Muslim Amnesia

"When the streets of Damascus were lined with lamps, London was a village."

- Peter O' Toole in Lawrence of Arabia

I was chatting with a devout Turkish girl. She had resisted her family since the age of eighteen, and worn a headscarf. I thought she must truly be a Muslim. I was wrong.

We got on the subject of dictators, as the Arabs were trying to topple them. She asked me if I liked dictators. I said I loved them. She did a double take. She couldn't believe how I could love dictators. Incidentally, she said that probably I knew more about her ancestors than she did.

It seems that was correct.

I know that under the Sultans, Muslim civilisation made room for diverse religions and created one of the long-lasting civilizations of the world.

And all this was achieved under dictators, autocrats, despots....

The tragic thing about Muslims is their loss of memory. They have lost all sense of time. They don't realise that 1,400 years of Muslim history - a glorious, benign and noble history - have passed. They are either fundamentalists, or 'modern' Muslims like the Turkish girl. The latter group look to Europe and America for inspiration.

When I said that she was hopelessly westernised, she reacted quickly. "Hey," she said, "I am not westernised." Yet, unbeknownst to her, she was.

Why are Muslims so servile?

The encounter with the west has so knocked the stuffing out of us that we have lost all self-respect. We have become thoroughly defensive. We have forgotten that Hazrat Uthman liberated thousands of slaves, and that the west was based on slavery. Ours, and the Chinese civilization, were benign. In this, lies our greatness.

Sayyid Qutb and Bangladesh

Sayyid Qutb has been described as the father of Islamic fundamentalism, but that's inaccurate. Islamic fundamentalism has several progenitors, but he was unique in his advocacy of violence. He was also innovative in his use of the term 'jahiliya'. Jahiliya was the period before Islam, a period of unknowing and iniquity.

Qutb felt that the contemporary Muslim world had ceased to be Muslim, and he described this as jahiliya. Clearly, this was an emotionally powerful slogan. Here I am concerned with how the term (as used by Qutb) would apply to Bangladesh.

Clearly, between 1971 and 1975, Bangladesh belonged to the period of jahiliya (Jahiliya 1). Over these years, we were concerned with what Arnold Toynbee has called "the worship of our collective selves", that is, nationalism. Nationalism, for a Muslim, is idolatry.

After the killing of Sheikh Mujib, Islam was reestablished in our constitution and in practice. Jahiliya had been overcome: not by fundamentalists, mind you, but by military officers, especially General Zia. This was the reverse of the experience of Egypt, Qutb's homeland, under Nasser.

General Ershad carried on this post-jahiliya period over nine years.

However, after the election of December 2008, jahiliya has returned with a vengeance (Jahiliya 2). Islam has again been disestablished: the democratic government hasn't dared to wipe Islam from the constitution, but it clearly would have loved to do so. The clause expressing our solidarity with the umma has been erased. The country is now a vassal of India. Language-worship and Mujib-worship are back.

Who will take us out of the present jahiliya - military officers or fundamentalists? Let's wait and see.