The Wisdom of Al-Maari

"This wrong was by my father done
To me, and not by me to one "

These are the words of Al-Maari, an Arabian poet. He wished he had never been born. He blamed his father for the 'wrong' of giving birth to him. He never had children. In this he anticipated Thomas Hardy, who wrote about an unborn child:

"Breathe not, hid heart! Cease silently!"

Both poets felt life was a mistake. Hardy says:

“Ere nescience be reaffirmed, how long, how long?”

It is interesting that Al-Maari anticipated Hardy by several hundred years.

And both poets felt that it is worse than a crime to bring children into this world.

We say, what a cute child! without realizing the child will suffer misery as it grows up, and grows old with Alzheimer’s disease and dies of cancer.

My Language

LONDON

My language is Bengali (or Bangla) but I don't know it very well. I can speak well enough but I can barely read. And I can't write at all.

I was born into a middle-class family in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1960. I attended English-medium schools, like St. Joseph High School. I had to study the vernacular, but I hated it.

I envied my father who never had to study Bengali. He was born in Calcutta in 1933 before the creation of India and Pakistan (I don't call it partition because the land had been united by the British imperialists: there was nothing to partition. It had been more like the Ottoman Empire.). He attended the English-medium Hare School and in East Pakistan, St. Gregory's College, also English-medium.

My father's English was very good. At Hare School, the headmaster read his writing and told him in private, "Some day you'll be a great writer." Of course he had no wish to be a writer. But his correspondence was pure literature. He would agonize over a word, seeking the mot juste, an expression borrowed from Flaubert that he often used.

He changed his job and went on a management course, first to Istanbul, and then to London. My mother, brother and I followed. Incidentally, it was in Istanbul that I saw my first mini-skirt! This was in 1970. When my wife and I visited Istanbul in 2014, we saw women wearing hijab.

We moved to London where we had planned to stay three months and then return to East Pakistan. The country was then in the grip of two demagogues, Sheikh Mujib in the East, and Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto in the West. The war began, and we found ourselves stranded in London.

My father got a job as a clerk despite having a master's degree in economics. He didn't have a British degree. We lived in cramped quarters, and I recalled the bungalow-like house that we had lived in in Dhaka, with its large compound; back then we had a car (very rare in those days) and servants. I began to resent London and longed to get back home, not realizing that things had changed.

In London, I attended Noel Park Junior School. The kids there were surprised by my English. They wondered where I'd learnt it from. I picked up an English accent, but carefully avoided the cockney the boys and girls spoke. I never said 'ain't', always 'haven't' or 'didn't'. I was a snob and I told them about the lavish life we had back home. They were plebeian, I was patrician. I felt superior, but I was a second-class citizen.

I began to long for home (now Bangladesh). Bangladesh for me then meant the sun - the heat, the humidity as opposed to the cold and rain of London. I never thought about the language.

We returned to Bangladesh in 1973. The firm where my father worked had left. Everything had been nationalized. My father had no job for a year.

Then I entered school. I will never forget the first day. My mother had bought all the textbooks and lovingly wrapped them in white paper. When I got back from school, I announced that I would never study there. Why? Because everything was in Bengali.

The government had made Bengali compulsory for all schools. This was Bengali nationalism. St. Joseph used to be English-medium, as the reader will recall, but now it was forced to teach in Bengali. The headmaster, Brother Thomas Moore, pleaded with the government to allow subjects to be taught in English; he was almost thrown out of the country.

Consequently, I loathed school. But my father introduced me to English literature. I read almost all the novels of Thomas Hardy. I read the essays of Robert Lynd. Then I discovered English poetry. I read Byron, Shelley and Keats with avidity as though my life depended on it.

I also discovered the Bible, the King James version. I didn't care about the religion, but I worshiped the language. 'Before the cock crows thrice, thou shalt regret me three times'. 'Inasmuch as ye shall have done it unto the least of these thy brethren, ye shall have done it unto me; and inasmuch as ye shall not have done it unto the least of these thy brethren, ye shall not have done it unto me'. I am quoting from memory.

I shall forever be grateful to the English language for saving me from the madness of Bengali nationalism.

Under Sheikh Mujib, we had to watch a lot of boring Russian movies on TV. We were then in the Indo-Russian orbit in the cold war. Then General Ziaur Rahman took over, and he moved us into the capitalist world. American and British  programs began to appear on TV. We moved away from nationalism towards a mild form of Islamism. English-medium schools began to reappear.



THE STUDY OF HISTORY

I began to write poetry, in English of course. My writing has been published throughout the world, even in Damascus!

I became an English teacher at Notre Dame College English course at the age of sixteen, a profession I have followed to this day.

After graduation, I began to study history, which had a deep impact on my life. I was heavily influenced by Arnold Toynbee's classic The Study of History. I began to ask myself, what was my parent culture? What culture were we heir to?

The answer was obvious: we were heir to the Muslim civilization - the Perso-Arabic civilization.. But I didn't identify with the rise of Islam, but with the history and secular culture of the Muslim world.

My wife and I enrolled in the Persian (Farsi) language course at the Iranian Cultural Center. I chose Persian, rather than Arabic, because Persian had once been used here, in the Indian subcontinent. You can hear traces of Farsi in Hindi item songs.

In the film Sharavi, Amitav Bachchan sings this line: "Imtehan ho gai intezar ki". Both the words 'imtehan' and 'intezar' are Persian (meaning, respectively, examination or test and waiting).

Again, in the item song Mahi Ve, we hear the words "Ek taraf ishq hai tanha tanha". One-sided  love is lonely, lonely. These are Persian words.

After a few months, I was able to read Persian classics with a little help. Sheikh Sa'adi and Omar Khayyam came alive. We had lost these treasures because of British rule. We had become Anglicized. It was not only the literature that we had lost. We had lost precious concepts. While reading the Gulistan, I came across the words 'zel Allah'. Sa'di had dedicated his book to the king, whom he described as the shadow of Allah. This is the Muslim, secular concept of kingship or ruler. A king must never be overthrown - no, not even criticized. One is immediately reminded of the Middle Eastern monarchs, emirs and sultans. In Bangladesh, General H M Ershad had been zel Allah, but he was overthrown by the western donors. We have learnt democracy from the west, but what we had were two dynasties.

Khomeini was told by learned mawlanas that the Shah of Iran was zel Allah. He scoffed at the idea. That was wrong. Today Iranians regret overthrowing the Shah.

When the East India Company ruled India, it had a policy of non-interference in religious matters. However, the Christian evangelicals (such as William Wilberforce, he of the anti-slave movement) refused to go along. A 'secular' solution was found: teaching English literature. It was felt that this would modernize India along English lines. But the evangelicals insisted on missionary activity. And despite the objections of the Company, missionaries began to arrive.(That the modernization of India largely failed is attested by recent events in India: India acquired an opposition only after the Bharatiya Janata Party demolished a mosque: the architect of the plan went on to become Home Minister and, finally, deputy prime minister.)

My point is this: did the study of English literature turn Indians into Christians? Then why should the study of Persian literature turn us into fundamentalists? Today, hundreds of students study English literature at Dhaka University. Their intellectual fair ranges from the atheism of Percy Bysshe Shelley to the learned piety of John Milton.

I now had my own civilization. True, I still love English and I write in English. But that is because of an inescapable historic fate. The fact must be faced that we had been conquered. Do I love the English? Not at all. I think in terms of civilizations now, not nation-states, and England is a part of western civilization. I agree with Susan Sontag's statement: the white race is the cancer of human history.

According to the anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah, the nation-state experiment has failed in South Asia. It has failed in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Each unit has reverted to its own civilization.

The idea of nationalism came from Western Europe. The idea was born of a reaction to Humean skepticism. Kant wrote a critique of pure reason, but the noumenon-phenomenon distinction proved unsatisfactory. The final result was Fichte's philosophy. For Fichte, the world was an extension of the ego. The ego spoke German. Fichte gave several addresses to the German nation. There was no German nation at the time. The idea was to have deadly consequences for Europe.

Our intellectuals imbibed the idea and dreamt of a nation-state. They brought disaster upon us, with the death of 700,000 people (this is the figure given by Albert Reynolds, who rejected the Indian figure of 3 million; that's plausible, for otherwise we would have to believe that the Pakistan army had been more efficient than the American military which killed 5 million Vietnamese after dropping more bombs than in the entire second world war).

But ideas never travel, only words do. In their conception of a nation-state based on the Bengali language, there was glaring incoherence. The Bengali language is spoken across the border in the Indian state of West Bengal. These people are Hindu, and from the beginning until now, nationalists have been pro-India and pro-Hindu. But this is a denial of nationalism. For a nationalist, the nation-state must be sufficient unto itself, with no external loyalties. No nationalist can consistently make the assertion that we are a nation-state and that at the same time we belong to the Indic civilization.

My wife and I spent an evening with a top-ranking bureaucrat. He was an ardent nationalist. He kept a picture of Sheikh Mujib, the father of Bengali nationalism, in his office even when it was illegal to do so. He told us that he didn't believe in the Abrahamic god who demanded loyalty. He was more at home with the likes of Apollo and the Hindu pantheon. With considerable pride, he showed us an instrument for embossing Shiva on his stationery. We ran from his house.



Yet the bureaucrat is typical of a nationalist in Bangladesh. My parents were nationalists and they loved Hinduism. As an agnostic myself, I find it impossible  to comprehend how one can love any religion. All religions are equally good or bad.

Indeed, nationalism itself is a religion. It has all the seven dimensions of a religion as adumbrated by Ninian Smart in his The World's Religions (see The Two Religions of Bangladesh). It is small wonder that I have never felt any affinity for nationalism.



Further, Bengali nationalism is not a shared idea. The mass of Bangladeshis have no conception of a Bengali nation-state. The elite and the people lead separate lives. I once investigated the role of cinemas in Bangladeshi life. In the cinema halls, I saw mostly day labourers, rickshaw pullers and garments factory workers - no gentleman or lady. In newspapers and on TV, the latter decry the tastes of the former, looking down their collective noses. An interview of people was conducted by a television channel, and it was found that no one could identify the meaning of a certain historically important nationalist day. That nationalism - which implies a total collective - is not shared by most people must be a source of considerable embarrassment for the elite nationalists.

And even among the elite, there is no loyalty to the nation-state. Almost all of my cousins live in the United States. One of the worst things about being a teacher in Bangladesh is the sure knowledge that most of your students will quit the country for good. When a student goes to the principal of Notre Dame College for a reference, he lectures him on his duty to study abroad and then come back to the country. I'm not against emigration: but in Bangladesh  it is the children of the well-to-do who emigrate, not those down-at-heel. When taking a flight from Kuwait, one encounters a long queue of Bangladeshis returning to their country. These people are labourers, they have nothing but the power to labour. These workers are widely employed in the Middle East and it is their remittance that helps pay for our imports. I would not mind the least if America took these people, but America takes the best minds - it is called brain drain.

Again, from the very initiation of Bangladesh, there has been rejection of its status. This was the reaction of the Chakmas of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Our nationalism bred a new nationalism, and the whole of the Chittagong Hill Tracts demanded autonomy. The Chakmas don't speak a different language, but speak a dialect of Bengali. But that was enough to alienate them from Bengali nationalism. In this, they anticipated the English-speaking Scottish nationalists. An insurgency ensued in the south-east, and we did what West Pakistan did to us when we wanted autonomy - we attacked them militarily. Rebellion always brings swift retaliation.

Our nationalists take pride in being a Bengali nation-state. But do we have a state at all? We are totally dependent on western foreign aid. Without aid, Bangladesh would have ceased to exist. That is cause for shame, not pride.

The elite of Bangladesh also suffer from cultural cringe. This is a feeling of inferiority to western civilisation. The feeling dates back to colonial times, and was successfully inculcated in us by British imperialists. We admire all things western - including their political system. When somebody is praised by westerners, newspapers rush to print the story and the individual is lionised. There are over 10,000 NGOs in Bangladesh, financed by western donors. We have become an outpost of western civilisation. We should be able to stand up and say: non serviam. 

Our inspiration comes from Europe, but what is Europe today? Not a congeries of nation-states

Each sequestered in its hate

but a supranational union with its own currency, its own bureaucracy, its own judiciary and its own parliament. Europe has been through two terrible wars, and it wants to shun that path forever.

Does all this mean we must be fundamentalists? Let's look at Persian and Arabic literature. The Gulistan   is an entirely secular work of art. Omar Khayyam was a hedonist and atheist. The Arabian Nights is very earthy literature, modeled on the Persian Hezar Afsane. The Perfumed Garden is the Kamasutra of the Arabic world. The Shahnama is based on ancient Iranian fables. Ferdousi wrote:

Besi ranj bordam
Dar in sale si
Ajam zinde kardam
Bedin Farsi

He had laboured thirty years to revive the Persian language.

Inja zi, wa jame behesht mi saz

Live here, and make heaven's wine, wrote Omar Khayyam. I listen to Persian songs too. My favourite is Zemestoon by Sheila. Persian songs are mostly the product of Iranian exiles living in the United States.The culture is life-affirming, not life-denying.

The people of Iran are ruled by fundamentalists, but they are secular. Most Iranian women don't wear strict hijab anymore. And they have plenty of premarital sex. Homosexuality is rampant. The have revolted in private. The mullahs have failed.

Indeed, the appeal of fundamentalists is that fundamentalism is unhistorical, ignoring the 1.400 years of Muslim civilisation. The Ummayad dynasty, for instance, was secular and this-worldly. In Bangladesh (as in the whole of India) the religious strand of Islam known as Sufism flourished since the thirteenth century. Fundamentalists have almost no place for Sufi shrines. Since 2013, 14 Sufi saints have been killed by militants. The phenomenon of the pir, or Islamic holy man, has been attacked by fundamentalists. Former president, General Ershad, used to be a murid (loosely translated as follower) of the Atroshi pir. 

It may be alleged that I do not love my country. I love my country enough to live here when all my peers are living abroad. I may not love the language, but that is something entirely different. My love of my country can best be expressed, not by me, but by a great writer. George Orwell wrote these lines while in Burma. He was describing an Englishman who had gone to Burma as a young man and had returned after a brief stint in England.

"Something turned over in Flory’s heart. It was one of those moments when one becomes
conscious of a vast change and deterioration in one’s life. For he had realized, suddenly,
that in his heart he was glad to be coming back. This country which he hated was now his
native country, his home. He had lived here ten years, and every particle of his body was
compounded of Burmese soil. Scenes like these—the sallow evening light, the old Indian
cropping grass, the creak of the cartwheels, the streaming egrets—were more native to
him than England. He had sent deep roots, perhaps his deepest, into a foreign country." 

Flory had come to love Burma. For me, Bangladesh is a set of images, memories, sensations. My wife and I have traveled to every corner of Bangladesh.  Love of one's country should not be talked about too much, but should be acted on.

But what kind of government should we have, assuming we, and not foreigners, can determine our own destiny? 1.400 years of Muslim history reveals monarchy to be our best system of government. But we have no royal family. So we must settle for the next best thing: military rule. In Muslim history, all our rulers had been military rulers. There was no separation of the military from the civilian. In Bangladesh, civilian government has always led to violence and worse. In the early '70s, the private army of Sheikh Mujib terrorized the countryside; in 1974, under his rule, more than a million people starved to death in a famine. There was enough food in the country, but it was exported to India (see Famine, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition). This is what love of India has done for us.

When democracy returned in 1991, under donor pressure, there was unceasing violence between the two parties. Not content with burning vehicles, they resorted to burning people to death. Besides, in a democracy, the minority is never safe. Under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Hindus were persecuted. All our best rulers had been military rulers: General Zia, Ershad and Moeen. We have no place for John Locke; Thomas Hobbes, yes, but not John Locke.

Bangladesh is not going to achieve modernity along western lines. We have to find a different route.

Contempt For Intellectuals Is Healthy

When Hitler strove for power and legitimacy, no group - neither business nor the military - wanted the jumped-up pantry boy.

However, there was one class of Germans who greeted him with open arms: the intellectuals. One must remember the prestige of the German intelligentsia back in those days. German universities were the best in the world. Their research was world-class and Nobel prizes were showered on them. After the war, the American universities displaced the Germans.

And once this clique embraced Hitler, the rest of Germany fell into line, according to Niall Ferguson. German society is characterized by hierarchy and obedience. Stanley Milgram’s experiment on obedience and power, when replicated in Germany, showed a compliance rate of 80%, as opposed to a compliance rate of 65% in the United States. Bangladesh probably has a higher level of compliance to authority. Obedience is part of our culture. It has been suggested that the Rwandan genocide was possible because of a culture of obedience. A genocide in Bangladesh is easy to imagine.

In fact, we came close in January 2007, when the two political parties unleashed murder on the streets. Fortunately, the army stepped in and, thanks to the UN and Kofi Annan, the army remained neutral.

However, on August 23, the intelectuals tried to discredit the army by alleging that a soldier had slapped a young whippersnapper on a campus. One fictitious slap spiralled into nationwide arson and unrest. The reason, of course, for the mythical justification was that both the evil leaders of Bangladesh were in jail. Obedience to them entailed a rebellion against the forces of good.

Obedience to evil, then, was the prospect of the period. Eyewitness account informed me how the thugs gathered on Satmasjid Road in Dhaka. Some yanked a driver out of his car and set it alight near road 8A. The next morning, the denizens of Dhanmandi and Rayerbazaar found that every restaurant on Satmasjid Road had been burnt to cinders.

A healthy contempt for intellectuals is essential for civilised existence. Civilisation, observed G.K.Chesterton, is based on truisms, or it is not based at all. And intellectuals, ever since Socrates, have been making out the worse to be the better cause. It is a truism that murdering people on or off the streets is evil, and those who do so should be shunned. It is a truism that murderers should go to jail. It is a truism that one must not burn vehicles and restaurants.

Our obedience to intellectuals has resulted in our obedience to evil. Where will this take us? To what bestial depths shall we descend? Around 80 people are lynched every year because of the lawlessness encouraged by our intellectuals; around 50 student politicians murder each other in the service of the two women who claim to be our leaders.

Besides, our intellectuals probably receive cash or other benefits from the Israel lobby - which would explain their strange silence on the Palestinian issue. They are not on the side of the good, but on the side of the evil.

(written shortly after the military takeover)