Rolling back militancy: Bangladesh looks to Saudi in a twist of irony
By James M. Dorsey
Bangladesh, in a twist of irony, is looking to Saudi Arabia
to fund a
$ 1 billion plan to build hundreds of mosques and religious centres to
counter militant Islam that for much of the past decade traced its roots to ultra-conservative
strands of the faith promoted by a multi-billion dollar Saudi
campaign.
The Bangladeshi plan constitutes the first effort by a
Muslim country to enlist the kingdom whose crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman,
has vowed
to return Saudi Arabia to an undefined form of ‘moderate Islam,’ in reverse
engineering.
The plan would attempt to roll back the fallout of Saudi
Arabia’s global investment of up to $100 billion over a period of four decades
in support of ultra-conservative mosques, religious centres, and groups as an
antidote to post-1979 Iranian revolutionary zeal.
Cooperation with Saudi Arabia and various countries,
including Malaysia, has focused until now on countering extremism in
cooperation with defense and security authorities rather than as a religious
initiative.
Saudi
religious authorities and Islamic scholars have long issued fatwas or
religious opinions condemning political violence and extremism and accused
jihadists of deviating from the true path of Islam.
The Saudi campaign, the largest public diplomacy effort in
history, was, nevertheless, long abetted by opportunistic governments who
played politics with religion as well as widespread discontent fuelled by the
failure of governments to deliver public goods and services.
The Bangladeshi plan raises multiple questions, including
whether the counter-narrative industry can produce results in the absence of
effective government policies that address social, economic and political
grievances.
It also begs the question whether change in Saudi Arabia has
advanced to a stage in which the kingdom can claim that it has put its
ultra-conservative and militant roots truly behind it. The answer to both
questions is probably no.
In many ways, Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism and militancy,
violent and non-violent, despite sharing common roots with the kingdom’s
long-standing theological thinking and benefitting directly or indirectly from
Saudi financial largess, has created a life of its own that no longer looks to the
kingdom for guidance and support and is critical of the path on which Prince
Mohammed has embarked.
The fallout of the Saudi campaign is evident in Asia not
only in the rise of militancy in Bangladesh but also the degree to which
concepts of supremacism and intolerance have taken root in countries like
Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan. Those concepts are often expressed in
discrimination, if not persecution of minorities like Shia Muslims and Ahmadis,
and draconic anti-blasphemy measures by authorities, militants and vigilantes.
Bangladesh in past years witnessed a series
of brutal killings of bloggers and intellectuals whom jihadists accused of
atheism.
Moreover, basic freedoms in Bangladesh are being officially
and unofficially curtailed in various forms as a result of domestic
struggles originally enabled by successful Saudi pressure to amend the
country’s secular constitution in 1975 to recognize Islam as its official
religion. Saudi Arabia withheld recognition of the new state as well as
financial support until the amendment was adopted four years after Bangladeshi
independence.
In Indonesia, hard-line Islamic groups, led by the Islamic
Defenders Front (FPI), earlier this month filed a blasphemy
complaint against politician Sukmawati Sukarnoputri, a daughter of
Indonesia’s founding father Sukarno and the younger sister of Megawati
Sukarnoputri, who leads President Joko Widodo’s ruling party. The hardliners
accuse Ms. Sukarnoputri of reciting a poem that allegedly insults Islam.
The groups last year accused Basuki
Tjahaja Purnama aka Ahok, Jakarta’s former Christian governor, of blasphemy
and spearheaded mass rallies that led to his ouster and jailing, a ruling that
many believed was politicized and unjust.
Pakistan’s
draconic anti-blasphemy law has created an environment that has allowed
Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatives and powerful political forces to whip up
popular emotion in pursuit of political objectives. The environment is
symbolized by graffiti in the corridor of a courthouse In Islamabad that demanded
that blasphemers be beheaded.
Pakistan last month designated Islamabad as a pilot project
to regulate
Friday prayer sermons in the city’s 1,003 mosques, of which only 86
are state-controlled, in a bid to curb hate speech, extremism and demonization
of religions and communities.
The government has drafted a list of subjects that should be
the focus of weekly Friday prayer sermons in a bid to prevent mosques being
abused “to stir up sectarian hatred, demonise other religions and communities and
promote extremism.” The subjects include women rights; Islamic principles of
trade, cleanliness and health; and the importance of hard work, tolerance, and
honesty.
However, they do not address legally enshrined
discrimination of minorities like Ahmadis, who are viewed as heretics by
orthodox Muslims. The list risked reinforcing supremacist and intolerant
militancy by including the concept of the finality of the Prophet Mohammed that
is often used as a whip to discriminate against minorities.
Raising questions about the degree of moderation that
Saudi-funded mosques and religious centres in Bangladesh would propagate, Prince
Mohammed, in his effort to saw off the rough edges of Saudi ultra-conservatism,
has given no indication that he intends to repeal a
law that defines atheists as terrorists.
A Saudi court last year condemned a man to death on charges of blasphemy and
atheism. Another Saudi was a year earlier sentenced to ten years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing
atheist sentiments on social media.
Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations have long lobbied for the criminalization of blasphemy in international
law in moves that would legitimize curbs on free speech and growing Muslim
intolerance towards any open discussion of their faith.
To be sure, Saudi Arabia cannot be held directly liable for
much of the expression of supremacism, intolerance and anti-pluralism in the
Muslim world. Yet, by the same token there is little doubt that Saudi
propagation of ultra-conservatism frequently contributed to an enabling
environment.
Prince Mohammed is at the beginning of his effort to
moderate Saudi Islam and has yet to spell out in detail his vision of religious
change. Beyond the issue of defining atheism as terrorism, Saudi Arabia also has
yet to put an end to multiple ultra-conservative practices, including the
principle of male guardianship that forces women to get the approval of a male
relative for major decisions in their life.
Prince Mohammed has so far forced the country’s
ultra-conservative religious establishment into subservience. That raises the question
whether there has been real change in the establishment’s thinking or whether
it is kowtowing to an autocratic leader.
In December, King
Salman fired a government official for organizing a mixed gender fashion
show after ultra-conservatives criticized the event on Twitter. The kingdom this
week hosted its first ever Arab
Fashion Week, for women only. Designers were obliged to adhere to strict
dress codes banning transparent fabrics and the display of cleavages or clothing
that bared knees.
In February, Saudi Arabia agreed to surrender
control of the Great Mosque in Brussels after its efforts to install a
more moderate administration failed to counter mounting
Belgian criticism of alleged intolerance and supremacism propagated by
mosque executives.
Efforts to moderate Islam in Saudi Arabia as well as Qatar,
the world’s only other Wahhabi state that traces its ultra-conservatism to the
teachings of 18th century preacher Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, but
has long interpreted them more liberally than the kingdom, have proven to be
easier said than done.
Saudi King Abdullah, King Salman’s predecessor, positioned
himself as a champion
of interfaith dialogue and reached out to various groups in society
including Shiites and women.
Yet, more than a decade of Saudi efforts to cleanse textbooks
used at home and abroad have made significant progress but have yet to
completely erase descriptions of alternative strands of Islam such as Shiism
and Sufism in derogatory terms or eliminate advise to Muslims not to associate
with Jews and Christians who are labelled kaffirs or unbelievers.
Raising questions about Saudi involvement in the Bangladeshi
plan, a Human
Rights Watch survey of religion textbooks produced by the Saudi education
ministry for the 2016-2017 school year concluded that “as early as first grade,
students in Saudi schools are being taught hatred toward all those perceived to
be of a different faith or school of thought.”
Human
Rights Watch researcher Adam Coogle noted that Prince Mohammed has remained
conspicuously silent about hate speech in textbooks as well as its use by
officials and Islamic scholars connected to the government.
The New
York-based Anti-Defamation League last year documented hate speech in
Qatari mosques that was disseminated in Qatari media despite Qatar’s
propagation of religious tolerance and outreach
to American Jews as part of its effort to counter a United Arab
Emirates-Saudi-led economic and diplomatic boycott of the Gulf state.
In one instance in December, Qatari preacher Muhammed
al-Muraikhi described Jews in a sermon in Doha’s Imam Muhammad ibn Abd
al-Wahhab Mosque as “your deceitful, lying, treacherous, fornicating,
intransigent enemy” who have “despoiled, corrupted, ruined, and killed, and
will not stop.”
No doubt, Saudi Arabia, like Qatar, which much earlier moved
away from puritan and literal Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism, is sincere in
its intention to adopt more tolerant and pluralistic worldviews.
Getting from A to B, however, is a lengthy process. The question
remains whether the kingdom has progressed to a degree that it can credibly help
countries like Bangladesh deal with their demons even before having
successfully put its own house in order.
Dr.
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International
Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture,
and co-host of the New Books in
Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well
as Comparative
Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North
Africa,
co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario, Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and
Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and
the forthcoming China
and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom
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