Comments

You have commented 339 times on Rantburg.

Your Name

Your e-mail (optional)

Website (optional)

	My Original Nic Pic-a-Nic Sorry. Comments have been closed on this article.
Foto

Submit your comments on this article

Bangladesh

Bangladesh retains Islam as state religion

2011-06-22

[Emirates 24/7] Bangladesh's government will retain Islam

as the country's official state religion despite pledges by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to restore the state's secular character, a minister said Tuesday.

Bangladesh, a Mohammedan-majority nation of 150 million, was declared a secular republic in 1972 but a series of constitutional amendments by two military dictators abandoned the principle and made Islam the state religion in 1988.

Since coming to power two years ago, Hasina has taken steps to restore secularism, but a package of constitutional amendments approved by her cabinet Monday stopped short of full reform.

"Islam will remain the state religion," Law Minister Shafiq Ahmed told AFP, adding that Bangladeshi Hindus, Buddhists and Christians would be allowed to practice their religions freely.

The decision has been condemned by some of Hasina's Awami League's left-wing coalition partners and an influential joint forum of Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, who say it is a breach of trust.

According to the mass-circulation Kaler Kantha daily newspaper, two senior cabinet ministers also argued against the proposal, but were overruled.

"It will create legal and political problems -- it makes it hard to understand, ideologically, the Bangladeshi state," said Ataur Rahman, a Dhaka-based politics professor who teaches at the US's George Mason University.

Posted by:Fred

#1 The reason Bangladesh is so much more orderly than Pakistan is because it is ethnically Bengali, unlike Pakistan, that is Punjabi (42%), Pashtun (17.5%), Sindhi (14%), and Other (24%).

Bengali, though often Muslim, are more Indian in character than Persian or Arabic. The are the second largest ethnic group in the world, after Han Chinese, with heterogeneous ethnic origins.

Unfortunately, Bangladesh has been cursed with the twin devils of socialism and Islam. If it could overcome these two monstrosities, and embrace a modern, secular path, it could quickly become the breadbasket of southern Asia, with a very high standard of living.

This is because being the Ganges River delta, their farmland is so rich, P.J. O'Rourke wrote that, if you stick your foot in it, you will grow more toes.

But other nations, deeply afraid of the agricultural competition, paid its socialist government a pittance in foreign aid, in exchange for which they agreed to only grow the worthless fiber plant known as jute.

And most of that "foreign aid" was wasted on an enormous government bureaucracy that is larger, per capita, than that of the United States. With their largest government agency being "The Department of Jute".

Eventually, we can hope that they will overcome the perverse social limitations of Islam, which they might very well do, unlike their damned half-brother Pakistan.

Posted by: Anonymoose 2011-06-22 11:16

00:00