Militant Islam

Now the government finds militants all over the place, arresting them as fortuitously as a fisherman catches fish with every draw of the net. They are found everywhere -- madrasahs, mosques, hotels, schools, colleges, universities, offices, cantonments, shoals, backwaters, woods, and forests. The demographic profile of these militants is also equally pervasive. From boys in the ninth grade to bearded men in their sunset age, the passion runs high to push religion to its logical end.

So, how has it happened? How has it come so far that devout men have hardened so much as to kill for faith? We have been a God-fearing country since the days of our ancestors, people believing in the five pillars of Islam, the Day of Judgement, and living this life in preparation for the next. But what has changed now that turned modest men into monsters? Why do they threaten to disrupt the country, blow away judges, destroy property, and do ungodly things in the name of God?

Tap here to add The Daily Star as a trusted source

We all know the answer. We all know that our governments have been playing footsy with the temptation of using religion for political gains. Every government has done the same. Every government has exploited fervour of faith to win favour in franchise. What we see now is Frankenstein confronting its maker. The faithful is asking for their fair share of the game. They want to run the government.

We are talking about two different worlds here. In one world sober and secular people live, where anyone who kills should go to jail. In the other world we have got the fanatics, people of extreme devotion, who believe that anyone who kills should go to heaven. We as a nation have been always pre-occupied with the notion of heaven, our lives sharpened to the point of denying this life to conquer the next, our pleasures postponed for the bliss and ecstasy of the world to come.

Our ancestors believed in it and they prayed in quiet patience. They believed it could come only if they earned it, only if they lived their lives according to scriptures in tolerance, kindness, purity, honesty, and righteousness. They grew beards when they grew old, some of them wore caps, observed ablution, watched that the outer garments in the lower portion of the body always stayed above their ankles. It was part of natural transformation, people growing old felt nearer to death and closer to God, getting ready to give up on this life to embrace the life awaiting them on the other side of the grave.

What if that transformation comes to a teenager, one who wants to renounce the world before he is old enough to understand it? And what about the older men who teach it to him, who encourage him to kill and die in the name of God, shed the blood of innocent men, disturb the peace of his own society and raise hell on earth in the name of heaven? There is a disease called Progeria Syndrome when a child begins to look like an elderly person. When a schoolboy carries the bomb, when he hurls it in the sublimated rage of his deranged mentor, does it tell us that our young minds are growing old fast, that they are skipping the stages of life when love not hatred should sway their hearts, when passion for life, not death should rule their minds?

In his article God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?, which appeared in the US think tank journal National Interest, Daniel Pipes investigated why the Muslim minds turned to militant Islam. He denied that socio-economic distress alone drove Muslims to their extremist path. Poverty didn't do it because militant Islam took off in the 1970s, just about the time oil-exporting Muslim states started enjoying extraordinary growth rates. He cited the example of Iran, where per capita income plummeted by nearly 90 per cent since 1980, causing alienation from Islam.

Instead affluent societies became the breeding grounds of militant Islam. In Kuwait Islamists control the parliament. The militant Islamic groups are more popular in the West Bank, which is more prosperous than Gaza. Militant Islam flourished in the member states of the European Union and in North America, where Muslims as a group enjoy a standard of living higher than the national averages.

Hence, Daniel Pipes inferred that perhaps wealth was the cause of militancy in Islam. People tend to become more engaged ideologically and active politically after they reach a fairly high standard of living. Most of the times, revolutions took place when the middle class swelled in their ranks. It is an irony that when Pipes wrote this article in 2002, one of his conclusions was that Bangladesh was the living proof amongst a few other countries that poverty couldn't generate militant Islam.

What went wrong in three years that turned our image upside down? If you visit a website called Wikipedia, there is a reference to how Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh rose in power exploiting the sentiments of people who resented the rampant corruption of the Awami League government. There are others who will blame BNP for sheltering Islamists under its fold and looking the other way when the militants were getting organised.

But that doesn't explain why the militants were getting organised in the first place. Many of these militants are educated, young, coming from small towns or rural background. Many of them are perhaps bright students, high achievers, people who want to go places in life. Why would they embark on the deadly course of death and violence? Why would they terrorise their countrymen, kill innocent people, and threaten to destroy government installations?

Perhaps this is the blind rage of disconsolate souls, souls which find moral anchor in religion in the ruffled sea of delusion and despair, just like fascism and Marxism-Leninism once attracted highly competent, motivated, and ambitious individuals. What Osama bin Laden and his Taliban enterprise have done is fire up the ambition to change the world by the barrel of guns and bang of bombs. It is nothing but a revolutionary zeal with messianic vision, Quran replacing Das Kapital.

There is also the bandwagon effect, opportunistic people getting a free-ride on the train of social transformation. There are those who are doing it for themselves, trying to get on to the elevator of power by adopting a counter-elitist path. Like every revolution, militant Islam will eventually devour its own children. That is how it goes, starting with a bang and ending with a whimper. There will be a time when this madness also shall pass.

Militant minds work like antibodies, their madness bringing sobriety to the frenzied aberrations of the human race. Militant Islam is the same old response to oppression and corruption that comes from anguished hearts embracing doctrinaire prescriptions to change the world. The only difference is that this time man has lost faith in himself. He has turned to God.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.