Silence speaks volumes

Prior to the outbreak of the recent violence in Bangladesh that pitted the police against the Jamaat-e-Islami, the conservative Islamic party, there was a stark silence among Western news outlets on the massive protests at Shahbagh junction in Dhaka. For 38 days and counting, up to a quarter of a million people have gathered peacefully everyday at Shahbagh, and elsewhere across the country, to demonstrate in favour of death sentences for those convicted of war crimes dating back to the country’s 1971 Liberation War against Pakistan. Shahbagh, and the subsequent violent backlash, was sparked by sentences handed down to leaders of the Jamaat, which collaborated with Pakistani forces in 1971 and has been tightly enmeshed in Bangladeshi politics ever since.

At the heart of the Shahbagh movement is a debate raging throughout the Muslim world: what is to be done with religion in politics? The assessment is complex and, in places, bleak. Analysis based on the Gallup World Poll’s multi-year study shows a complex picture. By and large the citizenry of Islamic-majority nations seem to want religion to be a part of their daily lives, yet the magnitude of desire for religious influence in public policy seems unclear. The tide, however, appears to be moving in the direction of greater religious-orientation in governance. Electoral results in Turkey, for instance, show the religious AKP party winning landslide victories in 2002 and onwards. In Iraq’s 2005 general elections, the religious Shiite alliance won 128 of the 275 seats in parliament. Alternatively, authoritarian regimes have used public fear of Al-Qaeda and ‘terrorism’ as a means to repress and control the actions of opposition parties. Yet the Gallup World Poll also shows that only in a few of the countries polled did the majority support Sharia as the only source of legislation; it should be noted that Bangladesh was one of them. This complex situation requires nuanced analysis and presentation in the media.

By choosing to cover only the ensuing violence and not the wider movement in Bangladesh, Western news media risks complicity in providing a simplistic view, thus distorting Shahbagh’s true nature and its significance. Even as Bangladesh may be witnessing a new kind of uprising, those of us watching from the West are witnessing another case of journalistic negligence. Without sufficient context and explanation, a movement built around calls for the deaths of a group of men, coupled with a focus on reporting violence, may continue to feed the apocryphal narrative of Muslims as a bloodthirsty mob. In the context of Bangladesh’s political polarisation and broken justice system, where life sentences delivered today can be pardoned after the next election, the demand for justice through death engenders a much more complex debate than the simple narrative of vengeful mobs in the streets allows. The American Revolution, let us remember, wasn’t just the story of a mob angry about tea prices. And whatever Bangladeshis’ initial reasons for taking to the streets were, Shahbagh has morphed into a broader and far more significant movement, with larger geopolitical relevance requiring deeper media analysis.

Arguably, the Shahbagh movement, mobilised in part by a group of bloggers and online activists, owes much to other global uprisings such as the Occupy and Arab Spring protests. But Shahbagh has also set into motion something new. Over the last decade, Bangladesh has overcome the stereotype of a nation of constant poverty and flooding. It is now recognised as a Muslim-majority nation where the general public has demonstrated that citizen-driven social change is both possible and effective. Shahbag falls within this Bangladeshi continuum of social action, which includes some of the world’s most successful and original non-governmental organisations in the shape of BRAC and the Grameen Bank, as well as citizen-led movements such as Phulbari that have legally overturned damaging contracts with multinationals. While Shahbagh shares certain methods of mobilisation with its foreign cousins, it is still a uniquely Bangladeshi and secular phenomenon. In short, what is happening in Bangladesh is an open revolt against fundamentalism and to some extent against religion, in politics. If similar currents are to be encouraged elsewhere in the Muslim world, covering the Shahbagh protest should be a priority for the international media. So one can’t help but wonder, where are the Anderson Coopers and their global TV news networks, who devoted so much attention to Tahrir Square? Why is Shahbagh almost entirely absent from Western news coverage?