Bangladeshi Epistemicide | Conference of the Pirates | Dead Reckoning | Abul Kalam Azad | Pacistan

Think of a situation where a press baron forbids his religious wife from bringing up his children with quranic teachings, employing a infantalising editorial policy on family, firm and whatever scale he can muster.

This is (present) Bangladesh.

I wonder if I would rather be beaten within an inch of my life by a spouse, or forbidden from conveying revelatory messages to my child.  I consider both to be domestic abuse. A maqasidi view would recommend remedial action in order to protect and promote faith.

Examination of the local politics of knowing and being suggests that this is not an isolated case. Plenty of Muslim subjectivities have been secularised, by Machines.

I shudder to think of what potential movement has been wasted in recent generations because of this. A post colonial generation taught by teachers who know little of their historical sources, a generation (mis)led by fools who seem to have snatched the keys to the political engine-building machine, trapped by an electoral politics that reduced the magic of political possibilities to spoils distribution and an ever hastier race to the bottom.

Shudder is an overreaction, sorry.

Actually, I shrug and call for epistemic disobedience and a regular Conference of the Pirates (CoP) through which we shall plunder passing ships for their treasures, seeds, spores and talents and assemble a nomadic freedom flotilla.

With each CoP, we shall emerge further from the narrow triangular bumprints of Year Zeroism, Coloniality, Developmentia and Secular Liberal Capitulation. Not for the purposes of establishing culpability/innocence or jumping back into any romanticised frying pan, but for future potentialities.

The raucous and epistemicidal reception of news of the publication of Dead Reckoning, by Sarmila Bose, from the rabid end of the Custodians of the Victims of Liberated Bangladesh was to be expected.  In a book which is based on large amounts of field work, she contests the numerology of and simple angel-devil picture of the Liberation Account, and complicates matters. I suppose when the actual content of the study is digested and compared with other evidences, things will sharpen, unevenness will be accepted and false witness exposed. I await it in the post.  Her work is seen as a threat by those who have invested a lot of time and effort promoting War Crimes Trials.



*********************************************************************************


On a related note, here's a link to an apparent interview of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad in 1946, where he reflects on the difficulties likely to be faced by the Muslims of south asia in the future. He foresaw quite a lot of grim times ahead. I would like to have spent time with him, Abul Hashim and Iqbal. probably in some kind of Tardis.



**********************************************************************************


On another related note, I think its important to recognise that Pakistan stopped being called Pakistan in 1971. After this time it should be thought of as Pacistan.