THIERRY DI COSTANZO

(UNIVERSJTt DE TECHNOLOGIE, UTT - TROYES, FRANCE)

PAST AND PRESENT PERCEPTIONS OF

angladesh, with his 55,126 square miles (148,000 square kms), is half the B size of . It is situated in the biggest delta in the world, a recent thirteen• thousand-year-old alluvial plain. Its main rivers are the , the Brahmapu• tra and Meghna - some of the biggest in the world. Blunt statistics portray Bangladesh as the eighth most populous country in the world with the highest rural density anywhere on earth. It is also one of the least prosperous performers in human development1 and one of the top corrupt nations in the world. For Westerners, Bangladesh rings with utmost misery. Very few in the media world manage to get away from the traditionally dominant tragic view on the country, one of cyclones and floods and ferry disasters and Islamic militants issuing fat• was on local modern feminist writers. The international community is worried about Islamic activists taking part in the new government in in the context of the 11 September major ter• ror attack on the US and the Afghan campaign. Some Bangladesh opposition parties together with some in the Indian and international media have accused Bangladesh of possibly harbouring pro-al-Qa-c idah terrorists that encourage local communalist violence.2 But Dhaka is not Qandahar and Bangladesh no Gujarat. Bangladesh is nearly 90 % Muslim, some kind of inverted mirror for pre• dominantly Hindu . Ten percent of the of this world live there. We must also bear in mind a rarely noticed fact which is that Bangladeshis are the first ethnic group in the Muslim world today outside Arabs, and the third Muslim nation on earth.3 Bangladesh is not situated in the heartland of like and was never on the traditional invasion route of medieval Mus-

1-874 people per sq.km; life expectancy, 64 years old; 968 women for a 1000 men; 70 kids out of 1000 die before aged 5; population increases by 1.48 per thousand a year; women have 2.9 children on average; nearly a quarter of the population lives in cities; death rate is 9 per thousand when the birth rate is 25 per thousand; only a third are literate. Library of Congress: http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/bdtoc.html Population Census provisional results 2001: http://www.nation-online.com/200108/24/n 1082401.htm#BODYl 1 2-Far Eastern Economic Review, 4 April 2002. http://www.feer.com/ "A Cocoon of Terror: Rising fundamentalism and religious intolerance are threatening secularism and moderate Is• lam". 3-C. Baxter, Bangladesh: From a Nation to a State, Westview Press, Boulder (Colorado), Harper Collins, 1997, p. 5-8, 151.

OM, XXIII n.s. (LXXXIV), I, 2004, p. 51-69 © lstituto per l'Orientc C. A. Nallino - Roma THIERRY DI COSTANZO lim armies. Bangladesh is peripheral, half-way between the extreme Muslim re• gion of the Malay world and the central Muslim Middle Eastern world. Mis• sionary re-Islamisation activities - through gatherings like Biswa ljtema on the Turag River north of Dhaka - organise the second largest religious pilgrimage after Mecca, each year. Bangladesh is definitely an important part of the Muslim and Islamic world. This nation is not very well known in Continental Europe although many immigrant Bangladeshis live in the E.U. - recently, young British nationals of Bangladeshi origin openly revolted against discriminations in UK society. In French the English word "Bangladeshi" is currently used but is not even attested by dictionaries.4 What is the reality of the Islamist threat on the politics of that country? What do we really know about Bangladesh's histoty and people in the West? What kind of political system does the countty really have? What has been Bangladesh's track record in the past thirty years? These are some of the questions we will try to answer here.

The Clash on the Origins ofBang/,adeshis The part of the delta constituting today's Bangladesh became independent in 1971. It is generally agreed that the region gained economic and demographic importance in the Middle Ages, that its population turned nominally Muslim in the 16th century. Bangladesh is part of a geographic and linguistic region called . 5 But , Buddhists, Tribals, Muslims, Westerners and others dis• agree on who Bangladeshis really are and when they really became what they are today. Who created Bengal, who made it glorious, who caused its decline and ruin is still strongly debated in the region.

Breadbasket Around the 13th century, Bengal gained a certain autonomy and a linguistic iden• tity. Was it thanks to Muslim rule or as a reaction to Muslim invasions? The de• bate is communal and raging. Pro-Pak nationalists used to support the Hindu

4-"Bangladais (e) (s}/bangladais (e) (s)" rather than "Bangladeshi" is a new word in French used in the press since the late eighties but then it is still unclear for most whether "Bang• ladais/Bangladeshi" and "Bengalais/Bengali" is the same or not ... Very often the word "Ban• gladesh• is misspelt as "Bengladesh • thus proving people mistake it for Bengal, a cultural• linguistic area spreading across its borders. In Italian (where is in use for "Bangladeshi" the word "Bengalino" or the non-binding expression "abitante del Bangladesh") there is a handful of books on Bangladesh about architecture of course, and Catholic missionaries! Out of less than 20 books on Bangladesh published in French, there are 7 books on Taslima Nasreen, 7 on sacred rivers and , a couple on politics or tourism, one on Islam and economics. 5-There have been many . Historic Bengal usually encompassed Bihar and Chota Nagpur. Geographic Bengal was mainly the deltas region. Muslim-populated Bengal was re• stricted to the three eastern colonial administrative divisions of historic Bengal. Linguistically Bengali spread across geographic Bengal but also had strong links with Oriya to the south-west and Assamese to the north-east. These rwo languages were the two important regional lan• guages of culture - more important than Bengali - until the British came.