http://www.thedailystar.net/2005/12/07/d512071501100.htm
Suicide bombing: The madrassah angle
Md. Asadullah Khan
Slowly, but with the cold certainty of the fog that has descended this winter,
realisation has begun to dawn. Following the Jhalakathi killing of two judges,
the suicide bombing attacks in the Gazipur Bar Association hall room and
Chittagong Court premises, killing ten including lawyers and a police
constable, have magnified a terrifying truth: driven by hate-filled ideology,
they are out to set Bangladesh civil society on fire.
As the country comes to grips with the blasts, questions are being asked
about the ruling party's soft approach towards the extremists. Sinister and
highly motivated, the followers of JMJB chief Abdur Rahman and JMB chief Bangla
Bhai are raising militancy to a pan-Islamic level. Osama bin Laden, the
mastermind of this terror worldwide is now a grainy message on a video-tape, a
prophecy of fear. The erstwhile cult has become a phantom in the wings.
Al-Qaeda is no longer a static identifiable organisation; today it's an idea
with many synonyms: it seems to have mutated into malignant units like JMJB,
JMB, and Huji in our country. The mutants are on the prowl, they are round the
corner and their unifying resentment now finds expression in a Muslim majority
country like Bangladesh. The suicide attacks that we now watch with horror in
different parts of the country are perhaps an expression of anger, a message
rather than a mission which the terrorists are willing to die for. These
faceless terrorists strike wherever they choose, as we witnessed recently in
the country, with virtually no strategic advantage to be gained. It's true,
as the LGRD Minister and Finance Minister said recently, that there is no way
that we can stop a person when he wants to die, but surely we can strike at the
root of this menacing trend if we have been able to identify the culprits
masterminding such banal attacks. At the moment, with the law enforcers, having
identified some of these suicide bombers, their patrons and masterminds, the
first priority is to track down the associates and zero in on them. Terrorist
activities and insurgencies throughout the world generally follow a similar
historical pattern. Often a minority group becomes visible with a spectacular
attack. The militants and their acts are plugged into long-standing grievances
and enjoy a significant degree of popular support. The administration resorts
to means that are often repressive which eliminates
individual terrorist leaders without healing the wounds that lie beneath the
surface. In absence of the leaders, terrorist activities begin to fragment and
separate groups set about their own agenda. What is worse is that these are
often indiscriminate and brutal and directed against targets with no symbolic
value, and thus have limited popular legitimacy. Bangladesh is now passing
through this phase of the threat. Disillusioned youths, completely brain-washed
while they studied in Qawmi madrassahs, and then either unemployed or dropouts
are easy recruits in the suicidal war against the established law of the
country. As everyone now knows, the global strand of radical Islam relies
on ideology, not organisation. So when the war on terrorism destroyed the
extremist bases in Afghanistan and confined Bin Laden to a series of hiding
places, it didn't derail his ideology. In December 2001, he was reported to
have said, "My life or death is unimportant; the awakening has started."
In Bangladesh today we can see what this awakening entails. Evil has an
uncanny habit of blending with fantasy. Adolf Hitler was unquestionably the
most evil spirit of the previous century. In his bid to create a master race in
Germany, he resorted to ruthlessness that finds no analogy in living history
till this date. Osama bin Laden aroused the subliminal passions of his chosen
folks with the dream of an Islamic Utopian State and his instrument of
salvation was a doctrine of murder as obnoxious and cruel as the Nazi "final
solution." The inheritors of such evil spirit in this country have combined
dogmatic certitude with total ruthlessness without even a touch of remorse.
With the blasts rocking the country and killing innocent people, it appears,
they have neatly hijacked a conflict-ridden and economically devastated country
to make it the nerve centre of terror. While analysing historical records we
can see that suicide bombing craze was once confined to conflict-ridden
parts of the world -- Israel, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, and now Jammu and Kashmir in
India and Iraq. Since 2001, the mentors of radical Islamic thought and ideology
in our country prepared the ground and now they have successfully injected a
disturbing dimension into our lives -- fear. Suddenly nothing seems safe. A
vigilant police force blessed with sniffer dogs could conceivably unearth
planted explosives, but no drill, no advance precaution could possibly deter
fanatical terrorists willing to become human bombs. For the civilised world,
this self-destructive monstrosity breeds an unreal climate of fear born of
utter helplessness. The techniques of terror they have mastered in the remote
forest and hilly areas are now being practiced in crowded city areas, courts,
meeting venues, shrines, and fairs, where anonymity is a fact of life. In a
macabre fashion, the protagonists of this quaint ethos and ideology did more
than arouse the fear of invisible terror. They have compromised the
element of trust on which modern societies live and flourish. These rogue
elements made us distrust our colleagues, our friends, our neighbours, our
fellow passengers. In fact every stranger. They destroyed all that was left of
our innocence. In a world polarised along rival power blocks and superpowers,
the definition of terrorism is complex and puzzling. As we have seen one man's
terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And the followers of non-violence
being in short supply, the end was always seen to be justifying the means What
is more unfortunate, unintelligible, and sometimes uncontrollable is the flow
of funds, logistics, cannon fodder, and explosives from external sources and
through undefined and uncharted routes. As for example, LTTE in Sri Lanka
picked up its cannon fodder from Jaffna but its support network extended to
Tamil expatriates in Europe and US. We are at such a critical juncture. It
won't mean much if we only stand united against a common enemy by
shedding all differences on party lines, but it would mean a lot if the
government prompted by a sincere will could better take into account the
allegations that the patronisers of militants exist very much within the ruling
alliance, as an intelligence official, maintaining anonymity, told a section of
media recently. That means a great sacrifice of power, privilege, political
affiliations, and adherence to some quaint beliefs that only helped a group or
party to capitalise on their power base and dragged the country to further
unstable and volatile situation. People in many countries of the world have
turned away from militancy and violence when they saw what was being done in
the name of their faith and what it did to their communities. It happened in
Egypt where a militant campaign from 1988 to 1998 ruined its economy, in
Algeria a decade-long civil war killed almost 100,000 people. Speaking more
precisely, ill-served by corrupt politicians and entrenched bureaucracy, the
vast
cohort of youth population numbering about 35 million in this country are
fuming with rage. With such an explosive mix of unemployed population,
Bangladesh at the present moment has become more a cauldron than a country.
Our biggest failing has been on the education front. Mostly struck by abysmal
poverty situation and to some extent out of keen attachment to religious
values, the parents chose to send their wards to madrassahs where these boys
along with religious education would be provided with food and shelter. But,
appallingly, most of those educated in these institutions will find themselves
almost unemployable at the end of their education. That brings to the fore the
question of balanced academic curriculum that includes math, science subjects,
English, and Bangla. The government can no longer afford to neglect or by-pass
this crucial matter of bringing about academic reform in the madrassah
curriculum in the interest of peace and national prosperity. Unless the whole
education system -- both school and madrassah -- is geared to function in a
way that ensures quality as well as equality of opportunity, it will be
difficult for the nation to avert an even bigger disaster than what we are
witnessing now. The PM in her speech in meetings at Patuakhali and Kushtia as
well as in her address to the Imams of the mosques at Osmany Memorial Hall
decried the rise of militancy and exhorted the Imams to inspire the Muslims in
the country with the peaceful images of Islam. But at the crux of the PM's
vision of a Bangladesh free of religious extremism should be the sweeping
reforms of madrassah education. It is now widely acknowledged that unchecked
mushrooming of these institutions, often affiliated to hard-line organisations
and jehadi groups, has been the major factor in the spread of the culture of
militancy. Some of the madrassahs which cater primarily to students from
underprivileged economic backgrounds have been accused of propagating stilted
versions of Islam and are prime recruiting grounds for extremist groups such
as JMB or Huji, an altered version of Taliban in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
The numbers are staggering. At the time of liberation, Bangladesh inherited
about 200 madrassahs. Today it is reported that the number of Qawmi madrassahs
running under private Madrassah Education Board has swelled to 15,000, in
addition to about 9,000 state registered ones. As statistics reveal, the
enrolment in general education between 2001-2005 rose by about 9 percent as
against 10 percent in madrassah education. If smaller mosque schools dotted all
over the country where religious education is imparted is included, the number
swells to 30,000. According to some modest estimate, some 9 lakh students are
enrolled in just the larger madrassahs. Presumably, with or without the
knowledge of the government, since long some radical groups have used the
impressionable madrassah students for military interest in Afghanistan and other
conflict-ridden Muslim majority states in the absence, to a certain extent, of
employment opportunity in the country. Most madrassahs sustain themselves
on foreign funding largely from the Middle East. Some madrassahs do not ask for
government funding only to assert their independence from official control.
Making a modest beginning during Zia's rule, the politicisation of madrassahs
began in earnest during Ershad's rule to counter the political forces opposed
to his dictatorial rule. During this time madrassahs recorded a phenomenal rise
in number. Recalling its early growth, one cannot fail to notice that Pakistan
was a centre of such growth, mostly supported by CIA to utilise them for jehad
in Afghanistan against the Soviets. As much as in Pakistan, so also in
Bangladesh their influence on the country's body politic marked a spectacular
rise because successive governments were not strong enough to take on their
street power. And now some madrassah educated people have
begun to play increasing roles in mainstream politics with motive to
destabilise the established law and the constitution of the country. And,
unfortunately, some madrassah students turned extremists are involved in
murderous activities like suicide bombing. The measures needed to be taken
up are to reform and revise the curricula to include subjects other than
religious studies, official registration of madrassahs and their monitoring
that includes regular inspection by the high-ups, banning foreign funding,
banning arms training, if any, and to integrate the madrassahs in the general
education system. The government must understand that the spate of unrest,
terrorism, violence, killing and lastly suicide bombing in the country has some
deeper roots like inequality of opportunity, uneven distribution of wealth,
lack of social consensus on the development strategy and transparency of state
business. The bombs may have ended the lives of some people in Jhalakathi,
Gazipur and
Chittagong by one or two madrassah students, but the everyday agents of
violence and killings are the country's dispossessed and disenchanted millions
who are still waiting for the equitable economic development that our national
leaders promised at the country's dawn. Md. Asadullah Khan is a former
teacher of physics and Controller of Examinations, BUET.
Doctors treat a madrassah educated JMB cadre at a hospital following a blast he
triggered in Gazipur.. PHOTO:
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