A Theist Blogger's Deshi Declaration

Dear Allama Shafi,

I cannot find the words to describe my sorrow and indignation over what has happened and what lies in store should hathazari bounce back and rise again. Maybe we will meet on the planes of Arafat and discuss this eventually.  Allahumma grant those who won't be returning to their families a place in the hearts of green birds near His Throne.

Dear Mir Quasem Ali

Of the party leaders detained and accused it is your diganta infrastructure that points to the future. We pray for you all, and for justice and that we might have the privaledge of knowing what the f@£k happened over those previous years.  69 to 72.

Most bloody expensive hobnobbing ever right?

Dear Mahmudur Rahman.

Our very own Julian Assange minus the rape allegations. May your wounds heal. If you were here in London I would invite you to our reading group and we could work on the non tribal religious language and decoloniality. Still. They would have arrested you regardless as you held the only press to challenge theur crown jewels. 

Dear Delwar Hussein,

I read your party's dossier on you and wish you healing, freedom and guidance. Its a downright shame that you inherit unjust stigma and thus serve as the lightning rod for Awami hate and brutality. I have given up hoping for an answer to the shibbir violence problem.

We're still looking for that higher gear.

***

We need a more open and inclusive ummahstructure to make space for alternatives to the DJ juice degeneration.

The government of Bangladesh holds unbridled power, and its supporting media- industrial-NGO complex has the people in a triple bind.

The brutal events of May 6th are a sign of things to come. As Awami minded denial shifts to just desertification.

If our Islamist brothers were to find themselves in power tomorrow it probably would be a disaster, not for fault of Islam, but people and the lack of Tawhesion. This is not a secular position but a basic form of training and political due diligence.

The secular liberal hegemony over political space, the right to audience and debate is a problem.

The conditions for faith, life, intellect, dignity, lineage and property are what our activism should be about. These higher objectives of Sharia must come to the foreground in what we say and do.

Whatever happened to the religious left?

There needs to be a moratorium on hartals and a rise in explorations of the political street theater of love.

[New Word] Political load-shedding

The troublesome process of contesting power (re)distribution. Although better timetabled these days, the hartal, or strike, causes problems for the public, which in addition to their existing problems is not the politics of mercy.

By mixing metaphors we avoid depoliticizing strikes, their need, and their impacts on people, power structures and pauperisation.

Political load-shedding is a non-solution to the problem of sustainable and just power generation and distribution.

So if you think that you, or your tribe, have what it takes to lead the people. Find another way. Don't (mis)lead dedicated young people to their martyrdom, bring sakina, or tranquility, to the streets and lives of the people.

As The Tailor once said, the prison has escape encoded in its very bars.

Practical reflections on The Shahbag Fitna

1. Those accused of war crimes and the fallen deserve a fair tribunal process based on quality investigations of matters during and surrounding the Bangladesh War.
2. There must be space for Political Islam(s) to dwell, refine and evolve in Bangladesh. This includes Jamat and it is no matter that they can be annoying.

The interelation between these two commitments is not my making. The Awami liberation warlore and the Nirmul Commission took one particular war experience, amplified it, then focussed all blame and evil on a politically sampled list of 'collaborators'. I do not beleive that it is criminal to have been against the Bangladesh project, which was at its unfurling even less thought through than its predecessor state. It is with unethical, immoral behaviour that I have a problem.

God knew what was in people's hearts and gave us Shahbag as a reminder.

Over the past weeks and days we have come to know ourselves and the Bangladesh nonsense engine's true colours.  From the Daily Star's blatant disregard for truth regarding the 22nd February Jumma shootings and recent attacks on Hindu properties, to Sabir Mustafa's partisan hackery at the BBC, AJE's Nicolas Haque's spinelessness, Sultana Kamal's ironyless appeal for attention, and Shahidul Alam's sick sweetening of Shahbag Spirit,  it has been a sad to see such selective humanity and cowardice.

On an optimistic note, I have never seen so many brothers alive to the situation in desh, cognisant of the conditions that have created it, and getting busy. In testing times like these, just like in those before, our true colours emerge. Who we are, how we roll and what we bowl are embodied by our response.

This is easily said from the comparative safety of far far away from gunshots and police with shoot to kill directives.

The injustice of these tribunals is symptomatic of a wider corruption of state institutions and civil society. The government can only get away with what is has done with the support of public figures, each of whom have stood still, if not participated in the sham. In dealing with the situation at hand we must build a better social infrastructure of active, evidence-based and soulful citizenship.

Shahbag can be seen as  a radicalisation of the Awami League, the secular block, but what is its significance to me/us?

I say this very deliberately so that every word will ring inside. Broad hearted 'Islamic forces' must renew commitments to Justice, Integrity and Dignity by working for fair trials, political space-making and political self-making.

Five areas I think we need to improve on.

ZERO// Learning
Learn, read, ask, search, discover the issues to the best of your ability.
Recent work by Yasmin Saikia and Sarmila Bose are good places to start.
Bose's London seminar on critical thinking on 1971 is online HERE

ONE// Be unprovokable, undistractable, unbwogable
Avoid being drawn into discussions of faith, non faith and anti-Islamic non-faith.
Shahbag is toxic enough already, Atheisation and AlieNation is the topic for another venture.

TWO// Language
Be responsible with language, not like Maulana Sadruddin who made an ass of himself on Obhimot the other day. Not all Awami Leagers are the same. Do not mirror any tyrant's misuse of language.

THREE// Greater Insaniyyat, humanity
Grow dialogical relations with people in all parties and trends. Some have cornered themselves, many haven't really thought carefully about these things.

FOUR// Empathy
Familiarise yourself the the psyche's of reference points of others through personal relationships, art, twitter, alalodulal, drishtipat (archive), muktomona and alochona yahoogroups.

Shahbagan: Garden of Hate and Fear

For the last week or so, the spectacle at Shahbag has continued to drive and distract political attentions in Bangladesh. This gathering calls for the execution of people it designates 1971 war criminals and the banning of religion based political parties, namely Jamat e Islami. Meanwhile the government has been busy passing legislation to allow itself the facility to hang people that its courts decide not to.

Without being a member of the party, standing for fair trials for the accused and non-secular political rights should be a no-brainer position. However, it requires a lot of people to argue uphill against their received wisdom and against a secular liberal establishment that has raised a blinded generation over some years. It doesn't help that Jamaat's own leaders have failed to address these issues directly, introspectively and convincingly enough.

Sentiment built over decades.

Into the mouths of babes:
"They are war criminals. We want them hanged."

The Shahbag demo is the descendant of a collective that rose to prominence in March of 1992 by holding mock trials of its designated war criminals. The demands and narrative of this Nirmul Committee match Shahbag, which builds on its emotional, organisational and (mis)informational foundations. The younger generation will have had less contact with people lived through enough of our political history to know history started well before 1971.

There has been a disappointing but predictable cover-up of the negative nature of the protest, a cover-up which shows not just me, but a wider audience how superficial so many of Bangalee Nationalists are with their oft-advertised liberal values.  From the naff novelist daughter of the Dhaka press baron, to the BRAC PR man, who used to run a human rights blog, and the trendy lefty anthropologist.  It's just quite sad.

Playground politics learnt from an earlier generation.
Nothing new here.

The twitter behaviour has been interesting to participate in. The intolerance of the proShahbag twitterati really is something of a liability to the liberal's projection of a new political horizon.  Detractors are put onto hit-lists and functionaries ordered to report them as spam (see left).

Such silencing of dissent is not confined to social media, but extends to print media, with Jamaat's newspaper Naya Diganta's building burnt by the ruling party student thugs. These are messy, dirty and greasy times. Mess has taken on new forms, for example, one of the things that Shahbag has prompted is a wider spread adoption of twitter amongst the different political camps in Bangladesh.

Shibir, Jamaat's student front, are not responding to violence against them in an angelic or cheek turning fashion. Accusations abound regarding their violence, from the usual quarters and usually without too much context. It appears that they have not, as yet, decided to go ape shit. It is difficult to know whether they have a creative way out of this. What would I do if I were them? Either way looks deadly and oppressive. Desh watchers have their work cut out for them establishing the truth of the violence these days.

Starting to unwind
Yesterday was Friday, the day of Jumma prayers. In the coastal areas of Cox's Bazaar, police fired on a post Jumma procession of Jamaat activists, killing between 4 and 7 individuals including a child and a random female bystander. Later at night, a young pro-Shahbag blogger was murdered in a grisly fashion in Dhaka.

All loss of life is to be mourned, and as we know, some loss of life is mourned and politically mobilised more powerfully than others. Late Rajib Haidar's death has unjustly and prematurely been attributed to Jamaat by co-protesters and now it seems the Prime Minster.  It looks set to fuel a new level of paranoia, fear and venom. Today many protesters were scratching their heads over the role of the janaza as funeral rites for someone who apparently didn't self identify with the faith any longer.

Watching the Shahbag nonsense engine deploy its master narrative on the loss of their comrade demonstrates just how a falsity, unchecked and unproven can be generated and spread in very little time. Within minutes of news being broken, the link was made to the Jamat and by morning it was well embedded into common sense.

Alternarratives
You might be interested to know who isn't joining on the bandwagon. An Indian writer mused on the similar sadisms of Indians and Bangladeshis.

...no matter how much we claim ourselves as democracies, at the end of the day we are nothing but a poor people who vent their frustration through sadistic instincts

At the start of the week it looked as in the Bangladeshi Nationalists (BNP) had started to wake up and recognise their irrelevance to an important public issue. The Weekly Holiday featured some less emotional thinking, and the ever challenging MBI Munshi cast a penetrating gaze on Shahbag's imagery, rhetoric and context. In the near future, Mahmudur Rahman's Amar Desh will continue to be one of the few major papers with the balls to face down our politics of hate and the sold-out nature of the main opposition BNP.

The BNP party seems to have left one of its senior member out to dry, Salahuddin Quader Choudhury was Parliamentary Special Adviser during the last BNP-Jamaat alliance government. Not particularly known for their balls-of-steel these days, they might sort their lives out nearer to the elections, but I am not holding my breath. They feed of the same master narrative as the Awami League, but with more militaristic, centre right, General Zia focussed trimmings.

What's a Razakar?
In the context of the 1971 Bangladesh War, the razakars were a paramilitary force raised to counter the Mukti Bahini.  In the context of Shahbag, a razakar, sometimes spelt with a 'j', denotes a person to be eliminated. It is a form of takfir, exclusion and casting out, applied selectively to political enemies of the regime in power.

Not only is this a historical lobotomy of the complex truths of how people tried to protect an established state from disintegration, but it is mighty convenient who isn't labelled a razakar and who overcompensates to distract attention.  HINT: There is a Minister in the Bangladesh Government, the ministry of Law to be precise, who is acting funny. More on him later.

These past days have taught me how little our people have moved on from 1971 thinking. Narrow racial thinking, autotakfir, very bad leadership, and the inability to see anyone else's pain or story.

What now?

• Keep in dialogue with friends and relations in desh.
• Do not feed this monster.
• Encourage press to pay attention to seculib head spinners and less articulate islamists.
• Duas for a Sakina (Tranquility) storm to enter the hearts of the restless.

Bangladesh 2012-3 Spectators of Suicide

As the current Bangladesh 'Parliament' period draws to a close, I am going to pay a different kind of attention to political matters there.

The 'secular liberal' Moronarchy of Prime Minister Hasina is generating an unprecedented field of oppression, with shambolic kangaroo 1971 War Crimes courts seemingly complicit in the kidnapping of defence witness Shukkho Ranjan Bali (who was originally listed as a prosecution witness), opposition media figures like Mir Quasem Ali of Diganta Media locked up, and smaller opposition figures beaten black and blue on the streets of Dhaka (then blamed for vandalism).

It's difficult to argue about political epistemicide and the unjustness of these trials with blind Awami Leaguers and those who hold the liberation mythology sacrosact, but as this misled and misleading group is 'of us', and holds both local power and the international megaphone, it is an inescapable challenge.

The problem is that power can throw any old BS as you and it counts, irrespective of the merit of ones claims. Power can erase human records and the means of knowing otherwise. Such political epistemicide is as clear as the eye can see. Kidnap the witness. Lock up the media man.

We are poorer for it, but in this darkness I believe that there are opportunities for political creativity and long-term deep societal action. I pray that those with the wherewithal will make something out of them.

After all, they have a while. Political pundits suggest that the Awami League will win the next election, this would mean an unprecedented level of continuity unseen in desh since the less-ballot-based dictatorship of President Ershad. Given the limpness and batteredness of the current oppositions and the general uselessness of the Armed Forcesm I am inclined to agree.

What a shame that the ingrates who arrested a Turkish MP for distributing Qurbani meat to the desperate Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, and who have managed to actually give the World Bank and Grameen Bank the moral high ground, will pay no price for their foolishness.

Ah, the hidden hand of the political market!

If you are interested, the ReclaimBangladesh resource is intended as yeast to raise the level of our thinking and political being.

A Halal Chicken returns an angry gaze

The halal chicken took her seat
Amongst the Conference of the Birds.
"Such great accomodation,
But my complaint you haven't heard."

I demand a joint action,
For my kith and my kin,
For these Muslims are collecting,
Great barrels of sin.

At two pounds we are valued,
Beak, feathers and all,
Our flesh is devoured,
Rememberance small.

They say that it is lawful, industrial, clean,
Let's wipe them out with their own damned machines.
Our living rights are curtailed in crates and conveyers,
Optimised, efficient, cheap perverted purveyors.

Claiming diminished,
Responsibility,
Believers come to me,
With tales of colonisation and skullduggery.

I bear witness that there is no creature as abominable as mankind.

At the World Social Forum in Dakar

Have been in Senegal for about a week in the run up to the Social Forum. Incerdible place, wish you were here with us. Sufi, Social, Musical, Majical. Check this, a few nights ago I heard a band called Nuru Kane, Bai Fall  Gnawa featuring Kora AND Oud. The kora sounded like light from heaven pouring out of a rip in the sky. This land's characters have made and continue to make, great contributions to Islamic and general culture. Even the boaba trees look like they could walk up to you and give you a good old frisking! bellebellebelle.

Today was the first 'business' day of the forum and participants have come from all over. Corporate NGOs (have already bumped into CRAP) and internationalist thinktanks do feature but by far its not the NGO fair that I feared. The theme for the day was Africa and Diasporas, well reflected in the sessions and conversations that we had as well as the questions im off to lala land with.

TrustAfrica's "Culture as Weapon" was chaired/interpreted and signed with states(wo)manly awesomeness. Dr Abduoulwaye Niange especially impressed. HE'S got a DOCTORATE IN BREAK DANCE! Needless to say the political and social value of hiphop is not under estimated in the content of urban culture in this country. The discussions ranged and searched and are only beginning to sink in at the moment (Art in politics, challenges of amateur/professionalism, the culture of cooperation and conditionality, social media, BS culture, financing, relations with power/state..). To top it off, arather jubilant tunisian bromrade played us out with an oud powered song.

Following a yasser poulet lunch, conversations with a mouritian teacher, a senegerman environmental worker and a good old fashioned brain-squeeze of an autonomous artist couple we made it to the Liberation Theology run session on Borders/immigration and the right to free movement. There have been several Caravan trips here, from Bamako and other African places. These intervention/protest acts have been highlighting how Europe is outsourcing its border control to north african regimes, and how much of west africa's regional unity is paper-based and not backed up by tarmac and political-administrative enablement.

The Campus mosque is a really happy place too. Dropped the mandatorys and proceeded in the direction of some cafe touba (spicy coffee). But not before experiencing some heavy heavy Tijani (?) dhikr from one of the student halls.

Ended the night watching a Malian musical-theatrical troupe perform a fantastic production on migrant experience.

Follow the World Social Forum here.