Many Bangladeshis today can simultaneously feel deeply Muslim, strongly Bengali, and proudly Bangladeshi. Those identities are no longer necessarily perceived as mutually exclusive.
This synthesis did not happen overnight. It is the product of a century of political evolution, from the Muslim League to the Language Movement to the Liberation War, and a constitutional experiment that tried to codify it.
Bengali Muslim political thought was never identical to the North Indian Muslim League tradition. The two represented different answers to the same question: How should Muslims organize politically in colonial India?
In North India, from Sir Syed Ahmed Khan in the late 19th century to the All-India Muslim League founded in 1906, the emphasis was on Muslims as a minority needing educational modernization, constitutional safeguards, and eventually, recognition as a separate political nation. This trajectory culminated in the Lahore Resolution of 1940 and the creation of Pakistan in 1947.
In Bengal, there was a powerful alternative basis of identity: Bengali language, Bengali culture, and a territorial homeland. The political careers of A K Fazlul Huq, the Krishak Praja Party, and later the United Front illustrated this tendency. For the Bengali Muslim peasant, identity was simultaneously religious, linguistic, and territorial.
Thus, Bengali Muslim experience contained two competing concepts of identity: Muslim identity versus Bengali linguistic-cultural identity. After 1947, that tension became increasingly pronounced.
Pakistan’s attempt to impose Urdu as the sole state language produced the Language Movement of 1952. That movement was enormously important for the eventual development of Bangladeshi nationalism.
The Bengali Language Movement did something politically profound. It shifted the basis of collective identity from “we are Muslims living in Pakistan” toward “we are Bengalis whose language and culture constitute our collective identity.”
This did not eliminate Islam from Bengali identity. Rather, it separated religious identity from national-political identity. Religion remained central to personal and cultural life; language and culture became the basis of political nationality. That distinction eventually became fundamental to Bangladesh.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Awami League’s political program under Sheikh Mujibur Rahman increasingly emphasized four principles: Bengali nationalism, democracy, economic justice (socialism), and secularism. The 1971 independence struggle transformed these from political slogans into the ideological foundations of a new state.
The Constitution of Bangladesh was adopted on November 4, 1972. Its preamble explicitly identified nationalism, socialism, democracy, and secularism as the fundamental principles of the Constitution. Article 8 made those four principles the fundamental principles of state policy.
But Article 12 gives us the most revealing definition of what the framers meant by secularism. It stated that secularism would be realized through elimination of:
- communalism in all its forms;
- the granting by the state of political status in favour of any religion;
- the abuse of religion for political purposes;
- discrimination against or persecution of persons practicing a particular religion.
That is extraordinarily significant. Bangladesh’s constitutional secularism was not primarily an attack on religion. It was principally an attack on using religion as the basis of political power and citizenship.
This is considerably closer to Indian-style constitutional secularism than to the more aggressively anti-clerical French model of laïcité.
The 1972 Constitution did not conceive secularism as “making Bangladesh a country without Muslims or without Islam.” Bangladesh was overwhelmingly Muslim from its birth.
Rather, the constitutional idea was that being Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian should not determine one’s political status as a Bangladeshi. That is why the original Article 12 simultaneously dealt with secularism and freedom of religion.
The conceptual vocabulary of secularism certainly came through the global modern political world, ultimately influenced by European Enlightenment thought, constitutionalism, and the American and French experiences. But the political reason Bangladesh adopted secularism was overwhelmingly indigenous.
It emerged from a specific Bengali experience: Muslim League politics → Pakistan → linguistic conflict → Bengali nationalism → 1971 Liberation War → 1972 Constitution.
And Article 12 tells us what the framers were trying to prevent: Religious communalism becoming the basis of political power.
There is one particularly interesting irony. The partition that created East Pakistan was supposed to solve the Hindu-Muslim political problem by separating the two communities geographically. But East Pakistan eventually demonstrated that Muslim identity alone was insufficient to overcome linguistic, cultural, and regional identity.
For many Bengali Muslims, 1947 created Pakistan, but 1971 created a political state in which being Bengali and being Muslim no longer had to be competing identities.
That makes it possible for a Bangladeshi Muslim today to look back at undivided Bengal and say: “I am glad Bangladesh exists, but I also feel that something precious was lost when Bengal was divided.”
That sentiment is not necessarily a rejection of Pakistan’s creation by their ancestors. It is often the result of seven decades of historical experience after Pakistan. Nostalgia for pre-1947 Bengal can coexist perfectly well with the creation of Bangladesh.
There is a fascinating demographic dimension to this. The enormous Hindu exodus from East Bengal and the much smaller but still substantial Muslim movement in the opposite direction fundamentally changed the social composition of both West Bengal and East Bengal.
The memories of those two migrations are very different -- and that helps explain why nostalgia for “undivided Bengal” is expressed differently by Bengali Hindus and Bengali Muslims.
For many West Bengali Hindus, undivided Bengal is a memory of a lost ancestral home. For many Bangladeshi Muslims, it is a cultural memory -- Tagore and Nazrul, Pahela Baishakh, bhatiali songs, traditional Bengali food -- without any desire to undo 1971.
Bangladesh’s experience after 1975 complicated the picture. The initial secular-nationalist period gave way to a gradual revival of Islamic political identity.
In 1977, Ziaur Rahman removed secularism as a fundamental principle and inserted Bismillah-ar-Rahman-ar-Rahim and a commitment to “absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah.” In 1988, HM Ershad made Islam the state religion under Article 2A. In 2011, secularism was restored as a fundamental principle, but Bismillah and state religion were retained.
Bangladesh now has a constitution that simultaneously declares the state to be secular and Islam to be the state religion. That legal contradiction is the institutional expression of the identity synthesis described above -- a society that is overwhelmingly Muslim and yet determined that religion should not determine citizenship.
The fascinating historical irony is that Bangladesh’s secularism partly emerged from the failure of Pakistan’s Muslim-nationalist experiment to accommodate Bengali linguistic and cultural nationalism.
It was not an attempt to make Bangladesh less Muslim. It was an attempt to make Bangladesh a state where someone could admire Tagore and Nazrul, celebrate Bengali New Year, and at the same time identify strongly with Islam -- without one identity having to negate the other.
Ziauddin M Choudhury is a former Civil Servant and World Bank Official.
