Mr Tickle
01-06-05, 08:50 PM
The Arab Assault On Our Culture
One vocation shall still be most noble and fair:Content I’ll be the braider of your golden hair.-“The Braider of Her Hair”
Will the poets of today and tomorrow be able to continue their ancestors’ love affair with the flowing tresses of the Bengali woman (or any other woman for that matter)? Not if the steadily encroaching Arab cultural imperialism does to us what it did to many others.
The Persians had a flourishing culture and resisted and thus have managed, even amidst the mullah-led revolution of 1979, to prevent their heritage from being subsumed by the invading Arabs. The Phoenicians of the Levant, Nubians of East Africa, and Amazigh (Berber, Kablye, and Touareg) of West Africa were not so lucky: their languages are largely forgotten, their people fully or partially Arabized, and their developing cultures stunted.
It is a pity of heartbreaking proportions to witness a Berber child in a remote Libyan hilltop village who cannot understand the fairy tales in the native language of his ailing grandmother.
In our land the process started in the 1960s with Field Marshal Ayub Khan and his self-hating quislings like Governor Monem Khan who reputedly said tauba (penance) every time he spoke in Bengali because it was supposedly not God’s chosen tongue. They banned Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore from the airwaves, started a multi-million dollar program to re-write Bengali in the Arabic script, and used the state publicity machinery to make a mockery of our ‘Hinduized’ customs.
A woman’s sari and teep were symbols of unIslamic behavior, we were lectured; what they meant was that such flourish and elegance was unacceptable to their nouveu riche cultural masters in the oil sheikhdoms dotting the Persian Gulf. We threw the Ayub-Monem circle out in 1971 and gave our culture some breathing space. Yet, that respite has been short-lived.
In the past, in the Levant and Africa the cultural genocide was effected with a sword under the guise of religion. Today in Bangladesh and elsewhere, as the religious mask of the Arab invader remains intact his sword has been replaced by his abundant cash. Through his subsidies to our political parties and their leaders, the Arab sheikh is trying his best to corrupt the top.
The results are already glaringly obvious; be it the nationalist Begum Khaleda Zia or secularist Hasina Wajed, both don the hijab on their heads and otherwise wrap up their saris in the weirdest contortions to look like abayas. The pattern thus set by the leading ladies of the Republic is parroted by the wives and daughters of cabinet ministers and business tycoons.
But the grab of cultural imperialism goes far beyond the top levels of society. The millions of our compatriots employed by the Saudis and their Gulf vassals are daily indoctrinated with subtle messages of Arab cultural superiority. Some carry this virus of indoctrination back home to their friends, family, and neighbors.
Many poor children in the hinterlands and metropolises alike find no avenue for education but the mushrooming madrassas and maktabs run by Wahhabi funded clerics who transmit their misogyny, hatred, and prejudice to a brand new generation that is growing up to despise the culture of its forefathers.
More and more mosques, including the National Mosque of Baitul Mukarram, have clergy trained under Arab auspices and full of derision for our native traditions, as is obvious every Friday in the sermons of the Baitul Mukarram mufti, Maulana Obaidul Huq. The effects of this frontal assault on our heritage are becoming more apparent every passing day.
Already we use the Arabized Allah Hafiz as opposed to the traditional Khuda Hafiz to bid adieu. The government publishes many of its documents in Bengali, English, and Arabic while the chief airport has a shiny new Arabic welcome sign. Female newscasters often cover their heads, public and private offices have significant numbers of people who like dressing in the unprofessionally flowing Arab garb, and the Bengali-hating daily Inquilab is one of the highest circulating journals in the capital. Even the customary seats of intellectual secularism are not safe anymore.
The shock-troops of this cultural war, the Islami Chhatra Shibir (Islamic Students Camp), have bared their teeth, and guns, on our universities. In loud voices they demand that women students be segregated and veiled, if allowed at all that is.
These young fascists physically attack secular organizations and nationalist programs at will and their preferred method of ‘Islamic’ punishment is to cut off the tendons of those who stand up to them. Rarely are they held to account. Why should they be? After all, the leaders of their parent outfit Jamaat-e-Islami sit in the cabinet.
This, then, is the face of our kulturkampf. We are under assault and the attacker has the initiative.
It is a pity. Once upon a time when the ancestors of our Arab brethren were selling slaves in the markets of Timbuktu, our progenitors were writing epics and composing hymns of love. When they were riding camels and herding goats through barren deserts, we were building flourishing cities like Mahasthangarh and Sonargaon.
Armed with the Holy Qur’an in one hand and the dollar in the other, these denizens of debauchery are now engaged in a war of attrition against twenty five centuries of rich culture. A culture is not lost overnight; rather, like liberty itself, culture is eroded slowly and surreptitiously because its guardians slumber on the watch not knowing what is happening.
Unless we want to go the way of the Phoenicians and the Amazigh, we do need to realize what is happening. Like the Persians, we have a well-developed language and literature able to withstand the assault longer. But ‘longer’ does not denote ‘forever’.
We need to fight back. We need to resist. We need to stand up to the gnawing tentacles of Arab cultural imperialism.
Or else some generation down the road will never know the poetry woven in the flowing locks of a beautiful woman.
http://bangladesh-web.com/view.php?hidDate=2004-02-14&hidType=HIG&hidRecord=0000000000000000001102
One vocation shall still be most noble and fair:Content I’ll be the braider of your golden hair.-“The Braider of Her Hair”
Will the poets of today and tomorrow be able to continue their ancestors’ love affair with the flowing tresses of the Bengali woman (or any other woman for that matter)? Not if the steadily encroaching Arab cultural imperialism does to us what it did to many others.
The Persians had a flourishing culture and resisted and thus have managed, even amidst the mullah-led revolution of 1979, to prevent their heritage from being subsumed by the invading Arabs. The Phoenicians of the Levant, Nubians of East Africa, and Amazigh (Berber, Kablye, and Touareg) of West Africa were not so lucky: their languages are largely forgotten, their people fully or partially Arabized, and their developing cultures stunted.
It is a pity of heartbreaking proportions to witness a Berber child in a remote Libyan hilltop village who cannot understand the fairy tales in the native language of his ailing grandmother.
In our land the process started in the 1960s with Field Marshal Ayub Khan and his self-hating quislings like Governor Monem Khan who reputedly said tauba (penance) every time he spoke in Bengali because it was supposedly not God’s chosen tongue. They banned Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore from the airwaves, started a multi-million dollar program to re-write Bengali in the Arabic script, and used the state publicity machinery to make a mockery of our ‘Hinduized’ customs.
A woman’s sari and teep were symbols of unIslamic behavior, we were lectured; what they meant was that such flourish and elegance was unacceptable to their nouveu riche cultural masters in the oil sheikhdoms dotting the Persian Gulf. We threw the Ayub-Monem circle out in 1971 and gave our culture some breathing space. Yet, that respite has been short-lived.
In the past, in the Levant and Africa the cultural genocide was effected with a sword under the guise of religion. Today in Bangladesh and elsewhere, as the religious mask of the Arab invader remains intact his sword has been replaced by his abundant cash. Through his subsidies to our political parties and their leaders, the Arab sheikh is trying his best to corrupt the top.
The results are already glaringly obvious; be it the nationalist Begum Khaleda Zia or secularist Hasina Wajed, both don the hijab on their heads and otherwise wrap up their saris in the weirdest contortions to look like abayas. The pattern thus set by the leading ladies of the Republic is parroted by the wives and daughters of cabinet ministers and business tycoons.
But the grab of cultural imperialism goes far beyond the top levels of society. The millions of our compatriots employed by the Saudis and their Gulf vassals are daily indoctrinated with subtle messages of Arab cultural superiority. Some carry this virus of indoctrination back home to their friends, family, and neighbors.
Many poor children in the hinterlands and metropolises alike find no avenue for education but the mushrooming madrassas and maktabs run by Wahhabi funded clerics who transmit their misogyny, hatred, and prejudice to a brand new generation that is growing up to despise the culture of its forefathers.
More and more mosques, including the National Mosque of Baitul Mukarram, have clergy trained under Arab auspices and full of derision for our native traditions, as is obvious every Friday in the sermons of the Baitul Mukarram mufti, Maulana Obaidul Huq. The effects of this frontal assault on our heritage are becoming more apparent every passing day.
Already we use the Arabized Allah Hafiz as opposed to the traditional Khuda Hafiz to bid adieu. The government publishes many of its documents in Bengali, English, and Arabic while the chief airport has a shiny new Arabic welcome sign. Female newscasters often cover their heads, public and private offices have significant numbers of people who like dressing in the unprofessionally flowing Arab garb, and the Bengali-hating daily Inquilab is one of the highest circulating journals in the capital. Even the customary seats of intellectual secularism are not safe anymore.
The shock-troops of this cultural war, the Islami Chhatra Shibir (Islamic Students Camp), have bared their teeth, and guns, on our universities. In loud voices they demand that women students be segregated and veiled, if allowed at all that is.
These young fascists physically attack secular organizations and nationalist programs at will and their preferred method of ‘Islamic’ punishment is to cut off the tendons of those who stand up to them. Rarely are they held to account. Why should they be? After all, the leaders of their parent outfit Jamaat-e-Islami sit in the cabinet.
This, then, is the face of our kulturkampf. We are under assault and the attacker has the initiative.
It is a pity. Once upon a time when the ancestors of our Arab brethren were selling slaves in the markets of Timbuktu, our progenitors were writing epics and composing hymns of love. When they were riding camels and herding goats through barren deserts, we were building flourishing cities like Mahasthangarh and Sonargaon.
Armed with the Holy Qur’an in one hand and the dollar in the other, these denizens of debauchery are now engaged in a war of attrition against twenty five centuries of rich culture. A culture is not lost overnight; rather, like liberty itself, culture is eroded slowly and surreptitiously because its guardians slumber on the watch not knowing what is happening.
Unless we want to go the way of the Phoenicians and the Amazigh, we do need to realize what is happening. Like the Persians, we have a well-developed language and literature able to withstand the assault longer. But ‘longer’ does not denote ‘forever’.
We need to fight back. We need to resist. We need to stand up to the gnawing tentacles of Arab cultural imperialism.
Or else some generation down the road will never know the poetry woven in the flowing locks of a beautiful woman.
http://bangladesh-web.com/view.php?hidDate=2004-02-14&hidType=HIG&hidRecord=0000000000000000001102