Charting our way forward

IF conflict between civilizations is replacing the ideological animosity that ended with the cold war then it becomes necessary to understand the term civilization, that Samuel Huntington described as basically a cultural entity, and that the most important conflicts in the future will occur along the cultural fault lines. The differences among civilizations are not only real but are also basic. Among these differences the most important is religion.
One only has to look at the transformation of the former constituent parts of the USSR and Eastern Europe, including the Russian Federation, where former godless societies have turned to religion like ducks to water and have embraced either the Russian Orthodox Church or Catholicism.
It must, however, be recognised that with the collapse of the Soviet Union six Muslim Republics came into existence in the Caucasus and Central Asia and helped the emergence of Muslim dominated Bosnia in former Yugoslavia and the regeneration of Islam in Southern Europe and the eclipse of Turkey as the only Muslim state in Europe.
Late Edward Said saw Huntington's Clash of Civilizations as a "vastly overrated article, the core of its belligerent (and dishearteningly ignorant thesis) was the battle between the West and Islam (which he sagely warned would become even more dangerous when it was allied with Confucianism)." Said warned that Huntington's thesis, that attracted huge attention in the West, has tickled the intellect of the Westerners to understand this "rebellious and somehow resistant culture (Impossible Histories: Harper's July 2002)."
Thanks to Osama bin Laden and the terrorist acts of 9/11 the impatient West, which saw some of the subaltern colonials as hewers of wood and drawers of water being catapulted to center stage of world politics as a threat to their way of living and objected to the insolence of these ingrates still dependant on their munificence to which many in the developing world were still beholden to.
Edward Said's criticism notwithstanding, the fact remains that the Muslim diaspora in the West has been reduced to negotiating a second class citizenship in their countries of birth, and that the race riots of last year in France and several West European countries were the direct result of the exclusion of the Muslim community from the mainstream development of these countries.
Many in Europe had forgotten that the parents of the rioting youths were invited into these countries to bolster the sagging European economies after the devastation caused by the Second World War.
But, true to the metropolitan-periphery principle followed by the erstwhile colonial powers, the Third World invitees, particularly those of different faith, were relegated to the ghettos on the outskirts of the cities where they were expected to go back after the toils of the day were over.
Though such discriminatory treatment was accepted by the first generation immigrants, who were grateful for the opportunity for getting a better life than the one their home country could have offered, the second and third generation immigrants considered themselves as no less Europeans and, consequently, deliberate exclusionary policies followed by the authorities generated frustration and discontent that finally found expression in violence. The native Europeans remained indifferent to the accumulated frustration of this group of people.
Interestingly, the Westerners never acknowledged, as pointed out by Professor Stephen Zunes, that "from the time of the Crusades through the European colonial era to the ongoing bombings in Iraq, Western Christians killed far more Muslims than the reverse. Given this strong sense of history among Muslims, Washington's use and threat of military force, its imposition of punitive sanctions, and its support of oppressive governments result in a popular reaction that often takes the form of religious extremism."
Though some people have reservations about the term "Islamic fundamentalism," partly because going back to the fundamentals or the root of any faith does not necessarily mean divorce from modernity, though a fear lurks in many Muslim minds that large scale westernisation contains elements of contradistinction with Islamic culture, and also due to the fact that the term "fundamentalism" originated in Christianity and there was never a theocratic or clergy run state before the Iranian revolution of 1979 led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
The efforts of political Islam aimed at establishing an Islamic political order world-wide through challenging the status quo in the Muslim states and through transnational networks by forcing out the regimes that cohort with the West have given the Muslim faith a false identity of threatening others belonging to other faiths without interrogating whether the faith itself and majority of its followers believe in violence as seen in London, Madrid, Bali and many other places.
That these incidents of terrorism are manifestations of an internal struggle between the extremists and moderates within the Islamic world for the soul of Islam was often sidestepped.
Closer to home, President Musharraf's admission in a recent interview with Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria that his failure to contain extremists is due to the fact that they are Pakistanis from South Punjab, where al-Qaeda hides its operatives in the many madrassas (religious schools), is very worrying because of its extra-territorial implications.
In a report to the US Congress the Congressional Research Service pointed out that the number of madrassas in Pakistan increased more than ten-fold from 1947 to 1988 in apparent correspondence with the deterioration of the public education system, with ten percent of madrassas having links with terrorist groups.
The terrorist incidents in Bangladesh last year testify to the apprehension of many in this country that Islamic extremism, initially tolerated and then encouraged by some political leaders, has not been rooted out by the execution of a few leaders of JMB and Harkatul Jihad.
The national demand to try war criminals, ban the Islamists from participating in the forthcoming elections, and cancel the equivalence of madrassa degrees with those given by our colleges and universities should not be regarded as unIslamic.
While the genocide and other war crimes trial will reestablish the rule of law in the country, the cancellation of equivalence of religious degrees with the secular ones will help democracy that needs an efficient knowledge based bureaucracy rather than one mainly conversant with spiritual knowledge of life after death.
Bangladesh needs highly educated people to be competitive in the increasingly globalised market, and each citizen to be economically productive. Democracy without economic advancement, or in Joseph Stiglitz's terminology "moral growth," would be meaningless.
In the ultimate analysis, any policy freely arrived at, that brings greater good to the greater number of people should be the aim of democracy that we aspire for.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.