For more on the Ahmadiya crisis, which is discussed in this article, go to:
http://www.shobak.org/muslimsorheretics


Bangladesh was supposed to be a model of democratic tolerance. But that was
before
militants like Bangla Bhai began their reigns of torture and the cry went up for
a new
Taliban.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/23/magazine/23BANG.html
NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
January 23, 2005

The Next Islamist Revolution?
By ELIZA GRISWOLD


Before dawn one morning this past November in Bagmara, a village in northwestern
Bangladesh, six puffy-eyed men gathered beneath a cracked-mud stairwell to
describe a
man they consider their leader, a former schoolteacher called Bangla Bhai. The
quiet was
broken now and then by donkey carts clattering past, as village women, seated on
the
backs of the carts, were taken to the market. The women wore makeshift burkas --
black,
white, canary yellow -- and kept their heads down, and this, the men explained,
was
Bangla Bhai's doing.

Last spring, Bangla Bhai, whose followers probably number around 10,000,
decided to try
an Islamist revolution in several provinces of Bangladesh that border on India.
His name
means ''Bangladeshi brother.'' (At one point he said his real name was Azizur
Rahman and
more recently claimed it was Siddiqul Islam.) He has said that he acquired this
nom de
guerre while waging jihad in Afghanistan and that he was now going to bring
about the
Talibanization of his part of Bangladesh. Men were to grow beards, women to wear
burkas.
This was all rather new to the area, which was religiously diverse. But Jagrata
Muslim
Janata Bangladesh, as Bangla Bhai's group is called (the name means Awakened
Muslim
Masses of Bangladesh), was determined and violent and seemed to have enough
lightly
armed adherents to make its rule stick.

Because he swore his main enemy was a somewhat derelict but still dangerous
group of
leftist marauders known as the Purbo Banglar Communist Party, Bangla Bhai gained
the
support of the local police -- until the central government, worried that Bangla
Bhai's
band might be getting out of control, ordered his arrest in late May.

''There used to be chaos and confusion here,'' Siddiq-ul-Rahman, one of Bangla
Bhai's
senior lieutenants, said through an interpreter that morning in Bagmara. The sun
was
coming up and a crowd was gathering. Siddiq-ul-Rahman boasted that police
officers
attend Bangla Bhai's meetings armed and in uniform. The Bangladeshi government's
arrest
warrant doesn't seem to have made much difference, although for now Bangla Bhai
refrains from public appearances. The government is far away in Dhaka, and is in
any case
divided on precisely this question of how much Islam and politics should mix.
Meanwhile,
Bangla Bhai and the type of religious violence he practices are filling the
power vacuum.

Bangladeshi politics have never strayed far from violence. During the war for
independence from Pakistan, in 1971, three million people died in nine months.
Thuggery
has been a consistent feature of political life since then and is increasingly
so today. This
has made it difficult to get an accurate picture of phenomena like Bangla Bhai.
Under the
current government, which has been in power since 2001 and includes two avowedly
Islamist parties, journalists are frequently imprisoned. Last year, three were
killed while
reporting on corruption and the rise of militant Islam. Moreover, 80 percent of
Bangladeshis live in villages that can be hard to reach and are under the tight
control of
local politicians. Foreign journalists in Bangladesh are followed by
intelligence agents;
people that reporters interview are questioned afterward.

Nonetheless, it is possible to travel through Bangladesh and observe the
increased
political and religious repression in everyday life, and to verify the simple
remark by one
journalist there: ''We are losing our freedom.'' The global war on terror is
aimed at making
the rise of regimes like that of the Taliban impossible, but in Bangladesh, the
trend could
be going the other way.

n Bangladesh, ''Islam is becoming the legitimizing political discourse,''
according to C.
Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the United States Institute of Peace,
a nonpartisan,
federally financed policy group in Washington. ''Once you don that religious
mantle, who
can criticize you? We see this in Pakistan as well, where very few people are
brave enough
to take the Islamists on. Now this is happening in Bangladesh.'' The region,
Fair added, has
become a haven where jihadis can move easily and have access to a friendly
infrastructure
that allows them to regroup and train.

Another close observer of Bangladeshi politics, Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights
Watch,
told me recently: ''The practical effect of politics along religious lines is
that you start to
accept a religious identity and reject every other. It's absolutely crucial to
understand that
this is happening in Bangladesh right now.''

This was not supposed to be the fate of Bangladesh, which fought its way to
independence 34 years ago. While its population of 141 million is 83 percent
Muslim, the
nation was founded on the principle of secularism, which in Bangladesh
essentially means
religious tolerance. After the guiding figure of independence, Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman, was
assassinated in 1975, military leaders, seeking legitimacy, allowed a return of
Islam to
politics. With the return of fair elections in 1991, power became precariously
divided
among four parties: the right-leaning Bangladesh National Party (B.N.P.), the
mildly leftist
Awami League, the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami and the conservative Jatiya. The two
leading
parties are led by women: the B.N.P. by the current prime minister, Khaleda Zia,
widow of
the party's murdered founder; the Awami League by Zia's predecessor as prime
minister,
Sheikh Hasina Wazed, herself the daughter of the assassinated founding father,
Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman.

Zia and Sheikh Hasina, as she is known, have a legendary antipathy toward each
other.
Each of their parties regularly accuses the other of illegal acts. When Sheikh
Hasina very
narrowly escaped assassination last August, B.N.P. activists all but accused her
of staging
the attack in order to acquire political advantage. Zia's government has been
unable to
identify the assassins -- who lobbed grenades into a party rally, killing at
least 20 and
wounding hundreds -- and Sheikh Hasina has refused even to discuss the
investigation
with the prime minister, saying: ''With whom should I meet? With the killers?''

The political breach between those two parties is being filled primarily by
Jamaat-e-
Islami, which agitated against independence in 1971 and remains close to
Pakistan. The
group was banned after independence for its role in the war but has slowly
worked its way
back to political legitimacy. The party itself has not changed much -- it was
always
socially conservative and unafraid of violence. The political context, however,
has changed
enough to give it greater power. Since 2001, Jamaat-e-Islami has been a crucial
part of a
governing coalition dominated by the B.N.P. The two parties have ties dating to
the late
1970's, but it is only since 2001 that a politically aggressive form of Islam
has found, for
the first time since independence, a strong place at the top of Bangladeshi
politics.

It has found a corresponding position at the bottom of Bangladeshi politics as
well, in the
social scrum that produces figures like Bangla Bhai. (Opposition politicians
have linked
Bangla Bhai to Jamaat-e-Islami, a tie that Jamaat and Bangla Bhai have both
denied.) The
border provinces have, since independence, harbored a proliferation of armed
groups that
either Bangladesh, India, Myanmar or Pakistan, or some region or faction in one
of those
countries, has been willing to support for its own political reasons. By the
early 1990's
Islamist groups began appearing, mainly at the periphery of the jihad centered
on
Afghanistan. The most important of these has been the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami
(Huji),
which has been associated with Fazlul Rahman, who signed Osama bin Laden's
famous
declaration in 1998 endorsing international, coordinated jihad -- the document
that
introduced Al Qaeda to the larger world. But Bangla Bhai's group and others have
since
emerged and are making their bids for power.

''Bangladesh is becoming increasingly important to groups like Al Qaeda because
it's been
off everyone's radar screen,'' says Zachary Abuza, the author of ''Militant
Islam in
Southeast Asia'' and a professor of political science at Simmons College in
Boston. ''Al
Qaeda is going to have to figure out where they can regroup, where they have the
physical
capability to assemble and train, and Bangladesh is one of these key places.''


Six years ago, Huji chose its first prominent target: Shamsur Rahman, who is
Bangladesh's
leading poet. Recently, at his home in Dhaka, Rahman began telling me the story
of the
attack as he pulled a sheaf of papers from a pigeonhole in his writing desk, on
which sat a
bottle of black-currant soda and a copy of Dante's ''Inferno.'' Above the desk
hung an ink
sketch of the Nobel Prize-winning Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, as well as
a
yellowing photograph of Rahman's father.

Rahman, who is 75, is birdlike and wears his hair in a fluffy white pageboy.
Most of his
poems are love poems, but some address the rise of militant Islam in his
country. ''I am
not against religion,'' he said, smiling wryly. ''I am against fanaticism.'' He
reached for his
mug of hot water. It was the holy month of Ramadan, and Rahman's family had just
broken
the day's fast.

Downstairs, four policemen were eating a meal prepared by Rahman's
daughter-in-law
Tia. Rahman has lived under police protection since Jan. 18, 1999, when three
young men
appeared at his house and asked for a poem. Tia refused to let them in. The poet
was
resting, she said. But the men begged for just a minute of his time, so Tia
obliged.
Immediately one of the men ran upstairs and tried to chop Rahman's neck with an
ax. ''He
tried to cut my head off, but my wife took me in her arms and my daughter-in-law
too,''
Rahman recounted. The two women fended off the blows until the neighbors,
hearing their
screams, rushed into the house and caught the attackers.

Rahman gestured toward the women standing in the doorway. Tia looked exhausted.
The
hair around her face was damp from cooking. Rahman's wife, Zahora, not more than
four
feet tall, held her diminutive hands in front of her and smiled. (She
understands English
but cannot speak it.) Rahman pointed out the shiny scar on her arm. Zahora
patted her
husband and took his empty mug to the kitchen. ''They wanted my head, not a
poem,'' he
said.

The attack led to the arrest of 44 members of Huji. Two men, a Pakistani and a
South
African, claimed they had been sent to Bangladesh by Osama bin Laden with more
than
$300,000, which they distributed among 421 madrassas, or private religious
schools.
According to Gowher Rizvi, director of the Ash Institute for Democratic
Governance and
Innovation at Harvard and a lecturer in public policy, bin Laden's reputed
donation is ''a
pittance'' compared with the millions that Saudi charities have contributed to
many of
Bangladesh's estimated 64,000 madrassas, most of which serve only a single
village or
two. Money of this kind is especially important because Bangladesh is one of the
poorest
countries in the world. Out of 177 countries on the United Nations' Human
Development
Index, Bangladesh is ranked 138, just above Sudan. The recent tsunami that
devastated its
neighbors hardly touched it -- a rare bit of good luck for the country, as most
catastrophes seem somehow to claim their victims in Bangladesh.


In Bangla Bhai's patch of northwestern Bangladesh, poverty is so pervasive
that, for many
children in the region, privately subsidized madrassas are the only educational
option. For
the past several years especially, money from Persian Gulf states has
strengthened them
even more. Most follow a form of the Deobandi Islam taught in the 1950's by the
intellectual and activist Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, who was born in India in
1903 and
defined Muslim politics in opposition to Indian nationalism. While Maududi's
original
agenda was reformist, the Deobandi model is now better known from the madrassas
of
Pakistan, where it gave rise to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Whether Maududi
intended it or
not, his teachings have become synonymous with radical Islam.

In November, in a shop in the Bagmara bazaar not far from where Bangla Bhai
used to
hold his meetings, two young men sat waiting to tell their stories about the
cruelty and
repression of Bangla Bhai's movement. Everyone here wanted to talk about this,
they said,
but were afraid of the consequences. Several days earlier, Bangla Bhai's cadres
had beaten
a university student caught smoking cigarettes, another banned act.

''We weren't allowed to sell these,'' said one of the men, a 20-year-old
shopkeeper,
holding up a pack of Player's Gold Leaf he kept on a low shelf.

His friend, a thickset man in a white kurta -- a long-sleeved shirt extending
below the
waist -- sat on a carton next to the counter, with a blue mobile phone in his
hand. He
played with the phone distractedly as he described the announcements Bangla
Bhai's men
had made, beginning last summer, over the loudspeaker, demanding that people
come
watch public punishments. He told me that over the past months he himself had
seen
more than 50 men hanged upside down by their feet from bamboo scaffolding and
beaten
with hammers, iron rods and the field-hockey sticks that are commonly used in
Bangladesh as weapons. He winced for a second recalling these tortures, and then
his
fleshy face lost all expression.

''In this place people live in fear,'' the shopkeeper said. ''They still punish
people. If
anyone is not keeping Ramadan, even if it's a sick man and he's eating in a
restaurant,
they treat them badly.''

The thickset man scanned the street over his shoulder and added, shaking his
head,
''They wanted the regime of the Taliban here.''

Taskforce against Torture, a Bangladeshi human rights organization founded
three years
ago, has recorded more than 500 cases of people being intimidated and tortured
by
Bangla Bhai and his men. One of them is Abdul Quddus Rajon, a postmaster from
Shafiqpur, a village near Bagmara. He is 42 and comes from a wealthy family of
moderate
Muslims. Rajon was abducted early last May when two men in green headbands
showed up
at the post office on a motorbike. They forced him onto the bike and demanded
his
brother's phone number. Abdul Kayyam Badshah, Rajon's brother and the leader of
a
banned Communist Party, was wanted by the government and being pursued by Bangla
Bhai's men. Rajon refused to give them the number, so they took his mobile phone
and
drove him to one of Bangla Bhai's camps.

Rajon told me when I met him that he was held with 15 other men in two rooms.
''For four
days they tortured me,'' he recounted. Every morning, his captors, who Rajon
said were
not more than teenagers, took him to a cell and beat him.

Bangla Bhai's men demanded 100,000 taka for his release, about $1,600. Rajon
eventually
agreed to pay. Before his release, he said, his captors tried to intimidate him
into
becoming more observant. ''They took me in front of a mosque and told me to
promise I
would keep my beard and pray five times a day, and to never tell anything about
Bangla
Bhai's camp,'' he said. ''They wore beards and long kurtas like religious men,
but that was
the only way in which they were religious.'' He pulled up the cuffs of his
khakis to reveal
deep black gashes in his shins.

''Eleven days later,'' he said, ''they caught my brother.'' At noon on May 19,
Rajon was
awakened by a loudspeaker. Bangla Bhai's men were announcing that his brother's
trial
would start the next day and he would be sentenced to death. ''I tried to
contact the state
minister and the superintendent of police by telephone,'' Rajon said. ''Because
if Badshah
was accused, he should be tried according to the laws of the land. But they
wouldn't talk
to me.'' (According to The Daily Star, Bangladesh's leading English-language
newspaper,
the local government has been accused of colluding with Bangla Bhai.)

The next morning, Badshah was found hanged by his feet from a tree near a
police
station. He had been beaten to death. Rajon first heard about it through
whispering in the
village. ''A policeman was wandering around asking people if they were glad my
brother
was dead,'' he said. In the village and the surrounding districts, Bangla Bhai's
spate of
killings and torture continued for another month. One man was dismembered.
Another,
according to local journalists and villagers who told me they heard him, had a
microphone
held to his mouth while he was tortured so that the entire village could listen
to his
screams.

ommunists are just one target of Islamic militants in Bangladesh. Most attacks
have been
carried out against either members of religious minorities -- Hindus, Christians
and
Buddhists -- or moderate Muslims considered out of step with the doctrines
espoused at
the militant madrassas. International groups like Human Rights Watch cannot
gather
information freely enough to be certain of the scope of the problem. Yet
anecdotal
evidence is abundant. In Bangladesh, as part of the militant Islamists' agenda,
religious
minorities are coming under a new wave of attacks. One of the most vulnerable
communities is that of the Ahmadiyya, a sect of some 100,000 Muslims who believe
that
Muhammad was not the last prophet. (The Ahmadiyya are the subject of a Human
Rights
Watch report to be published next month.) In Pakistan, the Ahmadiyya have been
declared
infidels and many have been killed. In Bangladesh, religious hardliners have
burned
mosques and books and pressured the government to declare the sect non-Muslim.
Last
year, the government agreed to ban Ahmadiyya literature; earlier this month,
however,
Bangladesh's high court stayed the ban pending further consideration by the
court.

But those who oppose the Ahmadiyya are not giving up. At a recent rally in
Dhaka, 10,000
protesters gathered outside an Ahmadiyya mosque as one Islamic leader intoned
from a
parade float, ''Bangladesh's Muslims cast their vote to elect the current
government, and
the current government is not paying any heed.'' Police officers in riot gear
tightened their
formation protecting the mosque. ''Beware, we will throw you out of office if
you do not
meet our demands,'' he said. ''No one will be able to stop the forward march of
the
soldiers of Islam in Bangladesh.''

The Ahmadiyya are hardly the only group at risk. ''For the Hindus, the last
couple of years
have been disastrous,'' says Ali Dayan Hasan of Human Rights Watch. ''There are
substantial elements within the society and government itself that are advancing
the idea
that Hindus need to be expelled.'' On the ground, attacks against Hindus include
beatings
and rapes.

''Minority communities in the country are feeling less safe,'' said Govind
Acharya, Amnesty
International's country specialist for Bangladesh. ''The Hindus, the Ahmadiyya
and the
tribals in the Chittagong Hill Tracts are all leaving. This demographic shift is
the most
problematic for the identity and the future of the country.''


The permissiveness of at least some within the Bangladeshi government and the
police in
allowing violent groups like Bangla Bhai's to pursue their agendas has only
increased the
political legitimacy of such groups. Mohammad Selimullah, the leader of a
militant Islamist
group based across Bangladesh's eastern border in Myanmar, was arrested in
Chittagong
early in 2001, and he admitted in court that more than 500 jihadis had been
training
under him in Bangladesh. On his computer, intelligence sources found photographs
to be
sent to donors showing Islamic soldiers at rest and at attention, armed with
AK-47's and
wearing shiny new boots. Selimullah said that his group received weapons from
supporters
in Libya and Saudi Arabia, among others.

Last spring in Chittagong, 10 truckloads of weapons -- the largest arms seizure
in
Bangladesh's history -- were captured by the police as they were being unloaded
from
trawlers. The tip-off most likely came from Indian intelligence, which monitors
the arms
being sent to Islamist separatist groups in India's northeast. Haroon Habib, a
leading
journalist in the region, has written that a leader of the government's local
Islamist
coalition was helping to hide the weapons.

Several months later, under increased pressure from the European Union and the
United
States to crack down on terror, Bangladeshi security forces raided two camps in
the Ukhia
area belonging to Huji. Local journalists say that both camps, which were not
far from
Chittagong, have now been destroyed, but no one can get close enough to be sure.
What
is certain is that the attack didn't drive the militants out of the region. Four
months ago,
five more members of Huji were arrested in Chittagong.

In this environment, Bangladesh's radical leaders have ratcheted up their
ambitions.
Responding to the American invasion of Afghanistan, supporters of the Islamic
Oikya Jote
(I.O.J.), the most radical party in the governing coalition and a junior partner
to the
Jamaat-e-Islami, chanted in the streets of Chittagong and Dhaka, ''Amra sobai
hobo
Taliban, Bangla hobe Afghanistan,'' which roughly translates to ''We will be the
Taliban,
and Bangladesh will be Afghanistan.''

The I.O.J. is considered a legitimate voice within Bangladeshi politics. The
I.O.J.'s
chairman, Mufti Fazlul Haque Amini, who has served as a member of Parliament for
the
past three years, says he believes that secular law has failed Bangladesh and
that it's time
to implement Sharia, the legal code of Islam. During our two hourlong meetings,
the mufti
-- a welcoming and relatively open man with a salt-and-pepper beard and teeth
dyed red
from chewing betel -- asked if he could take photographs and pass them along to
the
local press to show his constituents that he is so powerful the Western press
now comes
to him.

The mufti presides over his father-in-law's mosque and madrassa,
Jamiat-Qurania-
Arabia, in Dhaka, where the traffic caused by 600,000 bicycle rickshaws, more
than in any
other city in the world, is so intense that it can take hours to travel fewer
than 10 miles
from Louis Kahn's ethereal Parliament -- a relic of a more hopeful period in
Bangladesh's
democracy -- to the warren of lanes in the old part of town where the mufti is
based. At
the mosque, he almost overfills the armchair in which he stations himself. He
admits that
as an Islamic state, Bangladesh still has far to go.

''As we are Muslim, naturally we want Bangladesh to be an Islamic state and
under Islamic
law,'' the mufti said. Amini is the author of books in Arabic, Bangla and Urdu.
(He learned
Urdu while completing graduate work in a madrassa in Karachi, Pakistan.) He
recently
completed a multivolume set of laws and edicts, or fatwas. The mufti is renowned
for his
fatwas, which, he said, he issues almost every day when people come to him with
questions about the application of religious law. The mufti has also issued
fatwas against
the secular press when they investigate the rise of militant Islam in
Bangladesh. When he
advocates punishment for those who offend Islam, he said, he does not intend to
preach
violence. The young men of Huji who attacked the poet Shamsur Rahman were
studying in
one of his madrassas in Chittagong.

The mufti said that the only reason he is not a government minister is that the
current
regime snubbed him out of fear as to how his appointment would look. The West
would
see both him and Bangladesh as too extremist. The mufti has been named in Indian
intelligence documents as a member of the central committee of Huji (itself
linked to Al
Qaeda), an association he would, of course, deny. He is also rumored to have
close friends
among the Afghan Taliban, which he denies, while adding that it's better not to
discuss
the Afghan Taliban, as they are so frequently misunderstood. Besides, he says as
the
corner of his mouth twitches into a smile, the Taliban are running all over his
madrassa, as
the word ''talib'' means only student.

Outside his office, the sound of boys' voices reciting the Koran rises and
falls. Fifteen
hundred students study at the madrassa, and the mufti's party, the I.O.J.,
sponsors
madrassas all over the nation; how many, he claimed not to know. Financing, the
mufti
said, comes mostly from Bangladesh itself, but some money also arrives from
friends
throughout the Arab world.

Of all his political influence, the mufti is most proud of his fatwas, which,
he said, give
him a means to speak out against those who violate Islam. ''Whoever speaks
against Islam,
I issue a fatwa against them to the government,'' he said. ''But the government
says
nothing.'' He shook his head, frustrated. That's next on his agenda: to pressure
the
government to recognize his religious injunctions. ''It's possible,'' he said,
''now more than
ever.''


Eliza Griswold is a writer based in New York.