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Time to wake up from stupor

Kazi Anwarul Masud
THE Washington-based Centre for Strategic and international Studies, before the 1/11 change in its Transnational Threat Update, stated: "The current security climate in Bangladesh may allow terrorist groups to organise attacks using a radiological dispersal device. Concerns over this possibility are plausible given that radio substance have proven accessible to tenor groups within the country." The recent arrests of militants from Pakistan and India, activists of banned Lashkar-e-Toiba, some of whom were educated in engineering in Bangladesh while recruiting prospective terrorists, confirm anew Eliza Griswold's report in the NewYork Times (January 2005), raising the possibility of Bangladesh giving birth to the next Islamist revolution. Travelling through Bangladesh, she concluded "The global war on tenor is aimed at making the rise of regimes like that of the Taliban impossible, in Bangladesh the trend could be going the other way." In Griswold's footsteps, Bertil Lin ter's article in the Far Eastern Economic Review (April 2002) warned of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh. Time magazine and the Asian Wall Street Journal alleged of sanctuaries being given to transnational Islamist elements.
In the eyes of Robert Kaplan, many in Bangladesh view it as a weakly governed state (The Atlantic-September 2009), surprisingly ignore David Held’s (of London School of Economics) assertion that we no longer live in a world of discrete national communities but in a world of "overlapping communities of fate." So the Muslims in Bangladesh do not constitute the majority community as they are surrounded by Hindu majority India and Buddhist majority Myanmar, and in the vicinity of non-Muslim South East and Far East Asian countries.
Militancy will not decrease in Bangladesh unless the primary education system is urgently addressed. Mainly due to poverty, coupled with Islamic fervour, people in general send their children to get educated at village madrasas. Since madrasa education is free, but does not carry much financial reward in a labour market demanding non-ecclesiastical skills, students graduating from madrasas are forced to become madrasa teachers or priests in mosques. Coming from impoverished families, they are forced back into poverty in a world racing for material advancement. This vicious cycle of poverty and deprivation find expression in anti-Western feelings, particularly in the aftermath of the decimation of Afghanistan and the illegal invasion of Iraq. Many madrasa students may find Osama bin
Laden as a hero. Understandably, the US Congress keeps itself informed of the madrasa education in South Asia. A report by the Congressional Research Service -"International Terrorism in South Asia" — states that among the approximately ten thousand madrasas in Pakistan, some have been implicated in teaching militant anti-western and anti-universal values.
The emergence of religious intolerance in Bangladesh, particularly during the BNP-Jamaat regime, should be seen in a global context If Muslims are to prove historian Bernard Lewis wrong, that "Islam was never prepared, either in theory or in practice, to accord full equality to those who held other forms of worship, and that the centuries old rivalry between Christianity and Islam is no less than a clash of civilisations - the perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the world wide expansion of both," then the Islamic world would have to abjure stoning and imprisoning of rape victims, public flogging, stoning and decapitation of criminal offenders. Globalisation is no longer a choice; it is a reality that all countries have to deal with.
In this game, the West has a decided advantage over the Muslim world, particularly the least developed among them. Countries like Bangladesh, suggests Dr. Biru Prakash Paul (The Daily Star, 15.11.09), should address modem trends and future needs in higher education to ensure quality in education. According to Cybermatrics Lab, Dhaka University has been ranked 4922
among 6000 universities in the world. Indian and Pakistani universities attend American job markets to select the best possible candidates, as do universities in France, Egypt. Singapore and China.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman (The Uneducated American, October 2009) wrote that if one had to explain US economic success in one word, it would be "education." In the 19th century, America led the way in universal basic education and as other nations followed suit, the "high school revolution" of the 20th century took the Western world to its height of prosperity, and the US continued to lead the world in higher education. Krugman is disappointed that due to the current economic meltdown, described by Josef Stiglitz as a tsunami shock to capitalism and free market as the collapse of the Berlin Wall had been to communism (stoutly refuted by his Columbia University colleague Jagadish Bhagawati), education, mainly the responsibility of state and local governments, has become a victim of austerity as in many other sectors of the economy. 55
It is possible that emerging economies -China and India - will lead in producing more engineers, doctors and scientists than the US and the West, and bring into question the technological superiority, claimed by some academics as one of the pillars, as to why the 21st century would continue to be the next American, and not Chinese, century.
Unless we wake up, our society will be irreversibly pulled down towards the labyrinth of underdevelopment and darkness
Kazi Anwa rul Masud is a form er Secre tary and a mbassador.
***Militancy will not decrease in Bangladesh unless the primary education system is urgently addressed.***