The Next Islamist Revolution?
By ELIZA GRISWOLD
Before dawn one morning this past November in Bagmara, a village in northwestern Bangladesh, six puffy-eyed men gathered beneath a cracked-mud stairwell to describe a man they consider their leader, a former schoolteacher called Bangla Bhai. The quiet was broken now and then by donkey carts clattering past, as village women, seated on the backs of the carts, were taken to the market. The women wore makeshift burkas -- black, white, canary yellow -- and kept their heads down, and this, the men explained, was Bangla Bhai's doing.
Last spring, Bangla Bhai, whose followers probably number around 10,000, decided to try an Islamist revolution in several provinces of Bangladesh that border on India. His name means ''Bangladeshi brother.'' (At one point he said his real name was Azizur Rahman and more recently claimed it was Siddiqul Islam.) He has said that he acquired this nom de guerre while waging jihad in Afghanistan and that he was now going to bring about the Talibanization of his part of Bangladesh. Men were to grow beards, women to wear burkas. This was all rather new to the area, which was religiously diverse. But Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh, as Bangla Bhai's group is called (the name means Awakened Muslim Masses of Bangladesh), was determined and violent and seemed to have enough lightly armed adherents to make its rule stick.
Because he swore his main enemy was a somewhat derelict but still dangerous group of leftist marauders known as the Purbo Banglar Communist Party, Bangla Bhai gained the support of the local police -- until the central government, worried that Bangla Bhai's band might be getting out of control, ordered his arrest in late May.
''There used to be chaos and confusion here,'' Siddiq-ul-Rahman, one of Bangla Bhai's senior lieutenants, said through an interpreter that morning in Bagmara. The sun was coming up and a crowd was gathering. Siddiq-ul-Rahman boasted that police officers attend Bangla Bhai's meetings armed and in uniform. The Bangladeshi government's arrest warrant doesn't seem to have made much difference, although for now Bangla Bhai refrains from public appearances. The government is far away in Dhaka, and is in any case divided on precisely this question of how much Islam and politics should mix. Meanwhile, Bangla Bhai and the type of religious violence he practices are filling the power vacuum.
Bangladeshi politics have never strayed far from violence. During the war for independence from Pakistan, in 1971, three million people died in nine months. Thuggery has been a consistent feature of political life since then and is increasingly so today. This has made it difficult to get an accurate picture of phenomena like Bangla Bhai. Under the current government, which has been in power since 2001 and includes two avowedly Islamist parties, journalists are frequently imprisoned. Last year, three were killed while reporting on corruption and the rise of militant Islam. Moreover, 80 percent of Bangladeshis live in villages that can be hard to reach and are under the tight control of local politicians. Foreign journalists in Bangladesh are followed by intelligence agents; people that reporters interview are questioned afterward.
Nonetheless, it is possible to travel through Bangladesh and observe the increased political and religious repression in everyday life, and to verify the simple remark by one journalist there: ''We are losing our freedom.'' The global war on terror is aimed at making the rise of regimes like that of the Taliban impossible, but in Bangladesh, the trend could be going the other way.
n Bangladesh, ''Islam is becoming the legitimizing political discourse,'' according to C. Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the United States Institute of Peace, a nonpartisan, federally financed policy group in Washington. ''Once you don that religious mantle, who can criticize you? We see this in Pakistan as well, where very few people are brave enough to take the Islamists on. Now this is happening in Bangladesh.'' The region, Fair added, has become a haven where jihadis can move easily and have access to a friendly infrastructure that allows them to regroup and train.
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