine to fight against the Israelis. He claimed Palestine was hiring fighters with good remuneration.
He also claimed many Bangladeshis, including some of his friends, were going and he demanded that he should also be allowed to go. I couldn’t imagine Bangladeshis seriously thinking of going to Palestine and fighting in their war.
However, later on, after many years, I did find out that many Bangladeshis indeed had gone to Palestine and fought in their war.
I learned something from this incident: An idle brain is indeed the devil’s workshop. If my cousin and the ones who went to Palestine were involved in proper education or were earning something from their own businesses, they wouldn’t want to go there.
Then came the Afghan war (1979-1992). This war was also going on almost at the same time. The Afghan mujahideens, with the help of America, were fighting against the erstwhile Soviets. Bangladesh may be thousands of miles away from Afghanistan, but surprisingly, in 1984, a group of volunteers visited the country and participated in the war.
According to an estimate, about 3,000 over-enthusiastic Bangladeshis joined the war in several batches in the following few years. Of them, 24 died in the battlefield. Many were believed to have met bin Laden.
An idle brain is indeed the devil’s workshop. If my cousin and the ones who went to Palestine were involved in proper education or were earning something from their own businesses, they wouldn’t want to go there
When the Afghanistan mujahideen emerged as victors, the Bangladeshi participants had expressed their delight at a press conference in Dhaka. These were the people who later on formed various radical organisations.
The returnees from Palestine perhaps didn’t fuel any anti-Israeli or anti-West sentiment in Bangladeshi society, but the Afghan returnees reportedly did.
They did a lot of damage to our social structure in terms of trying to turn our society into a radical one.
They targeted the poor and students from Islamic seminaries (who mostly came from poor families).
These returnees had also formed various radical organisations across the country in order to attract young people to radicalism.
Remember Picchi Hannan, Tokai Sagar, Eteem Rashed, Eteem Babu, Kala Monir, Lombu Dipu, Eteem Rahmat, Eteem Jabbar, Khato Jewel, and BBC Anwar? Remember how easy it was to drag them into the world of crime? Similarly, it was very easy to convince poor children to become radicals. Targeting the poor worked. That’s when the idea of suicide bombers evolved in this country.
The government has handled that quite firmly and intelligently in order to reverse the situation.
However, in no time, another trend evolved and the agents of international radical groups started targeting the educated youth, belonging to the middle and upper-middle classes.
They seem to have become quite successful in misleading our young people towards radicalism. After a few incidents, it’s evident that it has gone to a scary level; our misled youth seem ready to die for what they’re being taught. We seem to be at a loss in terms of preventing this infection among our youth.
If we analyse all these phases, we could very well conclude that there were and are many aspects in religion that have been unknown to us or we didn’t understand their real implications.
People at large seem quite far away from studying religious issues that are important to our lives. It’s only a recent phenomenon that some of our leaders are emphasising the importance of understanding the religion of Islam properly.
I think people should be encouraged more to do this. A culture of learning should develop in our society to have the right wisdom so that no one can manipulate or mislead us with wrong interpretations.
Ekram Kabir is a fiction writer.
