Comparing Pakistan with Bangladesh: Is South Asia Moving Toward Secularism?

Bangladesh has recently upheld a decision to ensure the separation of politics from religion. Arshi Saleem Hashmi, member of SAVE Pakistan, compares the situation in Bangladesh with that of Pakistan in a new article published by the Institute of Regional Studies, arguing that Bangladesh is creating the secular state that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, envisioned for his country.

BANGLADESH BAN ON RELIGION-BASED POLITICS: REVIVING THE SECULAR CHARACTER OF THE CONSTITUTION

The decision of the Bangladesh Supreme Court regarding the ban on religion-based politics must be seen in this historical perspective. It reflects the ideology of the country’s founding fathers and has restored the original Constitution of the People's Republic of Bangladesh. Following the SC Appellate Division’s decision upholding the High Court's landmark verdict of 29 August 2005 that declared the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment (1979) illegal, the ban on formation of political organizations based on religion was restored. The verdict also paved the way for ensuring secularism as the “cornerstone” of the Constitution. The Supreme Court decision vacated the stay it had granted the then BNP-JI-led government the same day that the HC judgement was announced in August 2005. (The SC Appelate Division’s verdict, which was issued in January 2010, became trapped in an appeals process until 29 July 2010.) According to Bangladeshi Law Minister Shafique Ahmed, carrying out activities of any political party based on religion is a punishable offence under the Special Powers Act. Political parties and other organizations using religion as their guideline stand banned with the annulment of the Fifth Amendment.

In the wake of this verdict, the Election Commission of Bangladesh, on 26 January 2010, asked the three religion-based parties — Jamaat-e-Islami, Bangladesh, Khelafat Andolan and Tarikat Federation — to amend their charters as they were in conflict with the supreme law of the land.

It is important to note that unlike Pakistan, in Bangladesh, the Awami League gave the nation its first constitution within one year of independence, based on the four cardinal principles — secularism, nationalism, socialism and democracy. Bangladesh became the third major Muslim country to officially embrace secularism after Turkey and Tunisia. This way a secular state that Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, had in mind when he spoke on 11 August 1948 about the basic characteristic of the newly independent nation-state Pakistan, Bangladesh in 1971 fulfilled his dream by separating the affairs of the state from religion.

Mohammed Ali Jinnah envisioned Pakistan not as a place for the ingathering of all Muslims from distant lands the way Israel sees itself regarding Jews, but as a place where Muslims of the subcontinent could feel safe economically and politically. It has very clear geographical limits, not really what today’s Islamists desire to make Pakistan as a political centre for the Muslims all over.

The most quoted and clear speech in terms of what Jinnah had in mind for Pakistan, is when on 11 August 1947 speaking in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan, he stated:

There is no other solution. Now what shall we do? Now, if we want to make this great State of Pakistan happy and prosperous, we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in co-operation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make. I cannot emphasize it too much. We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities, the Hindu community and the Muslim community, because even as regards Muslims you have Pathans, Punjabis, Shias, Sunnis and so on, and among the Hindus you have Brahmins, Vashnavas, Khatris, also Bengalis, Madrasis and so on, will vanish. Indeed if you ask me, this has been the biggest hindrance in the way of India to attain the freedom and independence and but for this we would have been free people long long ago. No power can hold another nation, and specially a nation of 400 million souls in subjection; nobody could have conquered you, and even if it had happened, nobody could have continued its hold on you for any length of time, but for this. Therefore, we must learn a lesson from this. You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. As you know, history shows that in England, conditions, some time ago, were much worse than those prevailing in India today. The Roman Catholics and the Protestants persecuted each other. Even now there are some States in existence where there are discriminations made and bars imposed against a particular class. Thank God, we are not starting in those days. We are starting in the days where there is no discrimination, no distinction between one community and another, no discrimination between one caste or creed and another. We are starting with this fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State. The people of England in course of time had to face the realities of the situation and had to discharge the responsibilities and burdens placed upon them by the government of their country and they went through that fire step by step. Today, you might say with justice that Roman Catholics and Protestants do not exist; what exists now is that every man is a citizen, an equal citizen of Great Britain and they are all members of the Nation. Now I think we should keep that in front of us as our ideal and you will find that in course of time Hindus would cease to be Hindus and Muslims would cease to be Muslims, not in the religious sense, because that is the personal faith of each individual, but in the political sense as citizens of the State.

Pakistan went on enforcing its religious identity where religion became everything, from domestic to foreign policy to culture to social issue to personal; becoming very much the business of the state. Bangladesh pursued, at least in the beginning what Jinnah had envisioned about the new Muslim State in the subcontinent.

To read the full article by Arshi Saleem Hashmi, follow this link.

Misperceptions work both ways: Muslim and secular women need to work for inclusive dialogue

Greater understanding is needed between Muslim and secular women. Instead of criticizing one another's way of life, women should conduct an inclusive dialogue that recognizes the common ground that all women have. Arzu Merali of the Islamic Human Rights Commission, describes common misperceptions from both sides and why we should work to respect everyone's point of view.

They hate women, don't they?

"It must be terrible having to wear all that," a friend of mine was told last December as she attended a meeting to discuss the future of Afghanistan, particularly its women - "all that" being some baggy clothing and a headscarf. "Not particularly," she retorted, putting an abrupt end both to the conversation and to the prospect of building bridges between Muslim and secular feminists.

My friend is the founder of an NGO dedicated to penal reform. A convert to Islam, she is as British and as white as the participant who so earnestly assumed she was a victim of the Taliban and in need of liberation. No doubt the woman meant well, but no amount of good intentions justifies the way that she, like many others, berates Islam for embodying all things anti-women. This misconception predates the Rushdie era - indeed, so oppressed were we deemed to be in the 80s that even an illicit affair with Ricky Butcher in EastEnders provided an avenue of liberation.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission receives case after case of employers and educators using this image of the downtrodden Muslim woman to excuse discrimination. Muslim women are denied many opportunities on the assumption that they will - if not on a whim then by force - get married, or have many children. Or they face the horrendous dilemma of having to choose between employment and their Islamic garb.

Muslim women have become an absolute symbol of oppression, and distorted images of them permeate news coverage. While Daisy Cutters began to thunder down on Afghans last year, journalists from across the political spectrum - from Boris Johnson in the [conservative] Daily Telegraph to Polly Toynbee in the [left-wing] Guardian - maintained that it was Islam that oppressed Afghan women. Beware Muslims, they screamed in their unlikely unanimity. They hate women, don't they?

As soon as they turn their attentions to Islam, commentators become missionaries. Muslim women must be saved from a religion that reviles, objectifies and veils them. Everything is proof of this. Afghan women had to wear the head-to-toe burka (although it turns out they did not); were not allowed to work (although they did); and could not vote (nor could men under Mullah Omar's regime).

Even an Iranian (yes, Iranian) movie has become part of the iconography of the campaign to rescue the Afghan and, by extension, Islamic woman. Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Kandahar has been held up as a critique of Islam and its treatment of women. The fact that it may actually be an appraisal of the Taliban's prejudices is a subtlety grasped only by a few. It is almost impossible to find a mainstream critique of the horror of the Taliban that is not itself an Islamophobic diatribe. Muslims, who could provide such a critique, are left out of the debate. Their reactions might as well not exist.

The cartoonish realisation of long-held prejudices in the Taliban's Afghanistan has given succour to an anti-Islamic clamour that the experiences of "western" and "Muslim" women are utterly distinct. While western women are assumed to have, or at least be approaching, equality with men, Muslim women are simply the victims of terror and oppression. So unfettered are western women in this scenario that they are what, according to Johnson, "Islamic terrorists" are really afraid of.

But this language of liberation disguises an exclusionary discourse. Conversions in the west are increasing and more women than men opt for the faith. Perhaps, the argument goes, they are not able to see how oppressive their choice is. Donning the headscarf as a means of negotiating modernity invites contempt for Muslim women's non-conformity to a single vision of female emancipation. "No letters please from British women who have taken the veil and claim it's liberating," Polly Toynbee wrote not so long ago. "It is their right in a tolerant society to wear anything, including rubber fetishes." Either insane or masochistic, the motives and beliefs of Muslim women are voiced by everybody except themselves.

The polarisation and misrepresentation works both ways, however. Marginalised Muslims have accused liberal society of objectifying, reviling and unveiling women. Western society, they charge, is pornographic, voyeuristic and exploitative. The gender pay gap is shocking. None of this would happen in a truly Islamic society. Women's financial independence and property rights are absolute in Islam. No woman is considered a commodity and pornographers would face punishments.

While the gap between Muslims and the west is widening the most striking feature of each other's critiques of their treatment of women is the lack of dissimilarity. Violence, workplace discrimination, educational opportunity and a desire for basic respect from men are universal issues.

Whether we are western, Muslim, both or neither, we must wake up to the possibility that what we see as problematic for women is much the same whoever and wherever we are. Plastered over billboards, or banished from view, women are subjugated by patriarchy. Demeaning Islam excludes the voices of Islamic women and that liberates no one.

· Arzu Merali is director of research for the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

The Guardian (London) Friday June 21, 2002