Right wisdom on faith

Nineteen eighty-two. I had just appeared my SSC exams and went to my nanabari on a vacation. It was a very cosy township and everybody knew everybody. I saw the young people spent most of their time in informal adda out of the educational institutions. They didn’t seem very interested in completing their education. They almost all of them liked to be a contractor and make some quick money. However, most of them couldn’t also succeed in becoming businessmen.

I had a cousin who also wanted to become a contractor but miserably failed after wasting some money that was provided by his father. His father and my mama didn’t want his son to become a contractor; he wanted his son to complete his education first. But the son seemed adamant on not continuing his education any more. His father and he were always fighting over the issue.

By the time I went there for a vacation, my cousin was roaming around the town in his disco-type outfit and chatting away his time smoking two packs of different cigarettes everyday. He was bankrupt and wasn’t earning anything; yet he needed to spend for continuing his lifestyle. He, at a university-going age, wasn’t into his studies and was unemployed.

One morning I saw he was in a quarrel with his father on a different issue. He was demanding that he should be allowed to go to Palestine for fighting in favour the Palestinians against the Israelis. He claimed Palestine was hiring fighters with good remuneration. He also claimed many Bangladeshis including some of his friends were going and he demanded that he should also be allowed to go for a better opportunity there. I never thought this Bangladeshis could be seriously thinking of going to Palestine and fight in their war. However, later on after many years I had learnt that many Bangladeshis indeed went to Palestine and fought in their war.

I had a learning from this incident: an idle brain is indeed a devil’s workshop. If my cousin and the ones who went to Palestine were involved in proper education or were earning something from their own business, they wouldn’t want to go there.

Then came the Afghan war (1979-1992). This war was also going on almost at the same time. The Afghan mujahideens, with the help of America, were fighting against the erstwhile Soviets. Bangladesh may be thousands of miles away from Afghanistan, but surprisingly in 1984, a group of volunteers visited that country and they had set up a connection with that war. Funnily, according to an estimate, about 3,000 over-enthusiastic Bangladeshis joined the war in several intakes in the following few years. Of them, 24 died in the battlefield. Many were believed to have met Bin Laden. When the Afghanistan mujahideen emerged as victors the Bangladeshi participants had expressed their delight at a press conference in Dhaka. These were the people who later on formed various radical organizations.

The returnees from Palestine perhaps didn’t fuel any anti-Israeli or anti-West sentiment in Bangladeshi society, but the Afghan returnees reportedly did. They did a lot of damage to our social structure in terms of trying to turn our society into a radical one. They had targeted the people from poor section of the society and students from Islamic seminaries (who mostly came poor families). These returnees had also formed various radical organizations across the country in order to attract the young people to radicalism.

Remember Picchi Hannan, Tokai Sagar, Eteem Rashed, Eteem Babu, Kala Monir, Lombu Dipu, Eteem Rahmat, Eteem Jabbar, Khato Jewel and BBC Anwar? Remember how easy it was to drag them into the world of crime? Similarly, it was very easy to convince the poor children about becoming radicals. Targeting the poor population did work in this phase. That’s when the idea of suicide bombers evolved in this country.

The government had handled that quite firmly and intelligently in order to reverse the situation.

However, in no time, another trend evolved and the agents of international radical groups started targeting educated youth belonging to middle and upper-middle classes. They seem to have become quite successful in misleading our young people towards radicalism. After a few incidents, it’s evident that it has gone to a scary level; our misled youth seem ready to die for what they’re being taught. We seem to be at a loss in terms of preventing this infection among our youth.

If we analyze all these phases, we could very well conclude that there were and are many aspects in religion that have been unknown to us or we didn’t understand their real interpretations. The people at large seem quite far away from studying religious issues that are important to our lives. It’s only a recent phenomenon that some of our leaders are emphasizing the importance of understanding the religion of Islam properly. I think the people should be encouraged more on this. A culture of learning should develop in our society to have the right wisdom so that no-one can manipulate or mislead us with any wrong interpretation.