Nevertheless, for the United States to strictly argue the merits of its case is not good enough here. Because it is the world’s greatest power, the United States must be seen to take the lead in the struggle against global warming or suffer the fate of being blamed for it. Bangladesh demonstrates how third world misery has acquired—in the form of “climate change”—a powerful new political dimension, tied to the more basic demands for justice and dignity. The future of American power is related directly to how it communicates its concern about issues like climate change to Bangladeshis and others. This matters just as much as the number of warships it has; maybe more so.
NGOs would not have the influence that they do in Bangladeshi villages without a moderate, syncretic form of Islam. Islam arrived in Bengal late, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, with Delhi-based Turkish invaders. It is but one element of a rich, heavily Hinduized cultural stew. In Muslim Bengali villages, matbors (village headmen) do not carry the same authority as sheikhs in Arab villages. And below these figureheads, the other layers of social organization can be dominated by women whose committee mentality has been both receptive to, and empowered by, westernized relief workers.
But this mild version of Islam is now giving way to a starker and more assertive Wahabist strain. A poor country that can’t say no to money, with an unregulated, shattered coast of islands and inlets, Bangladesh has become a perfect place for al-Qaeda affiliates, which, like westernized NGOs, are another sub-state phenomenon filling the vacuum created by weak central government. Islamic orphanages, madrassas, and cyclone shelters, which operate much like CARE or Save the Children, are mushrooming throughout the country, thanks largely to donations from Saudi Arabia, as well as from Bangladeshi workers returning home from the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula.
But rather than representing something unique in Bengali history, the radicalization of Islam shows how Bengal is part of a heavily Islamized Indian Ocean cultural system. Just as the great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta journeyed from Arabia to Bengal in the fourteenth century to gain the spiritual blessing of a renowned holy man, Shah Jalal, Saudi ideas and texts now infiltrate Bengal in the twenty-first century, and Bangladeshi workers, linked by air and sea to the Arabian Peninsula, return to their homeland with new ideas.3
From jeans and T-shirts a decade ago, women in the capital of Dhaka, in the port city of Chittagong, and throughout the countryside are increasingly covered in burkas and shalwar kameezes. Madrassas now outnumber secondary schools, according to Anupam Sen, the vice chancellor of a private university in Chittagong, who told me that a new class of society is emerging here that is “globally Islamic” rather than “specifically Bengali.” Islam is especially acquiring an ideological edge in urban areas, where rural migration is 3 to 4 percent annually, as people flee an increasingly desperate countryside, ravaged by salinity in the south and drought in the northwest. In the process, they lose their tribal and extended family links as they are swept up into the vast anonymity of sprawling slum encampments. Here is where global warming and man-made climate change indirectly feed Islamic extremism.
“We will not have anarchy at the village level, where society is healthy. But we can have it in the ever-enlarging urban areas,” warned Atiq Rahman. Such is the abject failure of central authority in Bangladesh after fifteen years of elected governments.
Nearing the second decade of the twenty-first century, Bangladesh is a perfect microcosm of the perils of democracy in the developing world because it is not a spectacular failure like post-invasion Iraq, but one typical of many other places. As in many a third world country that officially subscribes to democracy, civil society intellectuals play almost no role in the political process, the army is trusted more than any of the political parties, and although many champion historic liberalism, everybody I met also dreaded elections, which they feared would lead to gang violence. “We have the best constitution, the best laws, but no one obeys them,” lamented one businessman. “The best form of government for a country like ours,” he went on, “is a military regime in its first year of power. After that, the military fails, too.”
The military was the power behind a caretaker civilian government in the fall of 2006, when the political system appeared on the brink of chaos, with strikes, demonstrations, a spate of killings, and an economy going nowhere. The ruling party was in the process of fixing the upcoming election, even as the opposition was planning a series of attacks by armed gangs in return. Up to that point, democracy had served up two feudal, dynastic parties: the Awami League, headed by Sheikh Hasina Wajid, a daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s founding father who was assassinated in a military coup in 1975; and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), headed by Khaleda Zia, the widow of another of the country’s founders, General Ziaur Rahman, who was assassinated in another coup in 1981. The personal animosity between the two women harks back to the pardon given the killers of Begum Hasina’s father by Begum Zia’s late husband. This was darkly Shakespearean politics driven by personal vendetta, and as such, very reminiscent of Pakistan.
Because both parties are weak, both require alliances with various Islamic groups, and consequently turn a blind eye to al-Qaeda affiliates such as Jemaah Islamiyah that use Bangladesh as a transit point and training base. When in early 2007 the military-backed caretaker government hanged six militants from the Jama’atul Mujahideen—a local Islamic group responsible for literally thousands of terrorist attacks up through 2005—the conventional wisdom had it that neither political party could have carried out the sentence, compromised as they were by their Islamic coalition partners. In the eerie calm that characterized the time of my visit, with the country more orderly than it had been in years—with no terrorist attacks, with the ports operating without strikes, with army checkpoints everywhere, with hundred of arrests of politicians on charges of corruption, and with technocrats getting promoted over party hacks—nobody I met was enthusiastic about a return to the old two-party system, even as no one wanted the military to continue to play such an overt role in the nation’s affairs. The military eventually withdrew from power and Sheikh Hasina was elected prime minister, though soon after her election, she had to deal with a violent mutiny by paramilitary border guards.
Bangladesh illustrates how the kind of government a state has is less important than the degree to which that state is governed—that is, a democracy that cannot control its own population may be worse for human rights than a dictatorship that can. Again, one does not need the extreme example of Iraq to prove this point; the less extreme example of Bangladesh will do. Functioning institutions—rather than mere elections—are critical, particularly in complex societies, for the faster a society progresses, the more and different institutions it will require.4 Military intervention in Bangladesh is, ultimately, a response to the lack of capable institutions.
Furthermore, while democracy may provide the only cure for radical Islam over the long term, in the short term in Bangladesh, it was the very fear of radical Islam taking advantage of a political void that kept the military from initially returning to the barracks. This is a country where 80 percent of the population subsists on less than $2 per day, even as Jama’atul Mujahideen budgets $1250 per member per month. In addition to the financial incentive of becoming a militant, Bangladesh has porous borders with a barely governable part of India, where more than a dozen regional insurgencies are in progress. Rather than be eliminated in the military crackdown, it was thought that Jama’atul Mujahideen mutated temporarily into smaller groups operating in the frontier zones.
Bangladesh may be destined to be run by an old-fashioned Turkish-style national security regime composed of both civilians and military officers, in which the civilians dominate in public and the military draws red lines behind closed doors. “In the long run, we are hostages to democracy,” Mahmudul Islam Chowdhury, a former mayor of Chittagong, told me. “Your Westminster–Capitol Hill system won’t work here. But we’re poor and need aid and
so are required to hold elections.” He explained that democracy in India works because there are so many states where different political parties dominate, so state and municipal governments thrive alongside the federal one in a multi-tiered system. But in Bangladesh the central government cannot risk an opposition party gaining control of any of the few big cities; thus all power is hoarded in Dhaka. The result is a vacuum that village committees have filled at the bottom level of government, and NGOs and Islamists struggle to fill in the vast and crucial middle ground.
Barisal, a major river port in southern Bangladesh, is a poster child for that vacuum: a middle-sized city that reeks of garbage and untreated sewage because of the absence of any viable treatment plants and the drying up of canals. This, in turn, is related to the unauthorized building of high-rises that brings ever more people into the urban core. Ahmed Kaisea, the district environmental director, was another official who told me that “the laws are just fine, there is just no enforcement.” I had walked in on him without an appointment. He did not seem busy. His phone never rang, and there was no evidence of a computer. With electricity cuts throughout the day, use of the Internet is severely limited here. He was like many a bureaucrat I encountered, with an office but little effective control.
Because cities require more infrastructure than do villages (sewage, street lighting, traffic signals, and so on), the uncontrolled growth of cities like Barisal—because in part of the environmental ravishment of the countryside—makes it increasingly harder for government institutions, such as they exist, to cope.
Whereas Bangladeshi villages are defined by the struggle to find dry soil, cities are defined by the rickshaw economy. There are several hundred thousand bicycle rickshaws in Dhaka alone, a city of more than ten million people. Many of the drivers are migrants from the flood-prone countryside who pay the rickshaw mustans (mafia-style bosses, often associated with the political parties) the equivalent of $1.35 per day to rent the rickshaw. From an average passenger a driver collects 30 cents, and ends up making around a dollar a day in profit. His wife will often earn a similar amount breaking bricks into road aggregate, while their children sift through garbage. Such is a typical Bangladeshi family. This is an economic environment perfectly suited for the growth of radical Islam, which offers both answers and spiritual rewards for suffering that a mere conviction in voting periodically cannot. The miracle is not how radical Bangladesh and much of the third world is, but how moderate they remain.
The social cohesion that does exist on the national level is the result not of democracy but of linguistic nationalism. This is an ethnically homogeneous country where—unlike in Pakistan or Iraq—Islam is not required as a glue to hold together disparate ethnic or sectarian groups. What is more, national identity is built on violent struggle. In 1947, Muslim Bengalis rose up against the British and against India to form East Pakistan. Next came the 1971 liberation war against Muslim West Pakistan, which saw widespread rape and executions in Dhaka by a West Pakistani military hell-bent on imposing its Urdu language on the Bengalis. From East Pakistan (the “Land of the [Muslim] Pure”) Bangladesh (the “Land of the Bengali”) was created. Thus language replaced religion as the organizing principle of a society.
But that organizing principle is not inviolate. Because it occupies most of the landmass of the Asian Subcontinent, India enjoys a demonstrable geographic logic; not so Bangladesh. As small as Bangladesh is, again, it is vast in its own right. “Whoever comes to power in Dhaka—democratic or military—neglects us here in Chittagong,” Emdadul Islam, a local lawyer, complained to me, voicing a sentiment common in the southeastern port city. “We have our own Chittagongian dialect, a mixture of Portuguese, Arabic, Arakanese, Burmese, Bengali, and so on. Historically,” he went on, “we are as linked to parts of Burma and India as we are to the rest of Bangladesh. Who knows what will happen when Burma one day opens up and we have new road and rail links with India and southwestern China. Give me my fundamental rights and dignity, and I’ll love this soil. If not, I don’t know.”
He was not calling for secession, but he was indicating how this artificial blotch of territory on the Indian Subcontinent—in succession Bengal, East Bengal, East Pakistan, and Bangladesh—could metamorphose yet again, amid the gale forces of regional politics, religious extremism, and nature itself. After all, look at all the kingdoms that Chittagong had once belonged to: Samatata, Harikela, Tripura, Arakan, and so forth. Chittagong and southeastern Bangladesh were as organically connected with the story of Burma through the ages as with that of India.
He spoke of a new mini-state composed of Chittagong and the Hill Tracts, lying between Burma and a Greater India; with the Barisal and Khulna regions of southwestern Bangladesh merging with Kolkata in India. He mentioned the thousands of Chittagongians who work in nearby states as part of a rich mini-diaspora. He was not a firebrand, just a man thinking out loud late at night, as the rain pounded in a nearby alley, about things that the very chronic instability of this country made it natural to think about.
I was regaled with a history as voluminous as the file folders tipping up toward the ceiling in the lawyer’s office. Chittagong’s identity, it turns out, is defined by the Bay of Bengal and by the larger Indian Ocean world much more than by Bangladesh. Though briefly part of the independent Muslim sultanate of Bengal in the early fifteenth century (and sporadically in the sixteenth), for most of the fifteenth through seventeenth century “the city and its hinterland were dominated by the kings of Arakan,” a predominantly Buddhist kingdom more closely aligned with Burma than with Bengal. Chittagong was a principal South and Southeast Asian port for Muslim pilgrims traveling to and from Mecca, as well as a base for Portuguese renegades operating their own commercial and military enterprises beyond the reach of the Portuguese authorities in Goa on India’s Malabar coast.5 “Behold Chittagong,” Camões writes, “the finest city of Bengal.”6
Sometime in the Middle Ages, from across the Indian Ocean, came twelve Sufi saints, auliyas (protectors), who preached Islam and helped establish the city. Foremost among them was Pir Badr Shah, who, according to legend, floated from Arabia on a slab of rock to rid the city of evil spirits. A symbol of the wave upon wave of Arab traders who plied the Indian Ocean between Arabia and Southeast Asia, bearing spices, cotton fabrics, precious stones, and minerals, Badr Shah carried with him an earthen lamp that spread light “on all sides far and near,” to ward off the darkness of evil and to help sailors.7 This lamp may have been confused with a beacon fire atop a nearby hillside that he lit to guide his fellow sailors into the harbor. In any case, he is worshipped by seamen along the eastern shore of the Bay of Bengal as far south as Malaysia.
The earthen lamp and the slab of stone now lie in a rusted glass case under fluorescent lighting, next to the saint’s draped sarcophagus, inside a brass cage under a moldy domed roof in the old fort area of Chittagong. Around it are machine-made carpets, simple mats, and green tiles of the kind common to many a kitchen or bathroom. In other words, there is nothing particularly aesthetic about this tomb, yet at sunset it is packed with worshippers. Men naked to the waist in soiled longyis, bathed in sweat and rainwater, danced around it. Sari-clad ladies lay on the stone floor, quietly insisting to the saint. Everywhere I saw candles and flowers. It was as though I were inside a Hindu temple. Pir Badr Shah is holy to Hindus as well as Muslims. His very person may be confused with that of Hindu deities. Buddhists and Chinese revere him as an inferior god. The same delicious confusion of worship holds for the tombs of the other Sufi saints in the city. Chittagong is a window to a world much larger and more cosmopolitan than Bangladesh.
Yet there is little architectural sign of it. Dank and mildewed, Chittagong constitutes miles upon miles of low-end signage eaten away by rust. There is no structure other than a handful of mosques that you could identify with any particular historical style. Rather than architecture, I saw only a makeshift assemblage of necessaries—the minimal construction required to meet the needs of
the moment. The people who built such structures obviously lacked the luxury to be able to leave a permanent legacy, let alone something beautiful. For them, this slapdash construction represented a step up from the village from which they had migrated. Like the tomb of Badr Shah, Chittagong was ugly but also dynamic. Its history and folklore embraced a vast terrain, yet in other ways it was so void of tradition that little could be taken for granted here.
From a rooftop, Chittagong looked as if it had been dabbed in tar and charcoal dust, as the monsoon mist blocked out the views of the nearby picturesque Hill Tracts: “the mountains that seem to touch the sky,” in the words of a seventeenth-century Portuguese traveler. With me was Tanbir ul Islam Siddiqui, the founder of an NGO called Change Makers. Change Makers had one overriding goal: to make Bangladeshis aware of their own constitution. Bangladesh has a perfectly fine constitution, but because it had been violated so many times over the years by both military and civilian rulers, its very existence was an embarrassment to those in control; thus they treated it almost like a state secret. It was hard for ordinary people to obtain a copy. And so Change Makers was dedicated to distributing their own constitution to Bangladeshis. Tanbir had no illusions about what he was up against.
Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power Page 18