Islamization, Ummah Consciousness and Mass Support for Political Islam

Abstract

This chapter demonstrates how the state mobilizes Islamic cultural values and products to construct Bangladesh’s national cultural character as a member of the ummah. The core objective of this chapter is to lay out a dominant pattern of the state-supported Islamization process. To start, this chapter reviews several Five Year Plans (FYPs)—important policy documents for Bangladesh that set the political framework for socio-economic development of the country (i.e. socio-cultural and economic investment priorities). Reviews of FYPs show that the state, irrespective of who is in power, has been facilitating expansion of Islamic values, culture, and institutes since late 1970s. Next, the chapter reviews the phenomenal growth of madrasahs (public and private) as an implication of Bangladesh’s official policy to support madrasah education. These madrasahs, as one interviewee described them, are now ‘the castles of Islam’, preserving and protecting Islamic culture and values in Bangladesh. Following the discussion on madrasah, the chapter further reviews Islamic Foundation (IF), which is the state’s missionary organization designed to propagate and mobilize Islamic culture in the society. The roles of FYPs and IF have been unexplored in the study of Islam and politics in Bangladesh, although they offer significant insight into the justification of an ‘Islamic Bangladesh’.