Haji Shariatullah
Haji Shariatullah was an eminent Islamic reformer and brave freedom fighter of Bangladesh. The district of Shariatpur is named after him.
He was born in 1781 in a petty Talukdar family at the village Shamail under the then Madaripur sub-division of greater Faridpur district. His father was Abdul Jalil Talukdar. He lost his father at the age of 8 years and was brought-up by his uncle Azimuddin. After his primary education he went to Calcutta and got admitted to Barashat Aliya Madrasa. He then received education from famous Madrassa of Furfura, Murshidabad.
He emigrated to Makkah in 1799, returned to Bangladesh in 1818 (nineteen years after) and started an Islamic revivalist reform movement, akin to the contemporary Arabian Wahhabism. The movement he started came to be popularly known as the Faraizi Movement.
His reform movement was basically religious; but it touched upon various other aspects of the society. He may be characterised as an Islamic revivalist, a social reformer, a populist peasant leader and a freedom fighter. These traits were symptomatic of the devastating malaise which had taken hold of the people of Bengal who were then smarting under the unhampered misrule, loot and plunder of the English East India Company.
While going to the holy Makkah in 1799 at the age of 18, he left behind a demurred, anguished, thrown over, unprotected people bemoaning at the suppression and repression of the British occupier indigo planters who lorded over them. The planters had by the side of them an equally outlandish corporation of Hindu Marwary zaminders who purchased large-scale zamindari estates under the terms and conditions of the permanent settlement of 1793. A third group of agents, popularly called gomastas of the private businesses of the officers of the East India Company, who were also mainly Marwaris and their Bengali associates, took under their monopoly control river ports and markets all over the country. The combined perpetration of violence and extortion turned the people into serfs and slaves of the type of Medieval Europe; the violent social change was termed by the contemporary annual report of the English Police Commissioner as a 'loathsome revolution'.
Shariatullah returned home in 1818, devoutly educated in religious learning and Arabic literature, schooled under the supervision of the great Islamic theologians of the time at Makkah with unbroken scholarships for nearly two decades. His stay at Arabia from 1799 to 1818 coincided with the rise of the Mawahhidun revolution miscalled Wahhabism of Arabia. He met Abdul Wahhab and was greatly influenced by his thoughts. The revolutionary religious spirit of Islamic revivalism that set the Arab's heart boiling, remained throbbing and afresh. Shariatullah came back with a burning sparkle of the same revivalist fire, which he tried to introduce in Bengal.
In 1818, Haji Shariatullah started his reform movement, which came to be known as the Faraizi, spread far and wide and became popular also in the neighbouring areas of greater Dhaka, Barisal and Comilla districts during the lifetime of the Haji.
He emphasized on holding correct faith in the Tawheed (Unity of Allah) and on the Prophethood of Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allah be on him) as well as on abstaining strictly from associating any false gods and goddesses with Him (shirk). Secondly, he laid extraordinary emphasis on performing the compulsory religious duties of Islam, by which he meant all necessary and mandatory duties, such as five times daily prayers (Salat/Namaz), payment of poverty alleviation religious taxes (Zakat), fasting in the mouth of Ramadan (Saum/Roza) and performance of Hajj, which are Faraiz (compulsory duties) and hence the movement was known as Faraizi Andolon. Besides, he emphasized on the unity and brotherhood of the Muslims and equality of mankind; he condemned caste discrimination, which had contaminated the Muslim society. He vehemently condemned numerous un-Islamic customs, usage and polytheistic accretions that had crept into the Muslim society by contagion of the practices of the non-Muslim neighbours.
Following the classical doctrines of the Muslim legal experts as noted down in Hedaya, he declared British India as a Dar- al- harb (an state of war) and called the Muslims to fight for freedom against the occupation power.
In the socio-economic field, following the injunctions of the Quran to the effect that there is nothing due to man except the fruits of his own strivings, he declared that zamindars created under the Permanent Settlement had no right on the agricultural crops produced by the tillers of the land. He instructed his followers not to participate in the Puja festivities of the polytheistic Hindu neighbours, but also not to pay any crop-levy imposed on them by the zamindars, besides the legal revenues fixed by the rent-roll of the government. This policy aroused the opposition of the newly created Hindu landlords against his movement. They shrewdly combined their patronising forces with the conservative Muslim peasantry and also took into their arms the forces of the Indigo Planters and their combined forces of opposition gradually came to a loggerhead about the year 1840, when he died and was succeeded by his son Dudu Mian.
http://www.islam-bd.org/Heros/Shariatullah/Shariatullah.html
© www.islam-bd.org, 2002-2004. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]. Last updated on April 22, 2004
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(Holy Quran-16:125)
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