Statue of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh Father of the Nation
by Dr. Kalam Shahed 13 December 2020
The iconoclasts (those who rejected images) objected to icon veneration for several reasons, including an Old Testament prohibition against images in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:4). The defenders of the use of icons, however, insisted on the symbolic nature of images and on the dignity and the historical relevance of the created objects. Both Judaism and Christianity have moved away from iconoclasm and statues of religious figures eventually proliferated all over the Christian world. The Quranic message on iconoclasm centres on the 7th-century idolatry in Arabia and the actions of Prophet Muhammad. Although the Prophet destroyed all statues in the Holy Kaaba, he had, reportedly, spared a fresco of Mary and Jesus. Aniconism, or a prohibition of depicting images of all living beings, was considered immutable by early Islamic religious authorities. It was axiomatic that the creation and depiction of living forms is God’s prerogative, not to be usurped by artists and painters. In India, a leading Muslim educationist, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, refused to be photographed and the conservative Afghan Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, left no official pictures. A recent notable act of Islamic iconoclasm was the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamyan in 2001 by the Taliban government of Afghanistan. Muslim religious scholars have, however, become more adaptive to modern technology- driven communications such as religious TV channels, Youtube, and cell phones.
Europe’s age of ‘statuomania’
Nineteenth-century Europe saw the potential to unlock national zeal by installing iconic figures. Many political communities pursued state-building programmes and rewrote and appropriated history to serve political ends. State energy and resources were dedicated to commemorating heroes from the past in monumental form. Between 1848 and 1914 major cities, including London, Paris and Berlin received political and religious icons from often differing, yet dominant ideologies and European historians rightly identify the 19th century as an age of ‘statuomania’ that helped build national consensus. This was not always unproblematic. In France’s chequered history, Napoleon Bonaparte’s statue was removed several times in the 19th and early 20th centuries. More recently, statues of Nazis and Fascists in Western Europe and communist leaders in Eastern Europe saw departures as a democratic wave swept through the region.
Lately, even Mahatma Gandhi’s statues have been dismantled in Africa and in some places in North America for the iconic leader’s alleged racism and his known dislike of the blacks, and his dismissive attitude towards their socio-political rights. Hindu chauvinist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), in its attempt to reframe political narratives, installed exceptionally large statues of Dr. Ambedkar, the architect of the Indian constitution, the conservative nationalist leader Vallabh Bhai Patel, and the Hindu warrior, Shivaji, which all tended to eclipse, if not belittle and tarnish, the pre-eminence of peace-loving and egalitarian Gandhi’s statue.
Bangladesh and Mujib Statues
Sheikh Mujib, who was the driving political figure in creating an independent Bangladesh in 1971, remains nationally popular among the educated and well-to-do Bengalis and an appeal to history can further consolidate and promote Bengali nationalism. For some, there are reckonable political dividends that could be reaped from the large Mujib icons all over Bangladesh, particularly when there is a noticeable absence of icons of other national leaders such as Fazlul Huq, Shahid Suhrawardy, Maulana Bhashani, M.A.G Osmani, and Ziaur Rahman. The present Awami League (AL) government, in a countrywide drive to install Mujib icons, asked everyone including doctors in private hospitals to donate funds towards building statues in their campuses. For these architects of national discourse, history must reflect only the dominant social, political, economic, religious, and racial narratives, while national consensus was not high in their calculus. This assertive cultural narrative saw incremental patronage of apparently non-political cultural elites, including their selective elevation as unelected Members of Parliament and the occasional offering of ministerial portfolios.
The country’s secular pro-icon elites are based in major cosmopolitan centres such as Dhaka, Khulna, and Chittagong with, at best, weak linkages to the masses in all other parts of the country. The latter, larger segment of the population, appear to nourish different religious sentiments about the icons, which are nourished and promoted by thousands of Islamic scholars and clerics who, in some instances, could even be the followers of the ruling elites, and yet have a contrasting ideological viewpoint about iconoclasm. Secular political opposition in the country has been systematically decimated over the last decade, creating opportunities for new and hitherto obscure socio-religious forces to fill up the vacuum. For now, the religious ideologies in the country, unlike the Hindutva ideologues in India or the clergy in Iran, appear regionally turf-based and too fragmented to play a significant political role in the country. This could, however, change in the foreseeable future, especially due to the absence of democratic elections, unbridled graft and corruption, and continued institutional decay in the polity, and the spectre of seething mass discontent.
Madrasa education, with a variety of ideological undercurrents, remains extensive all over the country and many political observers remain unsure of the actual sway of religious fundamentalism prevailing outside the large metropolises and in rural Bangladesh. The potential rise of the BJP, with its communal overtones, to the helms of power in the neighbouring West Bengal in India could also stimulate and sharpen debates and widen secular and religious fault-lines in Bangladesh.
After brutally tackling the protesting conservative Hefazat (a madrassa group) activists in Dhaka in 2013 where scores die and many injured, the ruling AL leaders saw political wisdom in stretching a comprising hand to the conservative Islamic group and quickly distanced itself from its hawkish Home Minister Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir who ordered the massacre and sought to buy off the feeble, octogenarian Hefazat supremo, Allama Shafi who has passed away recently, as an ally and more importantly, as an alternative to the more formidable political opposition, the Jamaati Islami, an Islamic fundamentalist religious party.
However, bonhomie has proved to be short-lived and Hefazat is back to its rigid ideological platform creating unsavoury ripples against the government-sponsored monuments. The ruling elites are now beginning to see myopia in their stratagem, initiated by over- enthusiasts, keen on rewriting or restoring Mujib’s legacy. The long-term political fallouts of this statuomania are beginning to play out in dialectics between political secularism and ideological aniconism.
In a bid to avert further confrontations with the Islamists the Bangladeshi government, has adopted a two-pronged strategy – called on the secular intellectuals and their party stand patters to promote and protect the Mujib icons that are planned to be built all across the country that is intended to strengthen their professed socio-political narratives; and at the same time, the government has also scurried to negotiate with Hefazat activists and their allies, who consider the icons to be sacrilegious, urging them to tone down their strident opposition to these politicised artifacts.
Most religious ideologues in the country have, so far, refused to succumb to the official narratives and these icons now need round-the-clock protection by the law-enforcement agencies. Tensions between pro-icon and aniconism with occasional bursts of violence between an indulging state and the rebarbative ideologues are expected to continue.
What is instructive is that the ruling Awami League hierarchy may have unwittingly plunged itself into an intense national debate and scrutiny, with conflicting passions, ranging from veneration to indifference and intolerance around a national hero who has a special place in the hearts of each and every Bangladeshi without a statue. Sadly, instead of enhancing his image, the Mujib statues may prove a stick in the mud where religiously ideologically driven agitations however misplaced these may be, are likely to reverberate and resonate expansively and destabilise the society.
The author is an independent security policy researcher based in Canada.