On the Politics of Viruses and Visibility

Abstract

A library keyword search of “Muslim women” or “women [in/and] Islam” invariably pulls up a long list of books and articles with titles that include the word veil. The long-standing use of this word—and variations on it—is testament not only to an astounding lack of syntactic originality and to the continued association of Muslim women with “the veil” but also to the need of others to uncover and reveal what is hidden from sight. Often this project of recovery has been informed by a prurient curiosity regarding the activities that transpire in “harems” and “behind the veil”; at other times, by genuine and well-intentioned commitment to “reveal” that Muslim women are not really meek or oppressed. But even these latter efforts are ultimately a response to conversations and curiosity that originated elsewhere.With both academic and popular spotlights largely focused on meek and oppressed Muslim women who can be liberated only by the West, what fall into the shadows are the efforts of Muslim-identified women, across the decades, to set their own agenda for change, even if always against the backdrop of Western imperialism and global asymmetries in political and economic power. (Consider here the concerns voiced about the fate of Afghan women following the US withdrawal in 2021.) Also typically obscured by this rigid focus are the many other histories of activist efforts to improve not only “women’s status” but also their general health and well-being in those societies at the weaker end of these global and regional disparities.What would it mean to tell the story of Muslim (or Third World) women by beginning with the concerns and interests of the women themselves rather than with questions informed by European and American curiosity about them or even by efforts to respond to misrepresentations of them? What would it mean to tell a story where Muslim women and activists were actually the subjects of the story rather than making cameo appearances to make others appear more liberal, progressive, generous, developed, or free?There is, of course, no singular or archetypal Muslim (or Third World) woman, nor is there a singular story about Muslim women. There are multiple stories, and there is always power and inequality—within the family, communities, and regions; and across countries; and certainly within academe. And yet, the stories that are more recognizable and intelligible—because they meet certain expectations—are deemed more acceptable, more legitimate, than others.Thinking about and telling stories about Muslim women from the perspective of South Asia allows us to challenge the primacy accorded to Middle Eastern (West Asian) Muslim experiences. The vantage point of Bangladesh (and other “smaller” countries) within South Asia allows us also to counter the dominance of India within South Asian studies. The specificities of the East Pakistan/Bangladesh experience introduce us to less familiar historical moments, political regimes, and transnational networks that cast a dramatically different light on Muslim and Third World women within and beyond that particular location.The final stages of my own recent effort to meet this challenge in book form, that is, to try to begin the story with Third World, Muslim actors, coincided with the first months of the pandemic. As I tried to retrieve high-resolution copies of photos amid lockdowns in different parts of the world, I reflected again on the obscured histories of and on the politics of access to certain voices and images.The images that preoccupied me in the spring of 2020 were of mid- and late twentieth-century Muslim Bengali women’s transnational encounters. Some encounters had occurred in East Pakistan/Bangladesh, others elsewhere. These images were particularly exhilarating at that moment, perhaps because they transported me across sat sagor ar tero nodi (seven seas and thirteen rivers) at a time when travel had started to become a distant memory.One image stands out (fig. 1). It’s crowded. Many bodies and faces. According to the press’s design team, it wasn’t an ideal image for reproduction, but I insisted. It’s an official photo of a Pakistani delegation to Turkey in 1952—an example of what, today, we would call South-South exchange. Pakistan was just five years old at the time. Cracks had already started to appear in the new nation, whose two wings were separated by a thousand miles of Indian territory, most dramatically just months earlier, on February 21, when police in Dacca (as Dhaka was then spelled) had fired on Bengalis protesting the imposition of Urdu as Pakistan’s national language. Yet, here was this national delegation of cultural and educational leaders and twenty-four university students from East and West Pakistan posing for a photo with the Turkish president, Celâl Bayar, and various Turkish and Ankara-based Pakistani officials.Two places to the right of Bayar is Shamsun Nahar Mahmud, a leading educationist in East Pakistan and the only woman among the six senior members of the Pakistani delegation. A regular member of Pakistani delegations to conferences and meetings around the world, her own and others’ records of her travels have been an invaluable resource for my own explorations of women’s transnational encounters in the East Pakistan period. Mahmud also provides us with a precious link to an even earlier generation of Bengali activists, for she worked closely for many years with the fiery early twentieth-century Bengali Muslim feminist Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Hossain had taken the young Mahmud under her wing when the latter moved to Calcutta, and Mahmud later published the first biography of Hossain.According to Mahmud’s memoirs of her sojourn in Turkey, the delegation had traveled aboard the SS Daresa from the West Pakistani port city of Karachi, along the Marakan Coast of Pakistan and Iran, on to Muscat, into the Persian Gulf, and up the river Shatt al-Arab, which separates Iraq and Iran. They had passed the Abadan refinery, which, Mahmud noted with clear admiration, Iranian prime minister Mossadegh had seized from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company a year earlier and nationalized. (Just months later, Mossadegh would be overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup.) From Basra, the group had taken a train to Baghdad and then traveled again by train, the Toros Express, through Syria and on to Ankara.In the foreground, looking away from the camera while she adjusts her light-colored sari, is the young university student Sufia Ibrahim (later Ahmed). Ibrahim, then a second-year student in the newly established Department of Islamic History and Culture at Dhaka University, had been among the protesters in support of Bengali on February 21, 1952. She would be recognized as a National Professor of Bangladesh in 1995 for her academic contributions.In my recent and current work, I’ve been focusing primarily on elite educated urban women who leave behind written, even published, texts and images. These texts and images are enticing not only because they challenge tired Western representations of Muslim women but also because they show these women to be defined by far more than either their Muslim-ness or Bengali-ness. They emerge as citizens eager to participate in postcolonial nation-building and as keen observers both of the societies they visit and their own. Their descriptions of their encounters are marked by a sense of cultural pride combined with a clear recognition of problems that need to be addressed.I studied photos such as this one while ensconced in my Rice University office, a stone’s throw from the largest medical center in Texas and, no doubt, the world. Given the physical proximity, I somehow felt particularly well-informed (as though by osmosis) about the cutting-edge research on the COVID-19 virus as well as well-protected from the virus by the guidelines and vaccines being developed.Even as I worried about the lack of water and the population density in Bangladesh that would make it hard for the vast majority to follow the same safety guidelines, these images reminded me of the histories and stories of that part of the world that we seldom hear here given the power of development discourse and security concerns. And to be sure, the need to decolonize Bangladesh studies is urgent within Bangladesh as well as without. To rephrase my earlier questions: What would it mean to tell the story of Bangladesh in a way that privileges the concerns, priorities, and standpoint of that country’s most vulnerable citizens?In the years since the official start of the COVID-19 pandemic, four major anniversaries pertaining to Bangladesh have passed. Two have been celebrated with much fanfare and ceremony and many international guests: the birth centenary of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who is popularly known as Bangabandhu, or “friend of Bengal,” and widely revered as the leader of Bangladesh’s independence movement; and the fiftieth anniversary of Bangladesh’s independence. A third and a fourth, which bear directly on the current pandemic as well as the obscured histories of encounters and exchanges amid global power and wealth disparities that so fascinate me, went relatively unmarked: the sixtieth anniversary of a small research institute in East Pakistan that initially focused on the scourge of cholera, a deadly disease that, for centuries, terrified populations around the world with images of easy contagion and agonizing deaths, and compelled regulatory measures at the highest levels; and the fiftieth anniversary of a very successful public health-care delivery system that has relentlessly worked and campaigned for inexpensive medicine and vaccines of all sorts.Since at least the British colonial period, Bengal had been seen as the source of a particularly virulent and lethal strain of cholera. Successive nineteenth-century cholera pandemics were believed to have originated in eastern regions of colonial India and then carried by traders, pilgrims, and soldiers to other parts of Asia and on to Europe, resulting in millions of deaths. The colonial authorities responded with a variety of measures, including mandatory quarantines and blockades, in an effort to keep cholera out of Europe. Unsurprisingly, European fatalities were the authorities’ main concern.Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century, the Cold War, and US efforts to woo the strategically situated new state of Pakistan to prevent communist gains in South and Southeast Asia. In 1955, Pakistan, along with Thailand and the Philippines, became part of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), a military alliance with the United States, United Kingdom, France, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition to military training, the organization undertook a variety of socioeconomic projects, among them the establishment of cholera research centers in Bangkok and Dacca.The Pakistan-SEATO Cholera Research Laboratory (PSCRL) came into existence in 1961. With support from the US National Institutes of Health and the Johns Hopkins Center for Medical Research and Training, American and East Pakistani physicians and scientists (yes, including Muslim women scientists) would provide free treatment to all, while patient records would contribute to research on and a greater understanding of cholera and other diarrheal diseases. In 1963, the PSCRL set up a field research site in Matlab Bazar, some sixty miles southeast of Dacca and described in a center publication as “the historic seedbed of the disease, from which great epidemics have arisen and spread to other parts of the world.” At its peak, over a quarter of a million people were part of the Matlab study site, which is today also the longest running health project in the Global South. Over the years, Matlab researchers also took on other issues such as fertility control, maternal and child health, and malnutrition. Because of the project’s meticulous recordkeeping, more detailed and longitudinal data are available about the residents of that particular area than any other part of the country. The Dacca laboratory soon developed an easy treatment for cholera: replenishing bodily fluids and salts in a timely manner alongside a course of antibiotics to prevent additional loss of fluids. Oral Rehydration Therapy, also known as Oral Rehydration Solution (ORS), has saved millions of lives around the world.When East Pakistan declared independence as the sovereign nation of Bangladesh in 1971, cholera outbreaks in the refugee camps across the Indian border claimed many lives, while the PSCRL, to quote the New York Times, became an “unintended financial casualty.” The United States chose to support West Pakistan throughout Bangladesh’s nine-month war of liberation. Determined to follow a path of nonalignment, the new nation, for its part, quickly cut all ties to SEATO. In 1978, the PSCRL was renamed the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDRB), an international research center with support from the World Health Organization, the United Nations Development Programme, and several other agencies and countries. That same year, the center launched a public health campaign to demonstrate how, rather than waste valuable time waiting for professional help, even those without any prior health-care experience could prepare a homemade ORS with inexpensive and easy-to-find ingredients—a mixture of water, a pinch of salt, and a fistful of sugar (or local jaggery, gur). Short public service announcements on Bangladeshi TV along with NGO and government workers shared the recipe with families around the country.The fourth significant anniversary that passed during the pandemic was that of Gonoshasthaya Kendra (GK; the People’s Health Centre), which was founded in 1972, shortly after the end of Bangladesh’s war of independence. Under the leadership of Dr. Zafrullah Chowdhury, GK has consistently sought to improve rural Bangladeshis’ access to health care through trained paramedics and affordable medication.For decades, with far less funding than that of the Texas Medical Center across the street from my university campus, the ICDDRB and GK have quietly targeted and successfully tackled the illnesses that plague the impoverished populations of Bangladesh and other countries. The ICDDRB’s long history of research on and treatment of such diseases, it turned out, permitted an easy transition to research on different aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic, including transmission routes, detection, and postinfection complications. The World Health Organization has already approved a very affordable CPAP technology invented at the center to help treat children who develop pneumonia or hypoxemia following COVID-19 infection. GK, in keeping with its long-standing mission, has insisted on the need for an affordable and accessible response to the new pandemic. When it became clear in 2021 that the vast majority of people in the world would not have access to the expensive vaccines developed in the United States, Chowdhury called vociferously for the production of a local and a much more affordable COVID-19 vaccine, but in vain, given the lack of local governmental and business support. GK’s more successful efforts have included a mobile hospital that can conduct COVID-19 tests and treat early symptoms as well as its participation in a vaccination drive in the Rohingya refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh.Such long neglected (rather than lost or missing) images and accounts of historical interactions and collaborations, whether regarding culture, women’s rights, or medical research, disrupt popular and even some academic ideas about Muslim women, the Third World, and South Asia. Indeed, very much like the current pandemic, they remind us of the global and, indeed, regional asymmetries that have facilitated and shaped these encounters, and the obscured histories of—and the politics of access to—particular voices and images. At the same time, they, like the pandemic itself, remind us too of the fact of and the need for continued interdependence.I am grateful to the editors of History of the Present and to the special issue editors, Anjali Arondekar and Sherene Seikaly, for their sustained encouragement and constructive feedback across multiple drafts.