Unheard Voices

A butterfly flaps its wing somewhere in Borneo, setting off a perturbation in the weather system that eventually leads to a depression in the Bay of Bengal, and millions in the coastal Bangladesh fear the worst. This is a popular characterisation of chaos theory - a branch of mathematics that says that small changes in the initial condition has big impacts in the final outcome. I don’t know whether Arifur Rahman read about chaos theory or not, but when one of his cartoons was published by the Daily Prothom Alo last Sep, what happened was pretty close to chaos. This is how we covered the issue when it started.

This was a time of fraying nerves. Tazreena Sajjad describes the zeitgeist of the time here. It was within weeks of the Dhaka University riots. For a while, there were rumours of Prothom Alo being shut down. In the event, things calmed down after Prothom Alo editor, a one-time communist, apologised to the Imam of the national mosque in the presence of the information minister of the military-backed regime.

After a year, we can think about the controversy with a calmer mind. That’s what this post attempts. First it notes the role played by a new generation of activists - online and in the ‘real’ world - during the crisis. Then it notes that this wasn’t the first incidence of its kind. Finally, it discusses where and how we might draw the line between freedoms of speech and faith.

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As the US expands its war on terror, its venomous civilisational crusade of establishing democracies in the Middle East, one notices how Bangladesh has gradually been re-fashioned as a ‘moderately’ Muslim country, in an area considered to be ‘vital to US interests’. Jamaat-e-Islami, in the words of Richard Boucher, US assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian affairs, is a ‘democratic party’. James F Moriarty, US ambassador to Bangladesh, in his congressional testimony (February 6, 2008), said US interest in Bangladesh revolved around the latter denying space to ‘terrorism’ (mind you, Islamic, not US, not state-sponsored). Moriarty’s ideas echo Maulana Matiur Rahman Nizami’s. In an interview given last year, Nizami said, Jamaat was important to keep Bangladesh free of militancy and terrorism (Probe, June 27-July 3, 2007). (more…)

As of Tuesday afternoon, access to Sachalayatan.com has been blocked from Bangladesh. Right before this unofficial ban, Sachal (as the users of this site fondly call it) bloggers vehemently protested the attack on a war veteran by Jamaat e Islami activists at a “Liberation War” meeting. In one such article Faruk Wasif on Sachalatayan analyzes the incident: “These obstinate freedom fighters from the subaltern dare do what our seasonal “Sector Commanders” or the frogs of our Syphilis Society cannot.” The full article, that may have sealed the fate of Sachal in Bangladesh, has been translated below.

In the meantime New Age produced another stinging rebuke to the military controlled government for its kiddy glove approach towards Jamaat. Here is the blistering piece.

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