Norman Kenneth Swazo. Holocaust & Genocide Studies. Volume 32, Issue 2, Fall 2018.
Everywhere I found officers and men fashioning imaginative garments of justification from the fabric of their own prejudices.
—Anthony Mascarenhas, “Genocide,” June 1971
It seems in modern times that the post-colonial history of Muslim societies has been over-determined by violence in the name of religion.
— Salim Mansur, “Genocide and Justice in Bangladesh”
“Genocide” in Bangladesh, 1971
Nearly half a century ago, Pakistan experienced a civil war. What was then the military government of General Yahya Khan, whose power drew primarily on West Pakistan, responded with violence to territorially and culturally different East Pakistan’s demand for self-governance following elections that gave the Bengalis a majority of seats (160 out of 300) in the federal parliament. Following unsuccessful negotiations to grant minor concessions while preserving western control, in March 1971 the dismayed Punjabi elite launched “Operation Searchlight,” the bloody but ineffective incursion into East Pakistan that descended into civil war (from the West Pakistani perspective), or a war of national liberation (from the East Pakistani perspective), caused millions of civilian deaths, triggered a massive flight of Hindu refugees to India, and, eventually, resulted in the establishment of the new state of Bangladesh. The Mukti Bahini, a union of indigenous “freedom fighters,” fought a widespread guerilla war. India supported East Pakistan in its bid for independence, reflecting interests that were in part a “humanitarian” response to the massive refugee crisis on its border, but that also reflected its desire to weaken Pakistan and make the latter’s former eastern half a dependent neighbor. India’s military intervention was crucial to the cessation of war, East Pakistan’s declaration of independence, and the establishment of the new nation-state on December 16, 1971.
Of course, the historical context of what transpired in 1971 includes the communal slaughters and population exchanges that ensued upon Pakistan’s separation from India in 1947. William Dalrymple writes, “By 1948, as the great migration drew to a close, more than fifteen million people had been uprooted, and between one and two million were dead. The comparison with the death camps is not so far-fetched as it may seem. Partition is central to modern identity in the Indian subcontinent, as the Holocaust is to identity among Jews, branded painfully onto the regional consciousness by memories of almost unimaginable violence.” Dalrymple endorses the Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal’s characterization of Partition as “the central historical event in twentieth-century South Asia”; for her, Partition was “a defining moment that is neither beginning nor end” and “continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present and future.”
On June 13, 1971 a reporter named Anthony Mascarenhas published an article in the British newspaper The Sunday Times alleging a war of “genocide.” This report startled the conscience of many, contributing to Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s decision to intervene. Both sides committed atrocities that amounted to war crimes or crimes against humanity. But it was with regard to West Pakistan’s military actions that Mascarenhas and soon others popularized the conclusion that the Pakistani state was guilty of genocide.
Committed to a united Islamic republic, West Pakistan indubitably included elements of ethnic cleansing in its plans. Mascarenhas quoted military officers who acknowledged that “we are determined to cleanse East Pakistan once and for all of the threat of secession, even if it means killing two million people and ruling the province as a colony for thirty years.” Bengali Hindus (around ten percent of the population of 75 million) were a special target, but no one was to be spared during the military’s “pogrom.” Even the killing of Muslim Bengalis had cultural roots: “the [West Pakistan] army [was] dominated by the Punjabis, who traditionally despise and dislike the Bengalis,” Mascarenhas reported—hence their crimes against humanity under the cover of military action. I argue that their genocide is rooted in both the general cultural background of the peoples involved, and in the religious sentiments expressed in support of a united Pakistan qua “Islamic” republic. As Wardatul Akram opines, “The West Pakistanis wanted to purify the Muslim Bengalis in East Pakistan by making them abandon Bengali cultural traits, especially those which resembled Hindu cultural traits.” Akram adds, “The ideology to destroy the Bengali nation was that they were descendants of aboriginal Indian tribes.” Columnist and broadcaster Tarek Fatah adds that “the root of the problem lay with one group of Muslims feeling they were racially superior to their victims, who also happened to be Muslim.” As Fatah elaborates the point, “in the first twenty-five years of the country’s history, the racist depiction of the darker-skinned Bengalis as an inferior and incapable people became the unquestioned dogma among the ruling minority. The darker-skinned Bengalis’ culture was portrayed as un-Islamic and influenced by Hinduism. Their music, cuisine and attire were mocked, and their language banned, leading to widespread protests and deaths in 1952.”
During the war local “paramilitary” collaborators (the Al Shams, the Muslim League, and the Al Badr unit of the Jamaat-e-Islami political party) fought alongside the invading army in support of continued governance from West Pakistan (thus their local moniker, “Razakars,” traitors), and participated in crimes against fellow Bengalis both Hindu and Muslim. Salim Mansur recently observed that “Islamic solidarity, then as now, meant support for the architects of genocide, not for the victims.”
The charge of genocide remains a matter of “polarized narratives” in the national politics of Bangladesh. Writing in April 2016, David Bergman commented, “There is no question that there were many atrocities, including rape, deportation and massacres of civilians, carried out by the Pakistani Army, aided at times by pro-Pakistani militias…. There is an academic consensus that this campaign of violence, particularly against the Hindu population, was a genocide.” For others even acknowledging that it is a debate trivializes the matter. M.H. Khan of the Canadian Committee for Human Rights and Democracy in Bangladesh writes that contestations about numbers minimize the sacrifices of those who fought for independence. Indeed, the point of the indictment for genocide concerns the intentions of the government, not the numbers (whether 300,000, 1 million, or 3 million), especially if one is to avoid the questionable epistemological “claim that not enough empirical evidence is available to justify an unequivocal position on the reality of the genocide.” And this is not to mention alleged “grotesque caricatures of history” in Pakistani education that make it “impossible for Pakistan’s youth to understand 1971.” Thus, avoiding “scientism” on the one hand and gross caricature on the other, one can concur with Gary Bass, who has rightly characterized what happened as one of the “cardinal moral challenges” of recent times, a major chapter in “the dark annals of modern cruelty.”
The current Bangladesh government has claimed three million deaths. It has initiated prosecutions of individuals on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, seeking penalties up to death. Prosecution is based on an International Crimes (Tribunal) Act passed in 1973 and amended in 2010. According to Fatah, the murder of a million Muslims by fellow Muslims amounted to “an orgy of hate that defied the teachings of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, whose religious authority was being invoked by the Pakistan army.” Bangladeshis are less open about the widespread rape of women and girls during the war, reported to have numbered around 200,000. Vindictively employed by the Pakistani forces (if observed on the separatist side too) rapes seem to have embodied “punishment” of the “rebels,” the expression of ethnic contempt (Punjabi soldiers boasted they were “improving” the Bengali stock), and sheer opportunistic exploitation of a lawless situation.
Others, citing the uniqueness of the Nazi genocide of Jews in World War II, and accounting for the legal definition of genocide in international law, question the validity of the conceptual characterization of events of 1971, especially if these conduce to (a) a strident “nationalist mythology” that is not validated by reliable historiography; (b) a heightened emotional perception that reflects a “narcissism of victimhood”; and (c) “narratives of vengeance” that contribute to a sustained recalcitrance among ruling parties in the face of calls for forgiveness and reconciliation. Some even compare what happened in Bangladesh to other sociopolitical “disasters” experienced by Muslims, e.g. the Palestinian “catastrophe” (nakba), or others. But these experiences have not (for the most part) been denominated genocides by scholars of genocide or Islam per se.
International observers claim that recent trials have been conducted without due process, not to mention the apparent collusion between judges and prosecutors. Thus, the tribunal’s “first decision to execute a defendant―Abdul Quader Molla―was condemned by the UK, the US, the EU, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch,” as well as by the International Commission of Jurists, the International Bar Association, and the International Center for Transitional Justice. To external observers, justice has been deformed because “no international court can impose” the death penalty; no international jurists serve as judges; no foreign counsel is permitted the defendants; there are no constitutional protections for defendants; there are “no rules of admissibility of evidence”; and there are no “basic guarantees required by international human rights treaties.” Further, official justice has been tarnished by “a form of lynch law” or “victor’s justice” that has amnestied former freedom fighters (“sons of the soil”) who committed similar crimes (e.g. against the Bihari minority). Current “political antipathy” toward Islamists colors relations between the dominant political parties and the judiciary.
All these shortcomings notwithstanding, there is general agreement about the “unrequited horrors” that were “undoubtedly crimes against humanity” in 1971, and about giving the people an accounting for crimes that “brook no … statutes of limitations.” Still, as Talma Ahmad, chair of the membership committee of the Muslim Council of Britain, opines, the execution of Motiur Rahman Nizami, head of the Jamaat-e-Islami party and “the most high-profile person convicted of war crimes,” does not bode well for the country’s future. This view may prove correct as an empirical prediction, given Islamist militant terrorism in the country since 2009.
Efforts by the current government to outlaw “denial” of the genocide and to prosecute surviving perpetrators reflect in large part the commitment of the ruling Awami League to nationalism, social democracy, and secularism. Bergman characterizes the Awami League’s motivation thus: “To the government of the Awami League, the party that originally spearheaded the campaign for independence, the genocide of three million Bengalis is a foundational element of the struggle for national liberation…. The three million figure is totemic, which is one reason that in February [2016], the Bangladesh Law Commission opened consultation on a draft law called the Liberation War Denial Crimes Act. Recently approved by the cabinet, though not yet in force, this legislation uses the precedent of the Holocaust denial laws enacted in Europe after World War II.” There is thus in Bangladesh a principled commitment to the claim of genocide rather than to mere large-scale massacres and atrocities of civil war. The judicial authority has ruled that, “the issue of ‘death figure in 1971’ involves a highest sacrosanct emotion of the nation”; this is not to be contested as a matter of empirical fact, and those who do so are subject to indictment for contempt of court and “insulting religious sentiments.” For purposes of the present argument, the narrative of genocide (conditionally construed) is accepted. In any case, the claim of genocide is not the point at issue in the philosophical question posed here, even if it constitutes the contextual occasion.
Precisely in such matters lies the crux of the consideration that follows: How can Bangladeshi Muslims rationally sustain Islamic belief, given that Pakistani and pro-Pakistani Muslims employed that very belief―including fatwas issued by compliant clerics―to justify mass crimes by defining all who fought against their united Islamic republic “infidels,” “heretics,” “apostates,” or “blasphemers”—including women and children? I argue that the actual history of the war, a critique of two schools of Islamic theodicy (the branch of theology addressing the question of why God permits evil in the world), and literary insights render Bangladeshis’ continued Islamic belief “unreasonable.”
Engaging the Problem of Evil in Islamic Theology
The Nazi genocide of the Jews left many Jews and Christians alike suffering a crisis of faith. In the face of that experience, it was argued, it would be unreasonable for a Jew or a Christian to believe in the God of the Covenant. This God (as melekh ha’olam, “Master of the universe”) who would not, did not, or could not preserve the lives of all who perished in “the Holocaust”—but who, it is argued, should have preserved those lives—cannot be a god whose existence (if he exists, indeed) compels Jewish and Christian belief in “revelation,” and thus piety and love. So conclude many who have sought to work out the implications of the genocide (we need not reprise the arguments here).
This “paradigmatic” genocide implies questions about belief in “God” that would arise after any other genocide, including the case of Bangladesh. Many apply the terms “unique” and “unprecedented” to the Holocaust; “Jews in particular are likely to insist on them,” Richard L. Rubenstein and John K. Roth point out, “along with an emphasis on the particularistic nature of the Nazi genocide, which specifically targeted Jews for total extermination simply because they were Jews. Such emphases have validity because they reflect the fact that the Holocaust was a boundary-crossing event: one of those moments in history which changes everything (including the way we see the past), even if the substance and direction of the change take time to dawn on human consciousness.” Accepting this claim may imply that other genocides are not “unique” or “unprecedented” (which does not mean they are not recognized as genocides). Other “boundary-crossing events” qualify as genocide, if not everyone agrees on each case: the Armenian Genocide, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and others. One narrative of events in Bangladesh makes them a “forgotten” genocide.
A unique feature of the Bangladesh genocide is that it occurred in a sociocultural context of Islamic belief. One may ask why Bangladesh would constitute itself a secular state but establish Islam as its state religion. And one might well wonder how the country’s very history from the end of British rule and up to the establishment of Bangladesh as a nation-state came to center on a genocide perpetrated by Pakistan, itself born of its Muslim faith following independence and separation from Hindu India in 1947. Jamal Hasan opines that what happened in 1971 “inculcated a serious message on the belief system on a number of God-fearing Bengalis. The cruelty inflicted on a hapless population was so immense that many of the traditional believers became disillusioned with the religion of Islam.” A few, Hasan, observed, became zealous critics of Islam. The fact that this group was in the minority and that most Bengali Muslims retained their faith does not make their disillusionment any less significant.
Why then did so many Muslims refuse, despite the incomprehensibility of what had transpired, to abandon their belief in “Allah” as a merciful, provident God? How much of the strength of their faith reflected the “Sufi-inspired syncretic” Islam forged in Bangladesh (to paraphrase Salil Tripathi), versus a fervent Islam grounded in Sunni (whether Hanafi or Hanbali) or Shi’ite jurisprudential approaches? Hasan observes that in 1971 almost all of the Islamist parties sided with Pakistan’s Yahya government, and either tolerated or participated in its abuses and war crimes. He asserts that up to and during the war some Bengalis simply accepted “the opium of Pakistani = Islam”—and after the war most felt better with some Islam (even if Pakistani-style) than with none, whatever the apparent “theological” or “existential” contradictions recent experience entailed. Yet, to understand Bengali Muslim perceptions of Islamic identity, the task is to “find” that identity in the local cultural milieu rather than to “define” it (as Asim Roy puts it) according to some prefigured dogma.
Or did nation-building and Bengali solidarity have less to do with religion and more to do with culture and Bengali language, elements that anteceded the introduction of Islam? Geoffrey Robertson, among others, has observed that “Bengali Muslims and Hindus alike shared a culture based first and foremost on their Bengali language, and had common traditions … despised in the increasingly Islamised West Pakistan.” With the birth of “Bengali nationalism” in 1952, when Bengalis rejected West Pakistan’s efforts to replace their language with Urdu (under the slogan, “one language, one nation”), Bengali solidarity found its strength not primarily in religious identity. Bhardwaj has argued, “culture and society in Bengal evolved with a set of syncretic values that emphasized religious inclusion,” a “longstanding tolerance” that permitted a “meeting of Islamic and indigenous cultures.” In consequence, “Islam has been so finely woven in the Bengali fabric that it is almost impossible to determine where one thread coming from local beliefs, and another from Islamic belief, begins and ends. This helped to create a unique Bengali Muslim identity different from other Islamic cultures.” It is indeed this syncretism that contributed to the West Pakistani perception (or proclaimed perception) of East Bengalis as “impure” Muslims, more Hindu than Muhammedan.
Punjabis’ anti-Hindu inclinations need not necessarily have moved Bengali Muslims to question their common faith, at least if they accepted the argument that West Pakistan’s intention was the slaughter of Bengali Hindus. That notwithstanding, the historical record is clear: the “highly organized killing after partition [i.e. in 1947] etched a deep scar into the collective memory of Punjabi Muslims that remained long after most of their assailants had departed for India.” In 1971 the Pakistan army consisted largely of Punjabi Muslims whose “folk memory” equated all Hindus with the murderers of their families. Those who were also unfavorably disposed toward their Bengali co-religionists could find support in the Qur’anic injunction, “Those who have kinship by blood are closer to one another in The Book of God than the believers who are not kindred” (Qur’an 33:6). And yet, elsewhere the Qur’an (49:8−13) stresses that “the noblest” among men in the sight of Allah are those who are “the most God-fearing,” or, in other words, that kinship is secondary.
From the vantage point of pro-Pakistani Bengali Muslims, whatever happened to the Bengali Hindus was of little religious consequence: 1970’s Bhola cyclone had washed away hundreds of thousands of lives too, but seems not to have moved Muslims to question their faith.
The question here concerns the rational sustainability of Muslim belief in Allah, even as the same epistemological question arose for Jewish belief in God after the Nazi genocide, the “paradigm” of mass murder. Rubenstein and Roth have commented on the point:
[The Holocaust] was not the result of sporadic, random violence carried out by hooligans. Driven by a zealous antisemitism, which seemed totally rational to those who used it as a springboard to power, the Holocaust was a state-sponsored program of population elimination; a destruction process that could successfully target the Jews only because it received cooperation from every sector of German society. Why was this permitted to happen? That question indicts men and women, but since they did not begin history by themselves, the issue becomes a religious one as well. What or who started history is a question without a definitive answer…. Over time many of a person’s responses to religious questions and to questions about God in particular will change both in substance and in certitude. Others will stay remarkably the same in spite of traumatic events that create massive dissonance between what was believed before and what could possibly be accepted after.
And so, was the genocide of Bengali Muslims by other Muslims “a traumatic event”? Surely it was, something historians have amply documented. And contemporary politics demonstrates the same in today’s efforts to hold surviving perpetrators to account before war crimes tribunals. Did events engender dissonance between what the Bengali Muslims had previously believed and what they were ready to accept thereafter? One may answer in the affirmative―and yet, by and large Bangladeshis’ “response to religious questions and to questions about God in particular” has weathered the challenge.
Rubenstein and Roth remark, “The Holocaust certainly qualifies as a watershed event. A typical reaction is to feel that Auschwitz seriously impugns the credibility of many, if not all, the claims about God that Jews or Christians have usually made. Indeed the Holocaust appears to call the very existence of God into serious doubt, if it does not make God’s nonexistence perfectly clear.” If this is so for Judaism and Christianity, each taken as a repository of truth derived from revelation, is this not so also for Islam, which receives (according to its adherents) truth derived from revelation? (Islam indeed links itself to Jewish and Christian “people of The Book,” recognizing earlier revelation despite its own claim to embody the “final revelation”).
Rubenstein and Roth have formulated the obvious intellectual challenge: “Theologians and philosophers who wish to defend Jewish or Christian views about God have always had a formidable task to show that God is not buried beneath history’s debris. Few who encounter the Holocaust with seriousness would deny that Auschwitz makes their interpretive efforts more problematic than does any other reality.” By the same token, those who are committed to Islamic theology and Islamic philosophy, and who wish to defend Islamic belief in and about Allah (in the sense of His omnibenevolence, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence)—face the same obvious intellectual challenge consequent to the Bangladesh genocide. This is all the more so if we consider the Bangladesh genocide as a watershed event in the history of Islamic faith, a watershed eliciting individual Muslims’ indignation before a supposedly beneficent and merciful Allah.
One can take here the example of Rubenstein, who, as a Jewish theologian, “attacked belief in the God of history, the notions of covenant and election, the hallowed texts of Jewish tradition, and the scandal of theodicy” by his argument that “to posit a just and omnipotent God covenanted to Israel and active in its affairs could only mean that God justly willed the murder of six million Jewish people.” Muslims account Allah the God of history, a God promising the election of believing Muslims to Paradise. Islamic systematic theology’s notions of divine foreknowledge and the predetermination of individual and collective fates (kalâm) beckon the believer to a theodicy capable of accepting the Bangladesh genocide as consistent with divine suzerainty over the world. Hence, one reading the Qur’an will find any number of passages attesting to divine foreknowledge and divine decree (e.g. Qur’an 6:59, 64:8−11). The same is taught in the Islamic tradition (ahaadith), for instance Sahih Bukhari 8:77:606, as narrated by Abu Huraira: Allah has already written each person’s fate so that nothing happens except “by way of fore ordainment.” In short, Islam cannot avoid the problem of theodicy—unless Muslims adopt “the view that the problem [of evil] is too high for human reason, and that the very discussion of it transgresses human limits and affronts God,” an attitude, according to Eric Linn Ormsby, that has “played an important part in the Islamic debate.”
Ormsby, George Hourani, and others have engaged this question ably and systematically. There is a history of Islamic contestation on the subject. Mu‘tazilite theology, grounded in a concept of divine justice (‘adl), held that Allah “does no wrong nor does He choose it, nor does He fail to fulfill what is obligatory upon Him, and all His acts are good.” It was debated whether God’s obligations were restricted to religious matters and thus did not extend to worldly affairs. One can cite in this vein Bishr ibn al-Mu‘tamir of the Baghdad school: “It is not obligatory for God to do the best of things for man; indeed, this is absurd because there is no end and no term to the beneficence which God can perform [the doctrine of Allah’s limitless omnipotence (maqdūrāt Allāh)]. He is obliged to do for men only what is best for them in their religion.” Hence, given that things, events, persons, etcetera, are objectively good or evil; and given the human power to discern the difference between good and evil acts; the Mu‘tazilites imposed upon any who would question divine providence (‘ināyah) the task of discovering “the ‘rational aspect’ beneath every circumstance and event,” thereafter to arrive at trust in God (tawakkul) rather than to abandon their faith. Some Islamic scholars would locate this “rational aspect” in “the notion of evil as a necessary concomitant of a greater good”: the world as we experience it cannot, in its totality, be improved upon―the limitless omnipotence of Allah notwithstanding. In Mu‘tazilite ethical rationalism, Allah “knows all good and evil,” “wishes and commands only good for men,” yet “allows them to do evil and to disobey His commands.” Because humans have the “power to act as well as to know values,” they are “responsible” for their acts both just and unjust. (Hourani notes that these claims draw upon both pre-Islamic and Islamic sources.) For purposes of the present discussion, then, one Islamic approach to theodicy offers Muslims in post-1971 Bangladesh a deeply-grounded rationale for not questioning the benevolence or omnipotence of Allah—and thus not questioning their inherited faith.
An alternative Ash‘arite interpretation maintains that “God can wish good or evil for men, according to His unrestricted will and power,” and that humans “can know values only by revelation directly, or by reasoning dependent on the data of revelation, but never by any process of reason independent of revelation.” This school also maintains that “God has power over all man’s choices and acts, and ultimately predestines their direction by giving or withholding His grace.” Accordingly, “Whatever God decides is just, because He decides it as the Lord and not because it conforms with standards of ‘justice’ thought out by human reason.” Such is the dispute between the Mu‘tazilite rationalism (man must choose) and Ash‘arite “subjectivist” (man depends on God’s unfathomable will) theology. Either school can be made conformable with continued faith after genocide.
Of concern to us here, of course, is the nature of moral evil in relation to divine providence (al-‘ināya) and governance of human affairs. Hourani rightly states the intellectual dilemma:
The special form of the problem of evil in Islam concerns divine justice and injustice. God’s justice is on the surface inconsistent with His creation of men who would do injustice and then suffer for it. To be more exact, He could not be just in any familiar sense if (a) man suffers for his unjust acts, yet (b) God is Himself the ultimate cause of all man’s acts. For in that case God would be making man suffer for acts for which man was not ultimately responsible.
Whatever one may say about any human participation in acts of evil, the basic question remains: “Does God cause human injustice?” One then may also ask very specifically, “Did Allah cause the human injustice of the Bangladesh genocide of 1971?”
The philosopher Ibn Rushd accounted for this problem, recognizing that “choice (al-ikhtiyār) is a condition of human obligation.” He also recognizes that “since we are certainly under obligation we must therefore have choice” even as ( 1) “God creates all acts”; and ( 2) “God’s determination of our wills penetrates … into the internal background of our acts of willing.” And so the problem remains: It is assumed that the cause of some greater good is achieved by the presence of those who do evil—“some men must be evil and [some must] suffer for the good of the whole.” As G. Legenhausen puts it, the claim is that “the evil which exists in the world cannot be prevented, not even by an omnipotent being, except at the expense of some important good.” In the case of the Bangladesh genocide, then, the assumption is that such acts, as evil acts, cannot be prevented (and therefore were not prevented), given that to prevent these evil acts would be to lose some other important good, which, seemingly, only Allah knows.
For all Muslims, the sharī‘a mandates the legal categories of what is (1) obligatory conduct; (2) permissible and recommended conduct; (3) permissible but not recommended conduct; or (4) forbidden conduct. These four categories undergird all Islamic jurisprudence (usûl al-fiqh); the positive law of divine commands implies the settlement of questions of theology (kalām), in particular “the determination of good and evil (at-tahsîn wa’t-taqbīh)” and the dispensation of Allah’s justice. A Muslim is to perform his or her deeds according to the sharī‘a, whether undertaken through his or her own understanding or through appeal to authority.
The individual Muslim may or may not appreciate the moral dilemmas involved as s/he undertakes specific actions, including those that are called for in war. To hold any individual accountable for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, or for genocide, however, is to assert “the assumption that it is morally wrong to permit avoidable evil.” War criminals are accountable for their crimes precisely because it was morally wrong for them to commit avoidable evil (according to any doctrine of military necessity, and consistent with all extant laws of armed conflict and international rules of engagement). By parity of reason then, if Allah is an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent being, it should be morally wrong for Allah to permit genocide, precisely because such an evil is avoidable, and hence was avoidable in 1971.
Here one opens up the philosophical disputation to the equivocal conception of justice being engaged—that of (a) human perception and will; and that of (b) the divine intellect and will. The Ash‘ari position (in contrast to the Mu‘tazilite) is that Allah, as “author of the moral law” is “not subject to it.” Put differently, “God may judge human beings as damned or saved by their adherence to the moral law, but this does not mean that the law applies to Him.” Indeed, one might hold here that, “God is also good because He upholds human morality … by promising punishment for the violation of moral principles and reward for those who are morally good”―which implies the Ash‘ari contention is that “it is not wrong for God to permit avoidable evil.”
In the case of the 1971 Bangladesh genocide, then, Ash‘ari theodicy permits a Bengali to assert that it was not wrong for Allah to permit an avoidable evil (avoidable inasmuch as such acts are contrary to the conventions governing the conduct of war). The argument is that Allah’s determination of human acts remains “compatible” with a claim of individual “moral responsibility,” in which case Pakistani soldiers engaged in war crimes are reasonably accountable for their failure of moral responsibility, even if Allah has determined their acts severally and jointly. The point is, that Bengali Muslims could turn to yet another school of Islamic theodicy that offered a weighty rationale for not questioning the benevolence or omnipotence of Allah in the wake of the genocide of 1971.
Of course, in the modernizing Bangladesh of the 1970s, such rationales could not go uncontested, and many rejected them for outlooks that orthodox Muslims might characterize as blasphemy, apostasy, or heresy.
Literature and the Problem of Evil
Sometimes mind-boggling events are more easily recounted by way of historical fiction than in historical or political literature. The novelist may more easily engage any number of issues having moral valence. Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim presents the post-liberation story of a woman named Maya who serves as a women’s doctor in a village named Rajshahi. Returning later to her home in Dhaka, Maya soon realizes that “it was a mistake … to think she could come home and everything would be as it was before”: she had her own sense of the postwar task of nation-building in 1972. Yesterday’s revolutionaries supposedly felt themselves “exempt from all social conventions”―a kind of intellectual stance that embraced Marxist political philosophy, and hence rejected religious culture. Maya, correspondingly, found herself estranged from her brother Sohail, who declared that after the war they would “have to behave like citizens, rather than rebels.” Although once a revolutionary in the cause of independence, and although deeply affected by the atrocities of war, Sohail surrenders the rhetoric of his university days for the “path to tranquility” that he has found in Islam: his salve for the pains of war. To Maya, who still seeks to cure physical disease, this is an irrational transformation: there was a time when Sohail believed that the Qur’an “was part of the problem…. Because people were attached to The Book, or their idea of The Book, more than to each other, or to their neighbors, or to their country.” Brother and sister had called themselves revolutionaries, considering themselves above religion and believing that “faith was a consolation for simpler, lower minds.” Sohail “had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty.”
Sohail’s faith-related transformation steals Maya’s brother―the intellectual and rebel she once knew―and delivers in return a stranger concerned rather with the afterlife than with this life. From his new vantage point, one does not urge upon the “wounded souls” self-examination or the admission of one’s own culpability. Some thirteen years after independence Maya faces a country once “quick to anger, quick to self-destruct,” but now seemingly “ready to forget, ready to forgive.” Like Sohail, Bangladeshis can now turn to prayer, even prayer “not for anything” in particular: prayer, after all, “is the abandonment of all other thoughts, all other pursuits,” and that includes any effort to make sense of the genocide. “It doesn’t matter what brings us to God,” Sohail clarifies for Maya, “it only matters that it does”—in which case, the good of the war, despite the experiences denominated as evils, lies in the fact that it brings many back, or anew, to “The Book.” Not so for Maya: “How can you accept the cure without considering the disease?” she asks. Maya asserts her own diagnosis: Islamic belief is the disease, Islam lies at the source of what transpired, and therefore it by no means offers a rational response to the recent evil. Yes, Sohail concedes, much evil was done the Bengalis “in the name of God.” But for him it would be a “mistake” to conclude that belief in Islam is bad or irrational “because it was usurped for evil ends.” Sohail has faced the absurd, and “needs to wrap [his mind] around a certainty, a path”: this is what The Book can do today for the living, whatever the evils done to the millions dead or wounded in the past.
Citing the prophet Abraham, who was also “a seeker of knowledge,” Sohail reminds Maya that this quest was not the salient point, but rather that for Abraham “knowledge was woven to the will of God,” in other words “second … to his deference to the will of God.” One can be devoted to one’s life in the present, to one’s loved ones, to one’s worldly affairs; but the true test of one’s devotion appears only in surrender to the will of God, and to the divine truth that always lies beyond our comprehension. Consequently the incomprehensible compels belief … and hope. For Sohail, it is incomprehensible that one would choose not to believe.
This argument does not lead to a Muslim version of Pascal’s Wager (essentially, that behaving as if God exists risks the loss of pleasure and ease in only one lifetime, but behaving as if He does not exist risks the loss of eternal bliss). Nor does it represent a counter-argument against those who believe that Allah’s existence is rendered doubtful or false by the injustice manifested in war. Rather, it leads the Sohails to acceptance of the incomprehensible as the Bangladeshi condition sine qua non. Whatever a practicing Bangladeshi Muslim may find incomprehensible about the Bangladesh genocide, remains at the same time cause for belief in divine providence. The war of liberation, crimes of war, the genocide itself, even the fact that this or that freedom fighter killed innocent non-combatants “in the name of Allah” (Bismillah)—none of this matters to traumatized people seeking such a ready salve as that which Islam provides. A Bangladeshi Muslim’s faith in the afterlife, his or her trust in the recompense that awaits there “Allah kareem” (from a merciful God), suffices for this day and the next, and all the days that follow, for injuries irreparable in this life. Such is Sohail’s position.
All of this notwithstanding, the fact remains that most Bangladeshis reject any “Islamization” of their national identity. The long history of Bengali culture provided the main element in Bangladeshi solidarity, despite the religious affiliations of individual Bengali Muslims, despite the syncretic Sufi ethos and Hanafi legal interpretations of religious practice, and despite the assimilation of Hindu influences. Many ordinary Bangladeshis have taken “a stand for their secular culture against the intimidation and intense pressure of Muslim fundamentalists.” Bhardwaj speaks of “contesting identities” in Bangladesh: proponents of secularism continue to engage those committed to Islamic fundamentalism, in particular fundamentalism intent on revising the traditional South Asian syncretism in favor of Middle Eastern “Salafist” ideology. He observes that Islam “alone was not sufficient to forge a cohesive national identity” such as West Pakistan desired in 1971; hence, there is an ongoing contestation within today’s Bangladesh about an appropriate vision of the nation’s future.
Current political efforts toward marginalizing or even banning the Jamaat-e-Islami reflect the Awami League’s efforts to curb those who would turn Bangladesh into simply another Islamic republic―another Pakistan. Tacitly if not explicitly, the secularist appeal seeks to counter efforts to shift Bangladesh from the traditional Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence to Hanbali forms of belief and practice dominant in the Middle East, a shift portending even more of the fundamentalist Salafist influences that one may see behind extrajudicial, sharī‘ah-based criminal and civil decision-making in many madrasahs and villages today. Presently the highly uncertain “battle of ideas” in Bangladesh includes a trajectory of violence against non-Muslims and “free thinkers.” As national politics and grass-roots religion coincide and collide in the evolution of Bangladeshi identity, the fact of the genocide perpetrated by Muslim upon Muslim in 1971 matters little to the Bangladeshis qua Muslims. These concern themselves little with the “contradictions” real or apparent between Islamic belief and the fact of genocide—so long as individuals trust in divine providence. Despite acts and events that (if subject to interrogation) may seem incomprehensible for such people, submission (islam) to Allah remains paramount.
In the end, one is tempted to conclude that for most Bangladeshi Muslims facing their country’s history of genocide, Islamic belief remains “rational.” The various ways in which Muslim theodicy is articulated and defended, the widespread willingness to surrender to divine providence, acceptance of the idea that much in this life is incomprehensible, and Bangladeshi Muslims’ hopes for a better afterlife all contribute to the widespread easy acceptance of the idea of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God. Without this practical rationality, belief in eternal values would be challenged to survive. This practical rationality underlies in part the contemporary contestation between Bangladeshi Muslims and Bangladeshi secularists, and hence the consequent uncertainty about individual and national identity, secular and religious.
The foregoing analysis includes what are clearly “theoretical” and “existential” dimensions of one Islamic context’s engagement with the problem of absolute evil: The former includes the perceived logical “coherence” of Islamic belief; the latter includes resolutions of the contradiction (i.e. between earthly evil and a benevolent God) that combined both sentiment and reason, and that may reflect and influence one’s “lived experience” as a confessant Bangladeshi Muslim. Comparisons of Islamic engagement with the Bangladesh genocide to the postwar engagement of Jews and Christians with the Nazi genocide permit a reconsideration of theodicy in general. The Islamic theoretical dimension draws upon contrasting positions articulated in Islamic tradition, notably in both Mu‘tazilite and Ash‘ari arguments on theodicy. The existential dimension appears in the empirical fact of continuing belief among Bangladeshi Muslims, satisfied as they are with their liberation and post-1971 nation-building.
But it also is presented in the literary narrative of Tahmima Anam. This narrative symbolically represents a contestation of “revelation” and “reason,” with one resolution proceeding in the direction of Islamic belief (that of the brother Sohail) and consistent with Islamic theodicy; another resolution proceeding toward rejection of Islam (that of the sister Maya) and consistent with a secular and gendered conception of justice emanating from the critical mind of a “liberated” woman. For Maya, as an emerging feminist, both dominant Islamic theodicies represent unacceptable answers to the profound challenge of human suffering—especially with reference to the systematic rape of Bengali women as a constituent part of the genocide.
Sohail represents a renewed commitment to Islamic orthodoxy after the war. For Muslims like Sohail, Maya signifies either an unfortunate or blameworthy turn to error (heresy, blasphemy, or apostasy). One commits to the primacy of the afterlife, to the promise of Paradise; the other to the primacy of the historical, political present. Maya is convinced that belief such as Sohail’s requires one to accept the exchange of “present suffering” for “reward in Paradise.” Maya’s radical critique equates to the observation “that God was thus not doing what was best” during the genocide of 1971. For former “intellectuals” such as Sohail and for ordinary Sunni Muslims, “the ways of God [Allah] are inscrutable”; for them it is better in the setting of post-Liberation Bangladesh to avoid interrogating belief―whether theoretically or existentially. For Maya and others like her, rational theology and rational theodicy―so grounded in Bengali material circumstances and so uncritically appropriated―do not withstand her tests of lived experience (certainly not the experience of Bengali women). For these intellectuals, feminists, and many ordinary women neither Islamic theology nor Islamic theodicy resolves the existential dimension of the contradiction of prevalent evil in a world supposedly governed by an omnibenevolent Allah.
Beyond this, Maya intuits (and Sohail does not) another fundamental problem: how the critically-minded respond to the disasters of contemporary life matters to them in a way that it may not to those who assume “a fated destiny.” The viewpoint of the latter accords more consistently with Islamic classical doctrine, but most assuredly does not accord with a modernist (and particularly secular) rationality. Montgomery Watt reminds us of “the fatalism of the nomadic Arab” that suffuses Islamic belief. Such is Sohail’s fatalistic resignation. He finds vindication in the revival of his faith―his wartime experiences notwithstanding. For him, the fact of Bangladesh’s liberation is sufficient evidence of Allah’s deliverance; it is sufficient evidence too that Allah calls Bangladeshi Muslims to patience (sabr) and trust (tawakkul).
For Sohail, one can remain a committed Muslim within the new nation and within the new nationalism. The traditional Islamic wisdom (e.g. Qur’an 2:153) clearly justifies his stance: “When standing before that in which one does not find meaning, one must be patient, for it has meaning such as Allah surely knows and which Allah may or may not disclose to human understanding” (Qur’an 2:216). This accords with Ash‘ari theodicy: “There is neither good nor evil on earth, save what [Allah] wills…. Things exist by [Allah’s] will…. Not a single person has the capacity to do anything until [Allah] causes him to act…. We are not independent of [Allah] nor can we pass beyond the range of [Allah’s] knowledge.” From the beginning, and therefore in the end, humanity needs to defer to the All-Wise, to ‘Al-Hakīm.
By contrast, Maya’s interpretive attitude cannot accept this Ash‘ari view. Her view is perhaps the expression of Anam’s pragmatic wisdom. Both espouse the right of contemporary Bangladeshi women not to be silenced. Maya cannot accept the piety that submits, come what may, to the will of Allah (or of men who appoint themselves to speak for Allah). Maya must voice what others account “unspeakable.” Allah’s justice should be impugned in the face of Maya’s experience with the evils perpetrated against Muslim and Hindu women during the war. A Pakistani officer sees his deed as merely “sullying” his hands, although he has in fact committed a crime against the humanity of women; Maya’s mother understands that Maya would not―could not, as many Bengali women could not―come through this experience of mass rape and genocide “with her world intact.” Maya insists that the unspeakable must be spoken if liberation is to be more than merely political: true liberation demands liberation of the Bangladeshi mind from the dogma of Islamic belief.
The juxtaposition―the antagonism―of Sohail and Maya points unavoidably to the differing experiences of Bangladeshi men and women, and therefore to differing resolutions of the contradiction between worldly evil and divine omnipotence. Anam points to the inescapable claims of gendered experience in any thoroughgoing judicial assessment of genocide. Women’s experience, even if “unspeakable,” must influence any human conception of justice—whatever the prevailing Muslim theodicy. Here one may join to Anam’s historical fiction the actual personal histories mobilized in historian and peace studies professor Yasmin Saikia’s provocative work. Saikia “prioritizes women’s narratives as the primary vehicle for reconstructing … forgotten history,” even though Saikia herself notes that “language is not always sufficient” to the memories of horror. Saikia reminds us that for the survivors “the oppression is unending,” and that too many women continue to experience the silent suffering of indignity and the feeling of national betrayal (in a male-dominated nation where Muslim society treats women’s experiences as “unspeakable”).
As does Anam, Saikia reminds us that the war of liberation was “a gender[ed] war.” Both Anam’s belletristic history and Saikia’s documentary history enable a balanced narrative about the Bangladesh genocide, a narrative long strategically suppressed by the patriarchal powers. Bina D’Costa charges that “in post-conflict Bangladesh, there has been a notable lack of systematic records that could help scholars and practitioners to understand and discover history grounded in women’s perspectives and experiences.” The “unspeakable” that befell women during the genocide has remained, for Saikia, “an archive of silence.” The historiography remains deficient relative to conflicts “that led to rampant violence against women”; women’s voices have been “actively silenced,” their experiences and memories “rendered invisible in the official history.”
The present discussion cannot extend to commentary on Saikia’s research. Yet, we must underscore here the momentous silence on the issue in previous interrogations of Islamic theodicy. Anam and Saikia call for a new, rational interrogation of the evidence; for enabling women to speak differently from men about 1971; and for the assertion of a human justice brave enough to indict Allah’s justice for the latter’s inability to indict crimes against humanity committed “in the name of” Islam.
If, as Saikia urges, “we need to move beyond the individual and investigate larger institutions such as the state and the ideology of nationalism that drove the war and used it to aggrandize power,” then inevitably we must interrogate religion—Islam in particular—as an institution (and belief-system) that was “used systematically by different groups during the war.” Accordingly, as Gita Saghal has argued, “intent to destroy a community may be determined by military orders, but fatwas and other religiously backed declarations which treat infidels and apostates as legitimate targets are also relevant. They need much more examination in genocide studies.” This is the case for the Bangladesh genocide.
Anam insists that we must continue “to tell stories,” including the hidden and unspoken truths now disclosed mostly by historians and journalists. She speaks much as Rubenstein did. The voices behind the stories of the Bangladesh genocide, often from out of the silence, argue that after such events, it is difficult—if not impossible—to justify belief in Allah, and that therefore that belief is to be accounted a questionable, even dishonest, rational post-genocide commitment.