Banning of religion-based politics
Post-Cold War political theorists are now engaged in interrogating the different visions of democracy (Nadia Urbinati of Columbia University, "Two visions of democracy," Dissent magazine). One vision questions the inclusion of Islam among the cultural and religious differences within a democratic community. The other does not exclude Islam within the expression of liberal multiculturalism because this school of thought does not see Islam as "a subspecies of totalitarianism," contradicting Pascal Bruckner's, a well-known French "noveaux philosophes," description of people being chained to their roots and consequently unable to change and adapt to modernity.
The militant liberals gained ground after 9/11 and shifted their politics of intolerance from communism in a post-Cold War period to Islam. But Italian theorist Norberto Bobbio postulates: "It is worth risking liberty by making its enemy its beneficiary if the only alternative is to limit liberty to the point of suffocating it, or not allowing it to bear fruit. Much better an always endangered but expansive liberty than a liberty well-protected but unable to develop."
The proponents of the second version that include, according to Professor Benjamin Barber, "Samuel Huntington's discredited notion of clash of civilisations in which the West and the rest are locked in a struggle of survival," are militant liberals, neo-cons and "new sovererigntists" glorified during George Bush's administration, who almost consciously ignored the 200 or more sects of Christianity to zero in on a few wayward Muslims of bin Laden's variety.
The question facing the world today is not about the comparative superiority of different religions. The question is of the engagement between people holding absolute contrapositions in order to establish cohabitation in a multicultural society that guarantees freedom of expression and the practice of one's own belief under the conviction that they will not be vilified by communities who profess other beliefs.
Addressing the Istanbul seminar in June 2008 (Reset Dialogue on Civilisations), Benjamin Barber found the proposition, which has become fairly fashionable in many Western quarters, absurd that Islam cannot accommodate democracy or that democracy cannot accommodate Islam. Barber contends that to the extent Islam is fundamentalist, so is religion in many places "because in our secular age religion is under siege and fundamentalism is above all a reaction to religion under siege."
Perhaps Benjamin Barber could have spoken of religious extremism instead of fundamentalism, as the word "fundamentalism" connotes looking for fundamentals of an idea or a concept, be it divine or mortal, and does not necessarily mean the meaningless terrorist acts conducted by a section of deviants in the name of Islam.
The aggrieved nations, both developed and developing, Muslim and non-Muslim, who have been victims of terrorism, would agree that the process of cultural transformation has to come from within and can only be encouraged from without.
The Bush version of democracy, as an international project to be implemented through coercive measures, if necessary, was a non-starter because many of the developing countries that lacked, in the eyes of the West, the basic tenets of democracy had been subjected to colonial exploitation for hundreds of years and are weary of intervention in the name of "liberation" of the oppressed from the tyrants.
Michael Ignatieff (of Harvard Kennedy School of Government) was at least honest enough in his admission that the invasion of Iraq "was a referendum of American power." But then, a decade after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the people of the world are reluctant to support the regime change argument now proffered because it was already known to the Anglo-US leaders that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
Barack Obama's Cairo speech had, to a large measure, diffused the scepticism in the Muslim world (no supporter of Osama bin Laden) about the sincerity of the US-led West to solve, for example, the festering Palestinian problem, but the strength of the Israeli lobby is proving to be more powerful than Barack Obama had assumed.
The confusion raging around the world today is not about the struggle between atheism and religiosity. Yale Professor Paul Bloom is convinced that religion is bred in the bones. Tocqueville and Durkheim insist that free societies have been constructed on a religious foundation that lends them stability and the opportunity of political disagreement. Rousseau saw the need for religion as solidifying people into groups laying the foundation of the state. What we have to guard against is that acknowledgement of religious and ethnic differences does not degenerate into giving, in Pascal Bruckner's words, "one's blessing to hostile insular communities that throw ramparts between themselves and the rest of the society."
In the light of the above, the Bangladesh Supreme Court's decision to lift the stay order on the four-year-old High Court judgment, declaring illegal the 5th amendment to our Constitution, provides an opportunity to bring back to life the 1972 Constitution with Islam as the state religion and, at the same time, to ban religion-based political parties.
Undeniably, Bangladesh is a Muslim-majority country and most of the people are devout Muslims. But the absence of the separation of religion and the political authority in unambiguous terms, the teaching of giving unto God what is God's and unto Caesar what is Caesar's, opens up the possibility of strengthening the alleged presence of what journalist Christopher Hitchens would call "Islamo-fascists" and historian Niall Ferguson would label "Islamo-Bolshevists," committed to revolution and reordering the world in a way that would undo modernism and take countries like ours to sixth-century Saudi Arabia.
There is no denying the fact that religion-based politics is contrary to the basic tenets of universal human rights followed by all civilised countries, both in their domestic law and in their international commitment. In Bangladesh, too, the events involving terrorist activities perpetrated by Islamic extremists have strengthened the demands of the people to ban religion-based political activities. One hopes this expectation will now be realised.
Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.
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