- Title
- Islamic resurgence in Bangladesh's culture and politics: origins, dynamics and implications
- Creator
- Hossain, Akhtar
- Relation
- Journal of Islamic Studies Vol. 23, Issue 2, p. 165-198
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jis/ets042
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- In Bangladesh, the resurgence of Islam is not synonymous with Islamic militancy. Islamic militancy grew in frequency and intensity between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, but as a transitory phenomenon on the periphery of Bangladeshi life and society. It arose for two main reasons. First, it is the predictable outcome of the sustained misgovernance of the Bangladeshi state. It is predictable in a Muslim-majority country that some of the militant groups protesting this official corruption are Islamic. These rebel groups are socially marginal. Their actions are reactive, episodic and unlikely to be the co-ordinated operations of a broad movement. Second, global factors have provoked some militants to engage in terrorist activities, some of which are anti-West, albeit rhetorically. Majority-Muslim Bangladeshis do not support such activities but do share the militants’ perception that the major Western countries are anti-Islam, as evident in their apparent indifference, sustained over decades, to Muslim sufferings across the globe, in which they have been directly or indirectly complicit. By highlighting Bangladeshi political developments in an historical context, this paper shows that Bangladeshi-Muslim nationalism has emerged as an alternative to Bengali nationalism-secularism. Both these movements have long roots in the history of the region, and could therefore become the basis of a stable, two-party political system. A necessary, if not sufficient, precondition for such a development is that the two major political parties (the Awami League and the Bangladeshi Nationalist Party) cooperate in establishing a stable, competitive political culture on the basis of this natural divide in Bangladeshi society. Such a development would represent an historic advance away from the current political paradigm of wasting public resources on ideology-driven, authoritarian policy-making under democratic paraphernalia.
- Subject
- Bangladesh; Islam; militancy
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1054534
- Identifier
- uon:15766
- Identifier
- ISSN:0955-2340
- Language
- eng
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