Introduction
In Muslim communities in contemporary South Asia and other Muslim-majority areas, informal religious lesson circles are proliferating rapidly as mass higher education brings more Muslims under the umbrella of standardized, nationalized education systems. These study circles often revolve around the study of compendia of Qur'anic commentary or exegesis, hadith (written records of sayings and acts attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) such as the thirteenth-century Riyad al-Salihin, as well as Qur'anic commentaries and theological texts produced by authoritative traditional religious scholars, contemporary or recent.Footnote 1
While some scholars have discussed contemporary commentaries on the Qur'an and their authors, fewer have focused on the users of these commentaries and of other Islamic literature, or on the specifics of audience engagement with these texts.Footnote 2 Thus, for instance, while the works of Sayyid Qutb (which are central to the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading Islamic movement in the Middle East and North Africa) have been analysed by several scholars,Footnote 3 some important questions are left unanswered: How are Qutb's ideas explained to adherents on the ground? What styles of discourse are employed in lesson circles? Which ideas are emphasized and which marginalized, and what kinds of techniques are used to do so? Do lesson circles actually shape how individual members feel, think, express themselves, and act? If so, how, and to what extent? Which groups are reading which texts or selections from texts?Footnote 4
As some scholars have noted, many contemporary Islamic activists are not recipients of traditional religious education. Rather, they are studying, or have studied, the sciences and humanities in nonreligious public schools and universities.Footnote 5 What, then, are the specific processes whereby such activists become familiar with Islamic texts and learn to view their own experiences and duties in the light of this religious literature? How, in turn, do they view this literature through the prism of their experiences?
I will outline answers to some of the foregoing questions in the context of a particular women's Islamist student organization in Bangladesh, BICSa (Bangladesh Islamic Chatri Sangstha, i.e., Bangladesh Female Students' Islamic Association). This group actively harnesses Qur'anic verses to re-cultivate young, educated Bangladeshi Muslim women as activists committed to the task of Islamizing self, community and state. By focusing on this process, I will show that such Islamist lesson circles can be a key site for the production of a particular form of Islamic subjectivity. In fact, I will argue that lesson circles play a central role in the sustenance and expansion of Islamic movements in Bangladesh. They do so by helping reshape activists' conceptions of self, religious duty and others through a rhetoric that deploys specific notions of religiosity and religious identity, culture, state, the global Muslim community or ummah, and the current world order.
It is often in lesson circles that a lay-educated Bangladeshi trained in nominally secular public schools first engages the contents of the BICSa movement's message, especially notions of pristine Muslimhood and those interpretations of Qur'anic and hadith teachings privileged by the organization. Yet, as I will also show, a lesson circle not only manufactures consent but also generates, authorizes and equips dissent from the same body of belief.
Lesson Circles, Education and Print: The BICSa Setting
BICSa lesson circles, especially those centred around tafsir (Qur'anic exegesis), are designed to attract recruits to the organization, deepen the knowledge and enhance the faith of the active members BICSa calls ‘workers’, and train workers in the art of disseminating Islamic knowledge.Footnote 6 BICSa lesson circles are part of a range of practices identified by some scholars as increasingly constitutive of ‘public Islam’Footnote 7 and are enabled, in part, by the advent of mass higher education and media technologies. A growing body of scholarship exists on the ways in which these related phenomena are shaping Muslim understanding, expressions and practices of religiosity within and across class, national and gender boundaries.Footnote 8 While some scholars emphasize how media technologies facilitate fragmentation of religious authority in the life-world of Muslim-majority societies, others highlight their disciplinary and centripetal effects.Footnote 9 Particularly useful ways of thinking about contemporary Islamic movements in the Middle East and elsewhere have been suggested by recent path-breaking inquiries into the forms of religious discourse and discipline supporting the effort to embody orthodox Islamic ‘moral–ethical virtues’ in the Islamic revival in Egypt.Footnote 10 Charles Hirschkind (2001), in his analysis of the emergent Islamic public sphere in contemporary Egypt, which is grounded in an early twentieth century reformulation of the classical Islamic notion of da'wah (summoning others to live in accordance with divine prescriptions), has argued that this particular form of Islamic public sociality is neither singularly hegemonic, as liberal theorists have conventionally understood religious socialization, nor simply argumentative. Rather, it is a practice-oriented realm—where deliberation amid participants, facilitated by the wide circulation of sermons on tape cassette and unfolding against a background of shared moral sensibilities, is integral to the cultivation of an everyday, embodied subjection to orthodox Islamic norms.
Transposing this type of phenomenological and discursive analysis (which attends centrally to the religious discussions and practices of Islamic actors and their emergent publics) to Bangladesh, I will describe a BICSa lesson circle as a site where Islamic reformist socialization and contestation of certain Islamic revivalist paradigms unfold simultaneously and interdependently.
While Bangladesh is the third-largest Muslim-majority country in the world today, it shares little in terms of language or national/local culture with North Africa and the Middle East, which have been the focus of so much scholarship on the contemporary Islamic revival. This paper is therefore an attempt at moving Bangladesh, and with it the larger region of South Asia, where BICSa's parent organization Jamaate Islami wields an increasingly powerful Islamist presence, from the margins towards the centre of the ever-expanding scholarship on Islamic revivalist or reformist movements.
The scope of this essay differs from that of Hirschkind's work. I take a microscopic view of a particular set of practices, in contrast to the stunningly panoramic view Hirschkind provides of an Islamic public sphere. I focus my analysis on a central site of ideological persuasion within BICSa, the leading Islamic revivalist group for young, educated Bangladeshi women. In so doing, I investigate one aspect (albeit an important one) of the intimate discursive domain of a segment of the emergent Islamic public sphere in Bangladesh. In this domain, the study group, men and women either directly or indirectly affiliated with one or more Islamic organizations or informal groups loosely formed around independent preachersFootnote 11 form the core of the Islamic public sphere and provide that sphere with much of its texture, and vitality.
Furthermore, my analytical framework differs from Hirschkind's, which is oriented around an inquiry into those modalities whereby orthodox Islamic virtues produce ‘the ethical conditions for a domain of public deliberation’ (2001: 4). My emphasis is on the particular ways in which BICSa strategically deploys a dialogic mode towards the end of manufacturing consent about what constitutes the content ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ (iman) and how it does so. I am especially interested in the extent to which BICSa is able to realize this objective, for deliberation within the women's Islamic activist sphere of BICSa, much like argumentation within the Egyptian Islamic public sphere Hirschkind describes, is not a goal in itself: BICSa does not aim at producing Islamic intellectuals, at the diversification of Islamic thought, or at promoting independent reasoning. It does urge activists to convince others of the Islamic authenticity and merits of BICSa's project of moral–political transformation by means inclusive of ‘rational’ or ‘logical’ argumentation, but argument and rationality are only means to the end. In the BICSa microcosm centred on learning and training to morally–politically fashion oneself and others, discussion is intended as a mere modality for facilitating the formation of a scripted Islamic pious-revivalist personhood and public. If BICSa believed that song and dance would be more effective at making good Muslim women than rationalistic discussion, it would employ them instead.
There are significant differences between the particular ideological–cultural setting I consider and the loosely organized Islamic movements for piety investigated in the pioneering works of Hirschkind and Saba Mahmood. First, BICSa is a religious and social organization with an elaborate, hierarchical administrative structure, detailed regulations governing participation, and a political project, namely, to enable the Islamist party Jamaate Islami (JI) Bangladesh—BICSa's parent organization—to secure state power through democratic means. In BICSa's view, an Islamic state would crucially bolster from above the Islamization which this group and others presently push from below through extending dawat (invitation to Islamize one's life; Ar. da'wah) to women, especially educated youth, and through educational-training programmes for recruits.Footnote 12
Second, for many BICSa activists, the texts comprising the formal BICSa syllabus (determined by JI) are the sole source of substantive religious knowledge. This syllabus centres on texts by leading JI thinkers on a variety of Islamic doctrines and movement imperatives, especially those by Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903–1979), the founder of Jamaate Islami in colonial India and one of the most influential Islamists of the twentieth century. BICSa women therefore do not possess the kind of dexterity in traditional religious reasoning or familiarity with diverse Islamic texts demonstrated by some of the people described in Hirschkind and Mahmood's studies. While BICSa encourages its members, especially relatively advanced members, to read Islamic texts beyond the organizational syllabus, most BICSa women have little knowledge of Arabic, Persian or Urdu, the three languages in which the most definitive orthodox and reformist Islamic texts have been produced. Besides some Qur'anic commentaries and hadith collections, most BICSa women have practical access only to those few authoritative Islamic texts available in Bangla translation (primarily from Urdu).Footnote 13
Third, reinforcing the foregoing point about BICSa women's limited sources of religious discursive expertise, women's access to and participation in the religious public sphere is even more limited in contemporary South Asia, including Bangladesh, than in many Middle Eastern and North African countries, including Egypt. Many BICSa activists (often recruited in their mid-teens) have little exposure to substantive religious discussion prior to joining BICSa. While weekly religious discussions by traditional religious experts are broadcast on the state-regulated radio and television channels, these are not widely watched by youth.
Fourth, since BICSa is a student organization by definition, most BICSa members are required to be students, whereas many participants in pietistic Islamic movements are adults and some have little formal education.Footnote 14 Occasional temporary exceptions are made for BICSa leaders who have completed their educational careers but whose services are considered indispensable to the organization. Between schoolwork, familial commitments and BICSa's demands on one's time, it is hard for the average BICSa activist to find the time to participate in any other forum for acquiring religious knowledge, even if she wants to.
These factors can combine to significantly limit the breadth of Islamic knowledge and viewpoints that activists bring to BICSa meetings, lesson circles and training programmes as compared to some participants in traditionalist, pietist movements. Finally, many BICSa activists who participate in lesson circles, particularly those conducted in urban areas by senior BICSa leaders, are not beginners but mid-level activists who have already demonstrated notable leadership ability, dedication to the practice of religious virtues, and commitment to BICSa's moral–political project. The highly methodical, formal–ideological character of the BICSa community and the limited scope for significant diversification in religious knowledge are important in shaping the deliberative space inscribed in a typical BICSa lesson circle. Also significant is the historical opening a movement such as BICSa creates for lay-educated women in Bangladesh to acquire some authoritative knowledge of Qur'anic verses, exegesis, hadith and modes of Islamist explanation and argumentation, and to do so amid other supportive women and in relatively egalitarian settings such as those of lesson circles.
Yet it is important to point to the commonalities between Islamist projects in Bangladesh and the Sunni-Salafi movement in Egypt, whose members aspire to embody a range of orthodox Islamic moral–ethical virtues as described by Hirschkind and Mahmood. As articulated repeatedly and enacted daily in a variety of ways by participants from both movements, central objectives are learning to purify the self and secure a pious social surrounding in total and spontaneous submission to divine edicts and in keeping with the traditional Islamic duties of da'wah and ‘enjoining good and forbidding evil’.
Background Islamic Knowledge
Some Qur'anic commentary or exegesis is part of the background knowledge of many Muslims in Muslim-majority societies.Footnote 15 In Bangladesh (as in many other Muslim countries), the primary site at which this knowledge is gained is the madrasa or traditional religious school, where jurisprudence studies (fiqh) and commentaries on the Qur'an and ahadith are the core of the curriculum. An important secondary site is the modern pubic school, where Islam is one among the many subjects taught within a set national curriculum in first through tenth grade.Footnote 16 While this subject is not generally considered important, since it has little bearing on educational or career success, it is taught as part of the state's effort to produce morally upright subjects with a basic knowledge of the religion of 88% of Bangladeshis. Parents are thus relieved of some of the responsibility for religious education. Friday sermons at the mosque, popular public preaching (waaz mahfil), and a few weekly religious programs on radio and television are tertiary sites for the production of generalized public religious knowledge.
One reason for the effectiveness of Qur'anic lesson circles, I suggest, is that these creatively exploit the ‘background’ or ‘informal’ Islamic knowledge to which many Bangladeshis are exposed. Qur'anic lesson circles build and elaborate on the kind of Qur'anic exegesis and the modern and rigorously classificatory or compartmentalized style of religious discourse introduced early on, albeit sketchily, in the non-religious public schools that most students from the relatively well-to-do families in Bangladesh attend.
The Structure of a Qur'anic Lesson Circle
The lesson circle (qoraner pat chakra) is one of the two basic styles of pedagogy that BICSa employs to confer Qur'anic knowledge. The Qur'anic lesson circle—other varieties include the ‘book lesson circle’ and ‘topic-based lesson circle’—often lasts 2 h or more, allowing for a relatively detailed exploration of Qur'anic verses (pre-assigned for study at the end of the previous meeting) in the light of exegetical texts, usually Mawdudi's exegetical work Tafheemul Qur'an. In the course of such a circle, individuals are prompted by a group leader to discuss different assigned verses. Each person's micro-presentation or commentary may be followed by discussion. The overall result is a round-table conversation, formal in tone and interspersed with questions, answers and comments.
A Qur'anic lesson circle is supposed to emphasize practical examples over theoretical discussions and citations from the Qur'an and ahadith. As a BICSa leader explained to a group participating in a Qur'anic lesson circle for the first time, ‘The main purpose of a group meeting is to transform theoretical Islamic knowledge into practical knowledge so that we can use this knowledge constantly in molding ourselves (atyagatan) and in drawing others to the movement and molding them well as future Islamic workers (karmigatan).’Footnote 17 In the course of a lesson circle, references are made primarily to texts by Mawdudi and secondarily to those by other leading Jamaat thinkers. Top-level Jamaat leaders in Bangladesh such as Golam Azam and Matiyur Rahman Nizami are also occasionally cited as authorities. These leaders sometimes deliver lectures and conduct lesson circles for members of the highest cadre in BICSa. These members, called sadasyas, are considered sufficiently qualified to oversee group meetings and lesson circles.
Group Study of Surah as-Saff
The Qur'anic verses preassigned for the meeting I am about to describe are among the most widely studied in BICSa, namely, verses 1–4 and 10–13 of a Surah (a chapter in the Qur'an) named as-Saff. I have also chosen to describe this particular lesson circle because the themes extracted from these verses in the circle relate to three key concepts of BICSa's discursive regime. Most BICSa training programmes and the micro-technologies that constitute them—the ‘lesson’, ‘lesson circle’, ‘report preservation’ and supererogatory prayers—are oriented around the conceptual triad of ‘belief’ (iman), ‘hypocrisy’ (monafeqi) and ‘struggle in the path of Allah’ (jihaad fii sabiilillah). Below, I describe how these key concepts, particularly ‘belief’ and ‘hypocrisy’, are explained and discussed in a Qur'anic framework and are harnessed to the task of reforming oneself and others as subjects of an Islamic ideology. This details how the practice of lesson circles within the Islamist movement in Bangladesh embodies a conceptual domain that is simultaneously deliberative and disciplinary.Footnote 18
The organizational context for the meeting I am about to describe is as follows: In the capital city Dhaka, where BICSa is strongest and where I conducted most of my field research, lesson circles are often led by senior BICSa leaders who usually occupy the highest administrative positions and therefore spend much time in the organization's headquarters or central office. The meeting concerned took place in a room in this office in Dhaka, which was simply furnished with a bed, a wardrobe, a desk and chair, and a valet stand for headscarves and borkha overcoats. The presence of the bed and wardrobe is explained by the fact that senior activists must occasionally work late at the office and so find it convenient occasionally to spend the night there. It is also used by activists from outside Dhaka who use the office as a temporary home till they can find more permanent housing in overcrowded dormitories. Following occasional episodes of especially violent conflict involving dominant, leftist–nationalist student groups and the Bangladesh Islami Chatra Shibir—BICSa's male counterpart, the openly political student wing of the Islamist party Jamaate Islami—BICSa women who fear violent retaliation from opposite groups on college and university campuses use the office as a temporary abode till tensions subside.
On the hot, hazy afternoon of 24 March 2003, I was in this room with Nabila, the lesson circle leader or moderator, waiting for the other seven participants to arrive. Since a group meeting is often 2–3 h long, it must begin early enough in the afternoon so that participants can reach home before dusk, at which time parents begin to worry for their daughters' safety. Participants whose classes continue beyond noon must therefore come directly from school. Some of these women may grab a quick bite if they reach the office before the meeting (the office also has a kitchen). Resident women cook several times a week, so there is always some cooked food in the refrigerator, but meeting participants must go hungry if they arrive at the office too late to eat. BICSa women sometimes joke among themselves that almost every activist they know suffers from ‘gastric’, an unpleasant stomach condition that can result from going without food for long hours. On the day in question, Nabila herself had arrived hungry from her part-time job as a schoolteacher. She did not eat even as we waited, eager to begin the meeting as soon as most of the participants arrived so that she could let them go home before dusk. All study-circle attendees are junior in rank to the moderator and most are younger as well, so often the moderator feels responsible for the well-being of the women in her group and develops a relationship of affection and concern towards them.
Participants trickled in, eight all told. All but Nabila sat in a tight semicircle on the bed. She sat on a chair close to and facing the bed, at the focus of the semicircle. The room was small. Whenever a participant had to leave the room, she would have to unceremoniously climb over the side of the bed closer to the door. The room had a ceiling fan, but it was old and worked only at a high speed. Since two of the participants were suffering from colds the group agreed to make do without the fan even though it was hot in the room and some activists were visibly sweating. The room had two windows, but both were curtained heavily to stop anybody from seeing in from the windows and rooftops of the buildings that closely surround the BICSa offices. These are located in the middle- and lower-middle-class neighbourhood of small grocery stores, departmental stores, bookstores, and dilapidated apartment and office buildings. The larger of the room's two windows was usually kept closed anyway during meetings to keep out the noise of the neighbourhood, with its narrow streets full of rickshaws ringing their bells in frustration, scooters beeping and occasional cars honking. The smaller window was often left slightly ajar, but on that day loud English-language pop music—the Backstreet Boys—was beating against the side of the building, so both windows were fully closed.
Most of the women, however, seemed not to mind the room's growing stuffiness. Nabila gave the activists a grace period of about half an hour after the scheduled start of the meeting to give latecomers a chance to arrive. This was a concession to the packed nature of an average female activist's daily schedule.
Nabila is a petite, slender woman no more than 5 feet tall, but used to talking to audiences. She began with a ritual invocation of the name of God (basmalah), invocations of blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad (darud shareef), and thanks to God for enabling the participants to gather for the meeting. She then chose a member, Bilkis, to recite the assigned Qur'anic verses (Surah as-Saff: 1–4, 10–13) from memory in the original Arabic. Bilkis did so. Once the various aspects of her recitation had been diligently critiqued—fluidity of recitation, correct or incorrect joining of the last letter of a particular word to the first letter of the next, pronunciation of individual letters—Nabila asked another member, Nargis, to read out the Bangla translation of the same verses from Mawdudi's Tafheemul Qur'an (Tafheem for short). Nargis was then asked to discuss, according to the standard order of points, the ‘naming’ (namkaran) of the surah, the context of its revelation (naziler sthankal or, more traditionally, shaane nuzul), and its gist or ‘subject matter’ (mool bishaybastu). Bilkis was also requested to discuss each verse in the set in a numerical order. Having attended numerous ‘worker meetings’ designed for initiates, to which the study of Qur'anic exegesis is central, lesson circle participants who are relatively advanced are well familiar with these discursive categories (e.g., ‘naming’ and ‘context for revelation’), which are also commonly found in modern Qur'anic exegetical works such as Tafheemul Qur'an. Below, let us follow the activists' and the group's handling of these categories in order.
Significance of Discussion of Naming and Context of Surah
In study circles, discussion of the naming of a Surah and of the place, time and socio-historical context of its revelation (i.e., whether during the Prophet Muhammad's stay in Makka or Madina and prevailing circumstances) establishes continuity with the authoritative style of Mawdudi's exegesis. More traditional forms of Qur'anic exegesis tend to ignore historical and socio-political contexts and application to personal life and to focus instead on the philological aspects of the text and its underlying values, which are understood as eternal, impervious to time and place.Footnote 19 In BICSa's Mawdudi-derived style of exegesis, an emphasis on the ‘sociopolitical context’ of the revelation (shaane nuzul) of a particular set of verses enables BICSa to privilege certain verses by drawing analogies between events experienced by the Prophet with his companions and by contemporary Islamic activists. BICSa thus legitimizes the narrative frame it uses to interpret current events and its strategies for coping with these events. The eternal nature of Qur'anic guidance, especially as embodied in its numerous verses concerning the struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, is reaffirmed but in such a way as to establish its relevance to the flux of history, a way which increases the plausibility of the Islamist project. Moreover, only certain sections of certain Qur'anic chapters (surahs) are included in the BICSa syllabus, a selectiveness that implicitly passes a distinctly human set of judgments on the relevance of various scriptures for the present time. However, few BICSa activists would acknowledge this selectiveness.Footnote 20
Discussion of Subject Matter
Nargis described the subject matter of the two groups of verses, drawing on Tafheem, as follows:
Verses 1 through 4 describe the greatness of Allah. These also mention a particular quality found among the believers that Allah dislikes and the kind of dedication Allah favors. Verses 10 through 13 state that the only way to success both in this world and in the hereafter is to have sincere belief in Allah and in His Prophet, and to wage jihad in the cause of Allah through sacrificing life and property. The obedient will be rewarded in the Hereafter with paradise, and in this world with Allah's help and victory.
These remarks were followed by an extended discussion in which Nabila asked one member after another to discuss a single verse or sometimes two verses.Footnote 21 The explanation of each verse offered by the chosen participant—based on Tafheem, other Qur'anic verses, ahadith, and practical examples—was followed by supplementary or critical comments by other participants, including the moderator. At the end of the discussion of each verse, Nabila would prompt individual activists for questions and then close with responses to questions raised and comments offered.
Belief (Iman)
BICSa activists discussing Qur'anic verses in lesson circles engage enthusiastically in exegesis in the light of concerns of both individual activists and the Islamic movement as a whole, especially the task of morally reforming one's self and the way Islam is understood and practiced in Bangladesh today. This is nowhere more evident than in BICSa discussions of ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ (iman) and what it means to declare that one is a Muslim, that is, that one ‘believes in Islam’ and that one's deen (religion) is Islam. Among the verses of Surah as-Saff discussed at this meeting, the tenth and eleventh comprised one of the two sets to address the issue of iman most directly.
(10) O you who have attained to faith! Shall I point to you a bargain that will save you from grievous suffering [in this world and in the life to come]? (11) You are to believe in God and His Apostle, and to strive hard in God's cause with your possessions and your lives: this is for your own good—if you but knew it!Footnote 22
At moderator Nabila's prompting, it fell to an activist named Reena to talk about this particular verse. As is common in BICSa Qur'anic lesson circles, Reena did so by discussing successively and systematically three terms she felt were central to the verse: ‘the faithful’ or ‘believers’ (imandargan), ‘bargain’ or ‘trade’ (babshya), and ‘suffering’ or ‘punishment’. As a characteristic of such lesson circles, she drew substantially on Mawdudi's interpretation of the verse. In this particular case, however, Mawdudi focuses only on the concept of ‘bargain’ or ‘trade’. In her elaborations of the ideas of ‘belief’ and ‘punishment’ based on sub-texts from earlier BICSa lessons and from required readings of various booklets that comprise the BICSa syllabus, Reena therefore adds significantly to Mawdudi's narrative. This is not uncommon among advanced activists such as Reena.
Reena often used rhetorical questioning to emphasize and clarify her points, liven the presentation, focus the attention of the audience, gain time to collect her own thoughts, and link her presentation to the style of popular preaching (waaz) used by traditional religious authorities, thus claiming greater legitimacy for BICSa's way of engaging with the Qur'an:
So, who is being addressed in this verse? The believing people. Who are the believers? Those who believe. But what does it really mean to believe? Does it mean that we simply whisper the kalimah [the fundamental short declaration of faith in the Arabic language] in the ears of an infant and she grows up thinking that she is a Muslim because her parents are Muslims? This is conventional (gatanugatik) belief. True belief (khanti iman) does demand that we formally articulate our belief but mere utterance is only the first requirement of faith and does not exhaust the meaning of faith in any way. Having declared the kalimah, one must realize its meaning in practice. One's entire life must revolve around this kalimah, the affirmation of one's belief in God and in the messenger of God, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him. This is the real significance of the kalimah. Only then can one be a true believer. Such true faith shapes a person's life in a very distinct way. This is the kind of believer Allah is addressing in this verse.
In this speech, Reena performs several definite ideological actions. First, she distinguishes between form and content. While reciting the kalimah in the ears of a newborn or by oneself is indeed correct in customary form, living up to the content or realizing the meaning of the kalimah in practice is as important, or more.
Second, she critiques mainstream Islam in present-day Bangladesh for its emphasis on ritual form and what she perceives as its negligence of content. Scriptural content, properly internalized, marks every aspect of a person indelibly. While BICSa pays considerable attention to the obligatory rituals central to the orthodox Islamic tradition—including the obligatory five daily prayers (namaz or salat), fasting during the month of Ramadan (roza or sawm), charity (zakat) and pilgrimage to Makkah (hajj)—it insists that in order to reap their true benefits to the fullest, one must embody belief at every moment and in every aspect of one's life. Conducting the prescribed rituals is important both in itself and because it prepares one to abide by God's wishes in areas of life beyond the contexts of specific rituals. In BICSa's cosmology, in accordance with Mawdudi's thought, means and ends are intricately intertwined and equally significant. Since the importance of the means (that is, ritual) is commonly recognized in mainstream Bangladeshi culture, BICSa, in a compensatory balancing act, tries to draw one's attention to the ends, defined in terms of BICSa's revivalist understanding of Islam.
Third, Reena distinguishes between conventional believers and true believers. In doing so, not only does she distinguish between those Muslims who do not support Islamist efforts and those who do, but she asks Islamic activists themselves a cautionary implicit question: Are we really committed to Islam? This theme of self-critique and the inculcation of a Foucauldian ‘panoptical’ style of self-discipline through constant self-surveillance appears in many Qur'anic lessons and speeches delivered by BICSa leaders at large training events.Footnote 23 This will become even clearer in the second part of this paper, which will focus on a lesson-circle discussion of ‘hypocrisy’.
Another activist, Najma, pointed out that verses 284–286 of Surah Baqarah contain a more explicit discussion of ‘belief’. A Muslim must, according to these verses, believe in Allah's unity, in the books Allah has revealed, in the prophets and messengers Allah has sent, and in the Last Day of Judgment. Belief, she suggested, means that a person enslaves herself to Allah: that everything she has and is belongs to Allah alone. She added that in daily conversation a Muslim habitually refers to her possessions as ‘my home, my property, my wealth, my talent, my health, my family’, when all these blessings are really only entrusted to human beings by Allah, and one must account to Allah on the Last Day of Judgment for the uses she has put them to. If she uses these blessings in ways sanctioned by Islam, then she will have earned God's pleasure and be duly rewarded; if she uses them whimsically, yielding to Satanic temptations, she will have earned God's anger and be duly punished. Najma thus critiqued the way in which an average Bangladeshi Muslim relates to things and people around her, suggesting that re-calibrating these perceptions is inherent to the project of proper belief.
In BICSa's ideology, and in the Qur'an for that matter, belief is sometimes understood in the context of ‘bargain’ or ‘trade’ and in relation to ‘suffering’ or ‘punishment’ and rewards. Reena (following Mawdudi) defined ‘trade’, as used in the tenth verse of Surah as-Saff, as ‘an endeavour in which a person uses her capital, time, labour, merit etc. for the sole purpose of accruing profit’. ‘But why’, asked Reena rhetorically, ‘does Allah want to inform us of a specific type of bargain? Given His own description of His might earlier, surely, there is nothing that Allah could possibly need from us?’ She supplied the answer:
The fact of the matter is that Allah created us because He wishes to test us. Since He loves us immeasurably, He wants us to avoid failure and hence punishment. He wants us to pass this test and win paradise as the reward. Thus He wants to inform us of a trade whereby we invest certain things, such as our lives and property, in a certain project and reap many times the profit in the form of paradise and avoidance of Hell.
Reena went on to cite Qur'anic verses from Surah Al Imran, Surah Dukhan and Surah Waqi'ah in which humanity is warned of the inevitability of death and of the impending Day of Judgment. She then conjured up a vivid image of Hell for her audience by citing various other verses. To make the horrors of hell more imaginatively accessible, she referred to mundane experiences: ‘How will we drink boiling water in Hell when it's so difficult for us to bear the summer heat in this world? How restless we become when there is no electricity and hence no fan even for the briefest of periods! How painful the slightest burn can be. And yet, hellfire will be so many times more intense than this earthly fire.’Footnote 24
While hellfire dominates traditional preaching discourse in South Asia, in BICSa it is dwelt upon most in meetings and training programmes for relatively inexperienced (hence uninformed and uncommitted) activists. In Qur'anic lesson circles, which are usually reserved for moderately advanced activists, discourses of punishment and hellfire recede to make more room for discourses of love for God and ways in which one can attain greater intimacy with God by advancing from the level of a basic ‘believer’ (mumin) to that of a vigilant God-fearing person (muttaqi) to that of an enamoured, God-loving person whose entire being is a constant longing for the presence of God (muhsin).
Discourse about a Muslim's personal relationship with God enables BICSa activists to distinguish between different levels of belief or piety and so between different types of Muslims. Various levels of commitment to the Islamist cause are identified as corresponding to different degrees of piety or intimacy with the divine. Indeed, the whole notion of the cadre system in BICSa—whereby activists are organized vertically in accordance with degrees of knowledge, piety and organizational commitment—is based on and legitimized by exactly this hierarchized notion of the character of belief. It is assumed that the intensity and authenticity of one's belief, hence one's proximity to the Divine, is roughly measurable.Footnote 25
This understanding of faith or belief as roughly gradable or measurable in degree or ‘strength’ (majbuti) by virtue of its embodiment in conduct is clear in the remarks made by the moderator in response to Reena's discussion of iman. Nabila posited a direct relationship between an activist's level of iman, her vulnerability to worldly distractions, and the success of the Islamic movement of which she is a part. Differentiating between levels of intimacy with Allah or stages in the acquirement of belief, she correlated these to stages in one's participation in the Islamic movement: better faith, more involvement. She drew on secondary textual authority in linking a central tenet of Islamic belief—the Day of Judgment—to the movement's success, citing a Mawdudi-authored booklet widely studied among BICSa members:
A basic relationship between Allah and Islamic workers may suffice for launching an Islamic movement. But for such a movement to gather strength and succeed, we must develop a sincere relationship with Allah (Allahr sathe antarik samparka gare tulte habe). Mawlana Mawdudi discusses this in Islami Andolan: Safalyer Shartabali [Islamic Movement: The Criteria for Success]. A virtue he considers essential for movement success is constant anxiety regarding accounting on the Day of Judgment (akherater chinta). It is clear that we are failing in acquiring this basic level of faith. Otherwise, why do we worry so much about school exams and not about the Last Day of Judgment? If we were to think about the Day of Judgment seriously, would we ever fail to study texts assigned for Qur'anic lesson circles? Do we walk unprepared into an exam hall at school? Our prophet and his companions did not just believe in and think about akherat, they were constantly anxious (pereshan) about it and this anxiety manifested itself in the way they lived every moment of their lives.
The concept of ‘belief’ was further elaborated by another activist's discussion of verse 11, where God calls upon the believers to have faith in Him and in the Prophet Muhammad. Tanya asks, seemingly puzzled, what it means when God commands believers, that is those who already believe, to believe in God and His Prophet. She suggests, following Mawdudi, that this can only mean that there are different degrees of faith, and in verses such as this, God commands the faithful to become ‘truly faithful’ or ‘pure Muslims’ (khanti Musalman). Mere verbal proclamation of faith is necessary but not sufficient, states Mawdudi; an adequate Muslim must be prepared to undertake any amount of hardship in practicing, implementing and upholding that faith to which they declare their submission (Tafheem, vol. 28, p. 111).
A boundary between ‘pure Muslims’ and ‘conventional’ or ‘partial Muslims’ is thus discursively constructed and repeatedly reaffirmed. This differentiation serves to legitimize, in part, the Islamist project of transformation of self and society. In BICSa's view, recognition of the flaws in the state of one's present Muslim self better enables one to transcend this state and move towards an improved state of Muslimhood. Furthermore, as is discussed below in the section on ‘hypocrisy’, such categorization or exclusion also turns the critical eye inwards, upon Islamists themselves, to exact a greater commitment to the Islamic movement and thus to Islam itself (as BICSa understands it).
The demand for consistency between word and action strongly resonates with Islamic activists in a context where popular and print media are replete with critiques of promise-breaking political leaders, bureaucrats and administrators. BICSa's identification of these national leaders and civil servants as ‘hypocritical’ Muslims suggests a solution: the production of Muslims who are truly different, who do not only claim to be Muslims and perform the canonical prayers when it suits them, but constantly strive to enact their belief in Allah and His commandments in every aspect of their lives. BICSa perceives the failure to do so, the problem of ‘hypocrisy’, as pervasive of the Muslim world, including the Islamic movement in Bangladesh and elsewhere.
Hypocrisy (Monafeqi)
Discussion of the assigned verses continued. In response to an explanation by an activist named Rikta of the first verse of Surah as-Saff—which declares the greatness of Allah's powers (‘All that is in the heavens and all that is on earth extols God's limitless glory: for He alone is almighty, truly wise!’)Footnote 26 —activist Najma asked:
Given how clear Allah's omniscience and omnipotence are, why are we so reluctant to submit to every command of Allah? Why do we want to spend more time sleeping, resting and pursuing the fleeting pleasures of this life than working for Allah's cause? Why do novels interest us more than Islamic literature? We believe in Allah and in Islam and we know what we must do. Yet why do we lose enthusiasm along the way? If we were to truly recognize the might of Allah and understand ourselves as His slaves, we could never be arrogant, and like every other species in this universe, we human beings would be able to embrace Allah and obey His commands in all sincerity.
This speech reflects the increasing concern among Islamic activists that Islamists today are not as steadfast in their belief or faith (iman) as earlier generations.
When Nabila prompted others to respond, Nahid volunteered, linking the problem of a perceived gap between an average Islamic worker's belief-knowledge structure and her commitment to action to a general crisis of belief, where ‘belief’ is understood to define the nature of one's relationship with Allah:
I think our real problem lies at the very source: we have not been able to develop a truly intimate relationship with Allah. We fear Allah to some extent, but a higher and truer form of intimacy grows out of love, and we have not been able to acquire that level of belief yet. If we could truly love Allah, we should be able to make any sacrifice necessary to please Him. An Islamic group like Tabligh Jamaat [a pietist group] is able to cultivate a closer relationship with Allah by focusing on the basic rituals of worship. Their only but serious problem is that they deny the vital importance of Islamizing the state. But we know that a true Muslim cannot pick and choose from among the various components of the Qur'an and hadith as they wish, emphasizing one that suits them and neglecting the other that does not. Our problem is that our approach becomes too practical and technical sometimes. We can become so occupied with paperwork and formalities, which is of course essential to the success of our movement that we tend to lose sight of the most important thing of all—our relationship with Allah earning whose pleasure is our ultimate goal.
This kind of self-critique is often articulated only at higher-level meetings, such as Qur'anic lesson circles attended by moderately advanced members, rather than at ‘worker meetings’ for members of the lower, ‘worker’ cadre level. At a ‘worker meeting’, perceived shortcomings are usually attributed to one's vulnerability to the ‘whisperings of Satan’ and to one's failure to master the desires of one's nafs (baser self). This is because junior activists, generally assumed to be less than devoted to the Islamic movement, must become habituated to faithful performance of their organizational duties before the self-critique of excessive busy-ness can be effective. While the critique of succumbing to nafs is also prevalent among higher-level cadres, it co-exists with both partial acknowledgement and extensive denial of the erosive effects on ‘God-fearing’ Muslim personhood of modern pedagogic techniques, even when used for the good of an Islamic movement. These techniques are often understood within BICSa as ‘scientific’, that is, as having some basis in the natural and/or social sciences or simply being ‘logical’ or ‘appropriate to the times’ (jugopojugi).Footnote 27
In BICSa's Islamist ideology, gaps between belief and action and between verbalization and action are distinguished. Both are discussed through the lens of Qur'anic references to ‘hypocrisy’ or monafeqi. Thus, the second, third and fourth verses of Surah as-Saff, as Nahid explained at Nabila's behest, state Allah's displeasure with those who utter words they do not put into practice and those who claim to do what they do not do:
(2) O you who have attained to faith! Why do you say one thing and do another? (3) Most loathsome is it in the sight of God that you say what you do not do! (4) Verily, God loves [only] those who fight in His cause in [solid] ranks, as though they were a building firm and compact.Footnote 28
Following Mawdudi, Nahid explained these verses as a condemnation of hypocrisy. Her exegesis is three-stage. She used several hadith to identify as defining elements of hypocrisy three different kinds of gaps between word and action: lying; not keeping one's word; and violating safe-keeping or trust.
BICSa's focus on hypocrisy serves three purposes. First, it helps motivate Islamic activists to greater self-surveillance and devotion to Islam and the Islamic movement. Thus, Mawdudi's exegesis of Surah Baqarah, a Qur'anic chapter frequently assigned for study in BICSa, provides a detailed description of different categories of Muslim hypocrisy, the last being, in the words of a participant in one lesson circle, ‘characterized by a lack of sincerity. These people believed in Islam but were not sufficiently committed to enthusiastically practice its teachings rigorously in every aspect of life. They were reluctant to rid their lives entirely of past ways of feeling, thinking and acting.’Footnote 29 In the course of Qur'anic lesson circles and other training programmes, BICSa activists' perceived shortcomings as Islamic workers, and hence as Muslims, are repeatedly identified both by the activists themselves and by their superiors as being rooted in this specific kind of hypocrisy, the hypocrisy of the weak believer rather than of the sham believer.
Second, the hypocrisy concept is used to construct boundaries between Islamic activists and their supporters—‘sincere Muslims’—and Muslims who do not support the Islamist movement. Muslims who actually oppose Islamists are understood to suffer from the most basic kind of hypocrisy—inconsistency between verbal claim and practice. Those Muslims who insist on a separation of religion from politics, such as activists in the transnational pietist movement Tabligh Jamaat, are seen in the BICSa paradigm as suffering from the kind of hypocrisy that the earliest Muslims in Makkah were allegedly afflicted with: authentic belief paralyzed by fear of persecution.
Third, in keeping with contemporary mainstream Islamic thought, BICSa subscribes to jihad (struggle or exertion) on two different levels. The ‘greater’ jihad entails spiritual warfare, battling those passions of the soul that impede one's cultivation of piety. The ‘lesser’ jihad entails efforts (militant and otherwise) to propagate, establish, and defend Islam, that is, to ‘strive in the way of God’ (jihad fi sabilillah) with one's possessions and life force, and thus to embrace martyrdom in the process if necessary. While there is considerable consensus among contemporary Muslim scholars on the desired centrality of the greater jihad (self-purification) to the life of a Muslim, there is divergence regarding the lesser jihad (militant exertion). For many such scholars, the lesser jihad is obligatory (farz-e ayn) for every Muslim only in those contexts (e.g., non-Muslim-ruled, non-Muslim majority societies) where Muslims are prevented from practicing the essentials of Islam. According to contemporary majority scholarly opinion, in the case of a Muslim-majority polity, jihad conducted to secure or sustain the domination of Islam is obligatory (farz-e kifaya) only for the state or a dedicated activist minority. Influential Islamists such as Mawdudi or Qutb, however, consider efforts to secure the domination of Islam a fundamental religious obligation for every Muslim even in a Muslim-majority society ruled by Muslims until such time as the state is officially and practically an Islamic state wholly grounded in Islamic law (shariah). In BICSa ideology, jihad fi sabilillah therefore is—or should be—integral to the ‘belief’ or iman of every Muslim in Bangladesh, where ‘belief’ is the most fundamental criterion of Muslimhood. This allows BICSa to identify those Muslims in Bangladesh and elsewhere who oppose Islamist efforts to transform society and state not only as hypocrites, but also as Muslims whose iman is fundamentally deficient or ‘partial’.
In the study circle, Nahid's treatment of hypocrisy offered not only a glimpse of the rich repository of Islamic prescriptions concerning even the most minute aspects of human character and relations but also a critique of the current political landscape in Bangladesh. ‘Take our political leaders, for instance’, she said, ‘who make so many promises prior to elections but renege on them afterward.’ Such critique is a stock element of national discourse, where political parties constantly charge one another with reneging on promises. The print media, which operate with remarkable freedom in Bangladesh, are replete with accusations that the party in power has failed to deliver on election promises, and it is popularly felt that the nation's troubles arise in large part from lying politicians. Nahid drove her point home further by moving from the national-political level to that of daily social practices, focusing on the experiences of her peer group, college students:
We tell a classmate that if she would lend us her notes, we would return her notebook to her within two days, but we end up returning her notebook a month later. This not only inconveniences another person but turns us into hypocrites as well, for a sincere Muslim must never speak carelessly. Once it is uttered, she is obliged to either keep her word or pay kaffara (compensation) if she is unable to keep it. Otherwise, she commits a sin and will be held accountable on the Day of Judgment.
She expanded this critique to include quotidian BICSa practices as well: ‘Sometimes we tell a donor that we will visit at three pm but we show up at six instead. We agree on a particular time for an organizational meeting, but we show up half an hour later.’
Having considered the issue of hypocrisy through the national–political landscape and the subcultures of college and BICSa, Nahid shifted her discussion to the historical circumstances to which, according to exegetes such as Mawdudi, the verses concerned were a response. ‘Some among the Muslims, despite having expressed much enthusiasm about following the Prophet into battle whenever necessary, became reluctant once the Battle of Uhud grew imminent.’ Citing verses from Surah an-Nisaa' and Surah Muhammad, she demonstrated Allah's displeasure with this kind of hypocrisy.
But she did not stop there. Paraphrasing Mawdudi, she went on to cite the comments of two medieval authors of tafseer (Ibne Abbas and Ibne Zayed) on the historical context (shaane nuzul) of the verses under discussion. She ended her discussion of verse 3 by urging BICSa activists to guard constantly against ‘weakness’ in belief and hence in the performance of jihad. She reminded her audience of the punishment of social isolation (shunning) until repentance that was meted out to those who did not want to fight in the battle of Uhud and asked dramatically, ‘How then shall we account to Allah for our reluctance to make far smaller sacrifices for His cause?’
Nahid's rhetorical strategy accomplished two things. First, though neither Nahid nor the majority of other BICSa activists are recipients of traditional religious education, by the technique of mentioning Mawdudi's occasional references to classical exegetes, she linked her discussion to traditional Qur'anic study, thus drawing on the authority that this has historically enjoyed in public imagination. Second, her stentorian call to guard against any kind of ‘weakness’ in commitment to jihad reiterates a widespread intra-organizational critique of the tepid dedication of many BICSa activists to the present Islamic movement. BICSa's leaders frequently lament in the course of informal conversations and training programmes, including lesson circles, activists' ‘reluctance to strengthen their belief and make even the smallest sacrifices for the Islamic movement.’Footnote 30
At Nabila's prompting for comments from the group, Nargis posed a question:
We know and our “work procedure” (kormopodhyoti) book states that our method of jihad is an eternal (chirantan) one. By this we mean that the Islamic movement is struggling exactly in the same manner and spirit in which the struggle to establish Islam has been waged in every age by the prophets and their followers. But sometimes we are asked whether the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, conducted his Islamic group exactly in the same manner in which BICSa conducts itself today. We are asked whether the prophet had his band of followers fill out organizational forms or had them record their daily activities so that he could evaluate those or whether Islamic workers at that time followed the kind of cadre system we follow today. How should one respond to such questions?
After allowing a few minutes for others to respond, she answered:
Naturally, the technical strategies (kaushal) for establishing Islam must change with changing times, but not the basic principles. Today we live in an age dominated by science. Hence to be successful we have adopted scientific techniques for preaching Islam, training our workers, and solving their problems and those of the community. But these three principles—preaching, organization and training, and problem-solving—clearly stated in our constitution, and practiced by Islamic workers in all ages, have withstood the test of time. Neither the objective of establishing Islam nor the fundamental teachings of Islam have changed. All that has changed and must change with time and place is how we go about realizing these principles in practice. But these changes in strategy do not and should not have any effect on the primary objective, teachings, and intended fruits of the authentic Islamic movement that has been waged since the times of the prophets.
The questioner did not seem fully satisfied but did not pursue the matter further. However, another participant, Shameela, followed up on this question. Fleshing out a concern that the participant Nargis alluded to earlier in the form of questions raised by outsiders (especially competing Islamic activists) regarding BICSa's movement techniques, and building on a similar point that the presenter Nahid had hinted at in her remarks concerning moral shortcomings evident in the daily conduct of some activists, Shameela commented:
I've been observing my roommate Rooma closely over a period of months. She is a Tabligh activist. It seems to me that she is able to spend more time performing nafl ibadat (supererogatory worship) because she need not spend half as much time as we do on technical matters of organization. Tabligh workers are therefore more able to focus on nafl ibadat than we. They can therefore cultivate a more intimate relationship with Allah and this often shows in the way they conduct themselves in their daily lives. This, in turn, attracts others towards them. It therefore seems to me that our style of furthering the cause of Islam does indeed affect the quality of our belief. Sometimes, it is the conduct of some of our sisters that causes their neighbors and relatives to question the authenticity of our methods. Was the Prophet Muhammad not able to train Muslims only through preaching and was he not able to draw others towards him by virtue of the sheer beauty of his character? Also, the organization requires us to do so many things that sometimes I feel that I am not learning much of anything at all. Reading just one slim book on a particular aspect of Islam is not usually satisfactory, and yet, between schoolwork and required organizational reading we must rush through so many texts on so many different topics that it is difficult to master a particular Islamic topic such that the topic is clear in my own mind. I now feel that I merely have a vague idea about Islam as a whole but do not have in-depth knowledge of any of its parts. I also feel that I am neither able to master Islamic texts properly nor my school texts. It is simply too much work!
Nabila looked around and smiled. ‘Shameela has made a good point. What do the others think? Would anybody like to respond?’
Sabiha, another participant, raised her hand and said:
I think if we are sufficiently committed to Islam, we should be able to adequately perform both nafliyat and organizational duties including the study of Islamic literature. The life of a believer is not meant to be easy, it is meant to be a constant exertion. If we do not strive adequately in this life, how can we expect to be rewarded in the Hereafter? We must invest more time and effort in organizing than Tabligh does because our objective is not to establish Islam partially but fully, on every level of life, from the personal to the economic to the political. To do this we must organize and maintain this organization and this naturally takes a lot of work. In order to attain belief fully, we cannot live as Muslims only at home and then stop acting or thinking like Muslims in school or in the Parliament. True belief encompasses every aspect and every moment of life. Did the Prophet Muhammad only pray and fast? No, he also preached and trained, fought battles, forged treaties, and established the first Islamic society and state in Madina. If we claim to emulate him, we must strive to live as he lived. He is our primary role model.
Nabila commended Sabiha for her comment, and went on to add her own thoughts and to conclude the session:
Indeed, the stronger one's belief is, the more able one is to work hard and on different levels. Why? Because belief, organizing, and discipline go hand in hand, each enhances the other two. To sustain belief is much more feasible in a group setting than isolated, on one's own. Thus the Qur'an and hadith urge Muslims to stay together and not fight among themselves. This way, when I slip in my belief, and we all do, my companions can alert me and help me correct myself. It is therefore crucial to organize and bind oneself to an Islamic organization. But then it is not possible to conduct an organization unless its members are disciplined and diligently abide by and uphold its rules and regulations. This is why so much of our organizational training revolves around learning to discipline ourselves. This discipline, in turn, enables us to use every second at our disposal towards a good deed performed to please Allah, be it the nafl prayer of tahajjud or study of the Qur'an or performing a familial duty or reading Islamic literature. Without discipline, it is impossible to get up early in the morning for the dawn prayer, especially during the cold days of winter, or to interrupt one's daily work to offer the afternoon prayer or to skip watching a favorite television drama to read an Islamic book instead, isn't it? May Allah enable us to attend satisfactorily and simultaneously to our various duties and to realize that our primary goal in this world should be to please Allah and thereby secure salvation in the Hereafter.
The kind of tension evident in these discussions between the practices of discipline and deliberation characterized most of the lesson circles I was able to attend in Dhaka. Ideally, these practices enable each other and are mutually constitutive. Discipline allows for a seamless flow of discussion which, in turn, further grounds an activist in the realm of self and organizational discipline. For its part, deliberation is intended to enhance Islamic discipline by encouraging the surfacing of questions and doubts, especially the most troubling ones, among advancing activists and thereby creating an opportunity for these doubts to be dislodged effectively through the most cogent—‘rational’ or ‘logical—’—explanations offered there and then by leading activists. In practice, however, activists are able to use the space of deliberation to question the feasibility of the intense, all-encompassing disciplining BICSa demands of them. Sometimes the supervising activist or a peer is able to answer a question to the satisfaction of the questioner, sometimes not.
Conclusion: Double-Edged Techniques of Discipline
The nature of some of the contemporary techniques BICSa uses to craft a highly disciplined Islamic activist subjectivity morally rooted in orthodox Islamic ideals is hybrid. It is a combination of traditional ‘virtue cultivation’ and pedagogical techniques with contemporary methods of rationalistic inquiry, manufacturing consensus and leadership, movement administration and organization, and panoptical surveillance of both self and other. Despite the denial prevalent among BICSa activists (especially BICSa's leading representatives) this hybridity has unique effects—some intended, others not—on the kind of subjectivity produced.Footnote 31 Although BICSa officially insists that it merely replicates the manner in which Prophet Muhammad sought to instruct individual Muslims in piety and to establish Islam in Arabia, many BICSa activists partially recognize among themselves that the form of the struggle has shifted significantly with time and place, that new accommodations have been made. Instead of defending Islam against idol-worshipping Makkan pagans, for example, BICSa must defend it against fellow ‘misguided’ and ‘ignorant’ Muslims, against capitalism, consumerism and a partly ‘Hinduized’ or ‘Indianized’, but primarily ‘Westernized’ and liberalized–secularized modernity and the latter's ‘propaganda’ against ‘real’ Islam and observant Muslims. A subterranean recognition of some of these shifts and of the growing multiplicity in interpretations of Islam, especially increasing lay access to this diversifying arena of canonical knowledge, helps prompts the concerns evident in the questions and remarks of BICSa activists reproduced above, which I heard being articulated in numerous Qur'anic lessons.Footnote 32
Intimately interlocked with both past and present, BICSa's lesson circles conceptually embody the kind of normatively Islamic yet locally–globally modernist–revivalist sensibilities that BICSa aims to craft and legitimize. The questions and comments integral to these study sessions sometimes reflect the tensions inherent in such a project. The clear encouragement to questions that characterizes BICSa lesson circles conveys, in part, BICSa leaders' acute awareness of the significant contestations to Islamist thought and praxis, and thus these leaders' eagerness to dislodge any resulting ‘confusion’ among activists through explanations and clarifications. Activists encounter contestations to their ideology and practices daily in various domains. One is the domain of the home and family, where parents and older siblings of activists often question and sometimes aggressively oppose activists' views and practices of Islam. Another is the domain of school, particularly the liberal-secular culture of gender-mixed university campuses in Bangladesh. On these campuses, BICSa activists are sometimes attacked by instructors and peers for their beliefs and practices, and where temptations abound in the forms of a growing sub-culture of gender-mixed socials, and dormitories equipped with the satellite dish disseminating Hollywood and Bollywood productions around the clock.
Effecting change simultaneously from below (by effecting individual transformation) and from the top (by Islamizing the state democratically) is the envisioned purpose of BICSa's lesson circles, where relatively advanced and promising activists are trained to become leaders able to spearhead BICSa's movement for change. In casting present times as a replay of jaheliyat (the spiritually deplorable state that the Islamic tradition attributes to pre-Islamic Arabia) and Islamists as a besieged minority akin to the early Muslims of Arabia, these emergent leaders seek to establish unambiguously—in their own and in their junior fellow activists' minds and practices as also in the public imaginary—continuity between BICSa's own projects and those of the prophets, especially Prophet Muhammad. This presents lesson-circle participants with an urgent motive to invest their physical, emotional and intellectual energies in Islamizing self and polity. Yet this model does not work seamlessly in practice. This is evident in the above lesson circle discussions where, for example, we find BICSa activists such as Shameela suggesting that the vast amount of organizational work necessary for socio-political reform impedes the enhancement of belief through self-purification. Such impediment, in the view of such critiquing activists, engenders hypocrisy in individual activists and ultimately weakens the movement, particularly its crucial ability to attract potential recruits through the exemplary daily conduct of individual activists.
As earnestly as BICSa attempts to elide issues of interpretation and diversity within Islamic traditions, the historical coexistence of different approaches to Islam in the larger region of South Asia and the intensifying competition between Islamic groups in contemporary Bangladesh (even though most are of a conservative-orthodox-revivalist bent) make the issue of ‘interpretation’ an obvious and contentious one. On college campuses, BICSa activists' encounters with liberal-secular student activists, the gradually growing presence of women affiliated with the more conservative Tabligh Jamaat, and the latter's increasing competition with BICSa for recruits all compel BICSa activists to ask themselves and their superiors a growing variety of questions such as those concerning the Islamic authenticity and efficacy of organizational bureaucratic labours evident in the comments of participants such as Nargis and Shameela. I have therefore sought to delineate a BICSa lesson circle as a space both of discipline and deliberation, as a methodical attempt at the inculcation of a totalistic, unambiguous worldviewFootnote 33 and as an integral habituation (often unintended) to the process of interrogating this view, to a certain extent.
Ambiguity, in this alternative sphere of schooling, is viewed officially as detrimental to concerted action. Yet in the course of attempting to remove uncertainties through questions, comments and clarifications, the better to enable activists to adhere to the disciplinary requirements of revivalist Islamic traditions, where the latter makes heavy demands on an activist's time and emotional—physical–intellectual resources, further questions and reflections emerge, some more unsettling for BICSa's revivalist programme than others. These questions gain legitimacy precisely through the deliberative process whereby a particular study group and its moderator/leader attempt to grapple with them. A study group and its conductor's openness to questions—practically any question related to Islam or even to the existence of God and issues of fate—motivates a participant to strive to discipline herself into a better Muslim and social activist in conveying to her the extent of BICSa's confidence in its beliefs. At the same time, once questioning is encouraged, it is difficult to completely control what questions they will ask.
In practice, BICSa's moral tripod—belief, hypocrisy and struggle—is thus in a continuous state of wobble. The embodiment of belief, so central to BICSa's project of self- and socio-political reform, entails a range of hardships. These include conflict with non-Islamist cultural values and practices, the discomforts of strict veiling in a hot and humid climate, the psychological pressure of relentless hyper-scheduling, and the allurements of Bollywood and Western culture as conveyed by the satellite dish to campus lounges and homes. These daily experiences create an obvious temptation to ‘hypocrisy’ or shirking of the work of the movement. This kind of hypocrisy, in BICSa's understanding, in turn undermines correct belief both directly, by undermining the piety of the activist who slacks or compromises, and indirectly, by postponing the establishment of authentic Islam. A reformed Islamic polity, in the BICSa view, is the only environment in which a truly devout Muslim subjectivity can securely thrive over the long term.
