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My niece Fatima turned eleven recently. Her favourite subject at school is geography. She often exhibits her precocious geographical knowledge talking about positions, climates, and populations etc. of different cities around the world. The other day, at lunch table, she was asking me why the USA is almost empty compared to how full Bangladesh was. What she meant was that the density of population in Bangladesh was much higher compared to that in the States. Then came an unexpected suggestion from her, But the solution is very simple. Why do we not take some people from Bangladesh and make them live in the USA? That should solve the problem. Is it not about evenly distributing the population over the surface of the world? The suggestion of my eleven-year-old niece smelled of naivet. We all laughed and explained why getting in the USA was not that easy. One would have to go through the hassle of obtaining a permission to stay there as a resident etc. and the USA would not be very enthusiastic about giving others the right to stay on their land. Later on, however, my nieces nave question kept ringing inside my head. What is stopping us from evenly distributing the population of the world over the globe so that no particular area is burdened with a lot while some other place is seeking a rise in the number of people? Todays Americans, descendants of different European migrants, literally invaded what we know as North America now. The indigenous, the Native Americans known as the Red Indians, soon became guests on their own homeland as the rampant and truculent Europeans took control using their advanced weapons and technology; the backward Indians could do little to fight against firepower with their primitive arrows and so on. The Europeans entered North America without caring much about asking for permissions and now, after taking control of that huge chunk of rich land, they are forcing others to take their consent before anyone can even set his foot on the American soil. The same story is true about the invasion of what we know presently as South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand etc. There are quite a few places in the world where the population is less than what the land can support. Many of these countries have initiated migration programmes seeking migrants from other countries to come and live permanently. However, the strict rules and regulations ensure that only qualified and educated people get entrance. These facilitates what we know as brain-drain and other similar phenomena. In the case of Bangladesh, the few educated people we have are enticed in to entering a more prosperous country eventually making our beloved motherland face a higher concentration of unqualified and unskilled population. The Bangladesh government has done little to hinder a mad growth of population over the years. Measures to improve the condition of their lives have been weak too. The burden of uneducated and unskilled people is growing day by day. At the same time, the more prosperous countries are taking away the best of us leaving behind the average and the below-average. The prospect of our country is very grim indeed from this perspective. Is the government going to show some alertness in this issue?

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Published on 08-07-2011 The Daily Sun Islam in South Asia (Part I) Prof Dr. Syed Anwar HusainHome to about
one-third of the world Muslim population, South Asia has witnessed Islam in its various manifestations. As elsewhere across the Muslim-inhabited regions, Islam in South Asia has appeared to be more than a mere belief system. Again, as the youngest of religions, Islam, as it spread across the world, has had to encounter other existing religions/religious systems; and Islam in South Asia is no exception. Consequently, in its process of emergence in many parts of the world, including South Asia, Islam has had to bear influences of other religions. That by about 19th century Islam could emerge as the second largest religion in the region is a significant fact linked not only to its inherent proselytising nature, but also to its intrinsically attractive features. Islam has had its majority converts from Hinduism, the largest religion of the region. As it is in this region, in three countries Muslims are in overwhelming majority (Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Maldives), in two countries in significant minority (India and Sri Lanka); in one country a gradually expanding minority (Nepal). Above all, the constitutions of two countries (Pakistan and Bangladesh) accord Islam the status of state religion (but, in reality, none of these could be called Islamic state). But the significant fact that should not be lost sight of is that Islam came to this region from outside, a fact entwining both strength and weakness of the religion. In this brief discussion an attempt is made to consider the various manifestations of Islam in South Asia in the context of other existing religions. The discussion is, however, prefaced with a few words on Islam as it appeared initially, and the subsequent changes that overtook it. The purpose of this section is to place regional Islam in its cross-regional perspective. I To all intents and purposes, Islam as the religion of desert was more than a religion; its preacher, Prophet Muhammad (SA), was also more than a preacher. The prophet was a pragmatic leader and a noble person who loved the poor and underprivileged because of his own background and as a response to the increasing concentration of wealth in a few hands organised a political community the primary concern of which was to create an ideal society which would lead to the evolution of an ideal state. In the process, the prophet of Islam engineered a human synthesis of pre-existing traditions and his own innovations, without, however, suggesting any particularist structure of a polity. In the years that followed successive Muslim rulers have tried to follow the prophets example. But there has been steady usurpation of authority by dynastic forces using Islam as a vehicle for self-justification. Indeed from the Umayyad onwards, Muslim rulers invariably have used Islam as a legitimating force to perpetuate their own autocratic and unrepresentative hierarchies. It may also be argued that Islam started getting distorted as well as distanced from its pristine purity from the time of the Umayyads and onwards. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi, for example, argues in her Woman and Islam that much of the restrictions on womens freedom in the so-called Islamic state are not grounded in the Quranic doctrine or early Islamic practice, but on the reactionary methods of social control introduced during the Umayyad dynasty. Islam underwent further distortions when confronted by the West. Muslim political

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decline and crippling introversion during the colonial period resulted in a total rejection of modern exigencies or any modernist construct based on ijtihad. However, Jamaluddin Afgani, Abduh, Allama Iqbal, Rashid Rida and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad emphasised the need for a new synthesis between Islamic moral values and Western political and industrial institutions. This trend of thought was, however, challenged by obscurantists (wrongly dubbed fundamentalists) like Hasan al Bannas Brotherhood Movement in Egypt and Moududis Jamat-i-lslami in undivided India and Pakistan. The turbulence created by the Islamists in Algeria also fits into this category. An abrasive and organised religio-political movement, this type of obscurantism, in reality, deviates from the Quran and Shariah and basics of the spirit of Islam in preaching and practicing violence. In South Asia, Pakistan has always remained an intellectual base for this type of Islamic obscurantism. The negative impact of such a backward-looking Islam has been succinctly described by Asghar Ali Engineer in his book The Islamic State (1994) in the following words: Thus poverty, orthodoxy, and backwardness on the one hand, and superficial modernity which often assumes the form of vulgar ostentation of wealth on the other, has become the bane of the Islamic world today (p. 201). II In South Asia Islam has been both a boon and a bane. It was boon in that a sizeable number of people found in it a better alternative to their traditional belief systems and got converted to it with a clearly decided purpose. It was a bane in that the converts to it were eventually led to a particularist and exclusive psyche which translated into politics acted as a catalyser for the division of the subcontinent. But on the whole, there have been at least four specific manifestations of Islam in South Asia. First, Islam appeared as the most powerful and dynamic proselytising religion. But in the process of winning over converts Islam either influenced the existing religions or got itself influenced by them. Moreover, this two-way process of give and take gradually led to the emergence of some deities/personalities commonly revered by both Muslims and Hindus. The cult of Satyapir in medieval Bengal was such an example. Guru Nanak (1469-1539), the founder of the Sikh religion, spent his whole life in preaching a religion based on all that was beneficial to man in Hinduism as well as in Islam. His mission was to put an end to religious strife; and, he, therefore, preached a gospel of universal toleration. He preached the unity of Godhead and condemned the formalism of religions. His sacred book, the Granth Shahib, draws heavily upon the basic principles of Islam. In Bengal (now divided into Bangladesh and West Bengal) Islam was preached by the Sufi saints who could draw easy converts by stressing social and humane rather than ritual aspects of Islam. The Islam practiced and preached by them was in peaceful coexistence at the mass level with other existing religions, and there were intermingling amongst themselves. Consequently, Islam in Bengal was more syncretistic than anywhere in the region. The legendary fights that Muslim saints had with the Hindu Kings in many parts of Bengal resulting in defeat and elimination of the latter were more in the socio-political than religious contexts. Second, for the marginalised Muslim community in colonial India, Islam provided a point of reference for identity and thereby for self-assertion vis--vis the advanced Hindu majority. The process started in the nineteenth century with the appearance of such Islamic revivalist movements as the Waahabi, Faraizi and the Tariqah-iMuhammadiya. Although the ostensible object of these movements was to purify

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Islam of non-Islamic accretions, the economic and political programmes were more prominent. The writer is Editor, daily sun.