An American secularist in Bangladesh Austin Dacey

An American secularist in Bangladesh

Austin Dacey

Published on February 13, 2007

On my second day in Bangladesh, I was being driven through the rice fields and banana groves outside of Keshabpur when our car passed some graffiti on a wall in a small village. My guide, Shahriar Kabir, explained that it was an Islamist slogan proclaiming that the Koran holds the solution to every problem. We were on our way to address a gathering of citizens who are fighting the rising tide of fundamentalism in Bangladesh. Just before we arrived, we passed on long line outside a fertilizer shop. The country was in the midst of severe shortages of fertilizer, water, and electricity. Yet despite the hopes of the Islamist sloganeer, average Bengalis were not trying to squeeze rice or water out of the Koran. They knew to bring their problems to the government and to leave their souls to religion.

The response of the government, however, provided only comic relief, as the prime minister denied the existence of the shortages in an address to parliament. Later that day, February 28, in the middle of my speech to a group of journalists and community leaders in Khulna, the lights went out. Indeed, these are dark times for secular democracy in Bangladesh. With nearly 100 known militant organizations and perhaps as many as 64,000 Wahibist madrassas (only 20 percent are overseen by the government), for the last 20 years the country has been undergoing Talibanization.

The previous day, in a meeting at the Bangladesh Institute of Law and International Affairs in Dhaka, I had appeared alongside Kabir, Professor Ajoy Roy, Professor Kabir Chowdhury, Dr. Hamida Hussain, Justice K.M. Sobhan and Ambassador Waliur Rahman. Ambassador Rahman, the author of one of the amendments to the constitution, read aloud from his personal copy of the original 1972 version -- which he described as poetry -- and said it brought tears to his eyes when he thought of what had become of it. As an American, I praised the 1972 founding document as even more secular than our own. While the US Constitution made no mention of God and forbade establishment of a state religion, the Bangladeshi Constitution went further to expressly ban religion-based parties. The recent history of the Jamaat-e-Islami party makes all too clear the wisdom of this provision. The secular heritage of Bangladesh makes all the more heinous the campaign by a militant minority to turn the country into a theocracy.

The title of the meeting in Dhaka was "A call for global unity of secular humanists to resist fundamentalism." I had come to deliver a message from secularists in the US and everywhere, that the plight of Bangladesh would not go unnoticed. There is a worldwide of network of people who are committed to the freedom of conscience and the separation of religion from government, and who stand in solidarity with Bangladeshis against theocracy.

This network has proven its effectiveness in the past. In August 2001, Dr. Younis Shaikh, an instructor at a medical collage in Islamabad, was convicted under Pakistan's blasphemy laws and sentenced to death. Dr. Shaikh was known in international humanist circles as the leader of a Pakistan-based organization called "Enlightenment," a member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, an umbrella organization comprising nearly 100 groups around the world. Upon his arrest, the International Humanist and Ethical Union initiated a campaign that eventually saved him from execution.

My organization, Center for Inquiry-Transnational, had sent me to South Asia to attend the inauguration of the Center's new branch in Hyderabad and to establish contacts in Bangladesh. For the last twenty-five years, the Center for Inquiry has been a leading advocate for scientific reason, freedom of inquiry, and secular values in public affairs, with its magazines Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer read around the world. An early critic of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, the Center has brought together activists and intellectuals from Pakistan, India, Nepal, Iran, Egypt, Nigeria, Russia, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. The black rivers of oil that flow from the Gulf states and turn to poison in the ears of young Bengali madrassa students do not observe national borders. So too must secular ideals cross national, religious, and ethnic boundaries to resist intolerance wherever it appears.

The question I was asked most often was why the US persists in regarding Bangladesh as a "moderate" Muslim government, in the words -- now infamous among liberal-minded Bangladeshis -- used by State Department official Christina Rocca. No doubt some in the Bush administration were moved by the short-term strategic interest in being able to claim at least one member of the Organization of Islamic Countries as a backer of the war in Iraq.

I also couldn't help but wonder whether America's own ambivalence about secularism at home is confounding its relationship with secularists abroad. Thanks in part to the propaganda of the Christian Right, secularism has become a dirty word in America, conjuring up godlessness and amorality. As the journalist-historian Susan Jacoby showed in her recent book, "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism," religious conservatives have constructed a revisionist history of "Christian America" that excludes the tradition of people like the founding father Thomas Paine, the celebrated 19th century orator Robert G. Ingersoll, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph, all of whom reached outside of traditional Christianity for sources of American democratic values. Today, it would be political suicide for an elected official to self-describe as a secularist. It is in the context of this political culture that we have to view the US failure to push for strictly non-religious governments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Could it be that like so many of our problems, America's religion problems are being outsourced?

While the US government is often no friend to secular democracy around the world, I believe the American people are and will be friends to the Bengali people, as they demonstrated in 1971. As the Islamists' power swells, it is now more important than ever for Americans to support the resistance in Bangladesh. This is not only a prudent step to avoiding a new generation of terrorists, but also a recognition of common moral principles. For while secular government may have come first to North America, secular values of pluralism and toleration go much further back in South Asia, from the world's most venerable materialistic philosophical tradition, to the liberalism of the Shah kings, and the humanism of Persian literature and music. Thomas Jefferson could have learned a lot about secular democracy from Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Back at the press club in Khulna, on the eve of the 35th anniversary of the liberation war, I was listening to former freedom fighters who were prepared to lay down their lives for secular democracy. I'll never forget how after the lights went out, we were led down the darkened stairs and outside by a young organizer with a single candle. If the great promise of America's ideals is to be fulfilled, Americans must walk with the Bengali people as they take their proud country towards a bright, secular future.

Dr. Austin Dacey is director of research and education at the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, and represents the Center at the United Nations in New York City.

The article is also published in Daily Star, Fri. March 17, 2006