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Re: A Brief Tale of Islamic Mind
In
response to the following msg: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mukto-mona/message/18787
Dear Imran: I see lots of truth in your statement and lots of
emotions too. The world is taking a dangerous turn towards religious
fundamentalism, and when I say that I also include Christians, Jews, Hindus
and others and of course the Muslims. Yes, our country with many other Muslim
countries is (or has) alarmingly shifting towards extreme fundamentalist
Muslim ideology. It is so
encouraging to see that lot of us are getting worried about it.
But when you say 99% of
Bangladeshi Muslims will rush to kill me, beat me up if I question Islam and
Mohammed (you said� I am 100% sure that I am right. Few (1%) of them would
not bother to argue with you, but the rest of them will insult you or beat or
kill you, depends on the people and situation.) do you rally mean that? I am
thinking, just to give you benefit of doubt, may be you are using it as a
rhetoric to convey the alarmingly deteriorating situation in Bangladesh,
not really trying to mislead people by giving a wrong statistics. If I follow your path of logic,
I can show you lot of examples from where I can derive to the solution that
all Americans wanted to drop 500lbs bombs in Iraq or kill all Vietnamese, all
Americans want to kill all gays or abortion supporters, all white Americans
want to kill all African Americans, all Indians support the attacks on Muslims
in Gujrat, all Israelis want to wipe out Palestinians or all Palestinians are
fanatic suicide bombers. Once, I shared a little piece of information with my daughter�s elementary school teacher in
Georgia (yeap, I am talking about the scary conservative South) that I was an
atheist�. she stopped talking to me since. Black Americans are still scared
to go to a county, two exits from where I live, because of racial
problems.These examples does not lead me to believe that all southerners are
hateful racists. If we start to make conclusions like that, I think, lot of us
will end up in a little corner of loneliness, hatred and denial. I know you
will say these examples can not be compared to what is happening in the rest
of the Muslim world, and you are right again. That is why we need to raise our
voices against the rise of fundamentalist Islamization very strongly and at
the same time should also keep in mind that we need to be very careful about
the conclusion we draw, whom we alienate and what massage we send to millions
of people. It is very important that we protest all extreme
fundamentalist ideology and specially now, when Islam is in its full speed
with all its fanatic actions and movements. They are engulfing power in most
of the Muslim countries. This is a very courageous and inspiring mission you
have volunteered to do. But can we really call all Muslims in the world
fanatic, fundamentalist killers? My problem is then I have to include all
known Bangladeshi muslims like my
parents who told me to read all the scriptures before I decide on a religion,
who introduced me to authors like Debiproshad Chottopaddhay, Carl Sagan and
others; my relatives who were arrested for actively participating in 1952
Bhasha Andolon, my childhood private tutor who told me not to take Quran
literally; so many poor and illiterate people who used to question Allah�s
existence because of their pathetic lives in this world or the parents of my
Muslim friends who gave shelters to lot of Hindu families during 1971 war and
you know this list can go on and
on. I am sure all of these people do not fall under your 1% population only. I
had a lifetime experience working in some remote villages, which included some
Shaotal villages as well, and I have seen these people very closely. There are
millions of completely illiterate people in Bangladesh who believe in a
religion because everybody else does so or they were told by mollas to do so. We are forgetting that there are religious people who know
very little about religion but believe in a faith (supreme deity) anyway,
there are also educated secular muslims who take religion as a social ritual
and convenience and only practices the parts which suit them. As we are going
around and throwing them at the same camp with the extreme Muslim
fundamentalists we are not only hurting their very sensitive belief system we
are also telling them they belong to those people, not us. I don�t think at
the end of the day this buys us anything other than strengthening our powerful
enemy with more and more support. By including all general population of
Bangladesh to the list of fanatic Muslims
I think we are alienating lot of of good-hearted moderate people who
could be our friends, but instead we are pushing them to the other side of the
fence. We are exactly acting like neo conservative Bush Regime, saying,
�Either you are with us or with them.� I think what you (actually few of us) are mixing up is
the difference between the common Muslims in Bangladesh (most of whom are not
only illiterate but also deprived of any descent level of human rights and
privileges) and the
institutionalized Muslim organizations like, jamat, or wahabis or madrasas,
our corrupted politicians or big shots who are trying to take advantage of
this religious ignorance and weaknesses our mass population possess. The later
part is actively promoting and empowering extreme Islamization in countries
like Bangladesh. There is a difference between practicing a religion
personally and imposing it on people from the state and political level.
And yes, I will 100% agree with you that 99% of these institutionalized
fundamentalist group of Muslims WILL try to kill you or beat you up or put you
in exile if you try to question Islam in front of them. And their number is
growing alarmingly every day. Don�t you think part of the blame comes on
people like us too? We, on one hand, claim ourselves to be secular minded
freethinkers, enlightened with education and free thoughts but on the other
hand, forget to take the responsibility to influence the majority of common
people who happen to have a belief system as they were born and brought up in
a global human society where a useless idea of religion has taken over for
thousands of years? This is a very critical time, not only in Bangladesh,
all over our little earth we are living in. We have seen similar phenomenon
with Christianity during the middle ages. The problem is much bigger than we
think, it is a global problem not confined to one country.
If we really want to do something and really want to create a secular
Bangladesh we should try to bring
together, instead of alienating, all true
Bangladeshis including religious-minded believers, (doesn�t matter Hindu,
Muslim or other religion) who are not communal, not fundamentalist in their
views and possess a secular mindset. I can guarantee you that we can find a
very large population falling under this category and these people can help us
to achieve our goal what we can not do by ourselves. Regards Bonna
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