Book Review: Mubashar Hasan, Islam and Politics in Bangladesh: The Followers of Ummah
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929920972867 |
| Author | Sümeyye Sakarya |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2021, Vol. 19(3) NP25 –NP26
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
972867PSW0010.1177/1478929920972867Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2020
Commissioned Book Review
Islam and Politics in Bangladesh: The
Followers of Ummah by Mubashar Hasan.
Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 215 pp.,
€89.99 (h/b), ISBN: 978-981-15-1115-8
An exclusive focus on the Middle East and
North Africa (MENA), which arguably stems
from Eurocentrism and Orientalism, is a funda-
mental drawback of the literature on Islamism
or, in general, politics and Islam. As a part of
South Asia, Bangladesh is one of those excluded
countries despite hosting the world’s fourth-
largest Muslim population. Hence, Mubashar
Hasan’s Islam and Politics in Bangladesh: The
Followers of Ummah is a significant contribu-
tion to the scholarship on politics and Islam.
However, beyond filling a gap, the book is out-
standing in its attempt to surmount
Eurocentrism. Hasan’s starting point is that
existing scholarship on Bangladesh employs
‘Western referent objects (i.e. hegemony, secu-
larism, security) while reinforcing a liberal dis-
course of religion’ (p. 16). This Eurocentric
approach inhibits a proper understanding of the
politics, particularly Islamization in
Bangladesh, by disregarding Bangladeshi
Muslims’ perception of Islam and their agency.
For, it builds on the religious-secular binary,
which is not applicable to Bangladesh.
With these concerns in mind, Hasan asserts
that we can construe Bangladeshi politics
through ‘the Islamic concept of ummah’. The
core argument of the book is that there is no
secular politics in Bangladesh, but only various
types of political Islamists or ummahs as lib-
eral, radical, and extremist. The idea of the
Ummah frames all politics in a way that engen-
ders illiberalism, authoritarianism, and human
rights violations. To prove his point, after pro-
viding a historical snapshot of Bangladesh’s
‘geopolitics of ummah(s)’ in Chapter 3, in the
two subsequent chapters, Hasan diligently
examines Islamization by the main political
parties: the Awami League (AL) and the
Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP). However,
by deploying the Eurocentric framework that
he criticizes, Hasan names the AL and the BNP
as the liberal Ummah due to their acceptance of
democracy and secularism, while these norms’
rejection by other groups leads him to denomi-
nate them radical and extremist. In this sense,
rather than articulating a substantial analysis of
the politics through Islamic concepts, Hasan
just carries the problem from the religious-sec-
ular division to the ummahs division with a
simple cosmetic/rhetorical move where both
divisions are formed with reference to the same
Western objects. In which case, it is not clear
what the point of using Ummah instead of
Western concepts is in terms of their ability and
capacity of explanation. This superficiality is
also apparent in his forcing the Islamist identity
on the AL. Hasan infers the AL’s Islamism from
some strategic and symbolic Islamic acts or
policies of it, such as alliances with Islamists or
adding ‘La Ilaha Illallah’ (no God but Allah) on
the election posters. Interestingly, while those
formal/cosmetic instances are adequate to
deduce its Islamism, not only similar secular
instances but also the AL’s persecution of
Islamists are not enough to declare it secularist,
although Islamization, akin to Gramscian pas-
sive revolution, is a way to contain Islamism
and gain public legitimacy, whereas secularism
has no public appeal and generates resentment
in Bangladesh.
Hasan’s Eurocentrism reveals itself more dis-
cernibly in the following chapters, where he uses
these Western norms to gauge the success and
value of Bangladeshi politics. In Chapter 6, he
scrutinizes the state-supported Islamization pro-
cess by analysing the Five-Year Plans,
Madrasah(s), public and private Islamic mission-
ary activities like Imam training academy,
mosque-based programmes, the Tabligh Jamaat,
and Islamization of the public sphere. He con-
cludes this chapter by declaring Bangladeshi
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