Unheard Voices

Nicholas Schmidle in Boston Review

“The Islamist Challenge to Secular Bangladesh”
http://bostonreview.net/BR32.3/schmidle.html

The usual refried text, but is there any substance to any of these scenarios? The challenge for us is to see past the overheated rhetoric and uncover the reality. (more…)

Most of us have our own personal ways of keeping our spiritual well-being, but there are too many people in this country who place their complete trust on religious-attired old men who have limited knowledge of anything, even the religion they claim to be experts of, and take up title prefixes pir- or fakir- and take advantage of simple-minded people of the villages.

Seventeen-year-old Salma Akhter had to pay a huge price for the trust her mother placed on one such pir. On the morning of July 10, while Salma was peacefully sleeping in their room, someone came in and doused her face with acid. She woke up screaming and saw the resident pir running away from the room very fast. She quickly went to the tube well and splashed her face with water. But it was too late. The left side of her face had already been burned. She was rushed to a hospital in Bhairab where doctors advised her to go to the burn unit of Dhaka Medical College Hospital.

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Professor James C. Scott of Yale established the notion of “public transcripts” and “hidden transcripts” in his study of how elites and their subordinates interact. “Public transcripts” are essentially all the information contained in the discourse between elites and subordinates in the public sphere. For instance, the deferential relationship ( “Ji sir! Na sir! Three bags full, sir!” ) between workers and their bosses in an office is the public transcript. “Hidden transcripts” are essentially what the subordinates say among themselves ( “Boss shobshomoy deri korey ashey, tobe amader boley time meney choltey!” ) or what elites/bosses are saying amongst themselves. Needless to say, the workers really NEED their conversation to be “hidden”!

The notion of hidden and public transcripts are becoming increasingly relevant nowadays, especially in the wake of Islamist terrorism and the ever-increasing popularity of Islamist political parties in some countries. Last week, I read an op-ed by one of the few Daily Star columnists I still read regularly and have a lot of respect for, Zafar Sobhan. As full of good sense as his columns usually are, this one nevertheless had these curious sentence in it:

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So you have just got divorced — verbally — by your husband — in the heat of an argument. The argument is over and the husband is apologetic. But as per the fatwabajes, you can not get back together with him just like that. The only way to get back with him is to get married to someone else and consummate the marriage first and divorce this person and get remarried to your first husband. This form of innate social injustice against women is known as Hila marriage. Muslim scholars over the years have said the form of instant and verbal divorce has no legal basis and is not Islamic. But yet in Bangladesh, the people who do business in the name of religion, have made it a new form of business to offer Hila marriage as a service. If the newspaper reports are any guide, reports of this business are cropping up in different parts of the country. All of the ones below are from last month’s newspaper.

A reader in New Nation reports
The most ignorant village leaders led by the Imam of the local mosque of Kusharigaon under the Pirganj upazila in the district of greater Dinajpur excommunicated Abdur Rashid and Morjina Begum for their rejecting the decision of hilla marriage illegally awarded to Morjina, reported a Bengali daily on Monday.

Janakantha reports that after living together for 25 years in a marriage, a fatwa given 25 years ago for a verbal divorce was implemented by a son for her mother. She was given to a 75 year old as a hila wife. The husband passed away few days later in shame.

Bhorer Kagoj reports of 12 such marriages in Gaibandha in two years. It describes the case of an Asma who is a day laborer and who was forced to do a hila marriage at the threat of getting caned by the village elders. The silver lining is that cases has been brought against these fatwabajes. But lives are ruined forever.

Muslim Congress of Canada(MCC) has come out with a protest against such practice and points out the lack of outrage among the Islami parties on this issue . The statement (in Bangla) actually covers the issue very well.

Travesty of fatwa and Hila marriage was highlighted the most in the case of Nurjahan 14 years ago. Shahidul Alam recently did a tribute in his blog. For those of you don’t know that tragic case, below is a blurb written by Rahnuma from that entry.

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