JP\/4\/Fundam<\/p>\n
Encouraging vengeful fundamentalism<\/p>\n
Jeremy Seabrook
\nGuardian News Service
\nLondon<\/p>\n
You see them everywhere on the streets of Dhaka, Jakarta,
\nKarachi, the boys with their qualifications: a Master's in
\npersonnel, a diploma in management, a degree in marketing. You
\nmeet them on the battered buses, in the dusty parks, in the fly-
\nblown eating-houses, clutching copies of their "biodata" in
\nplastic folders.<\/p>\n
They are on their way from house to house, giving tuition to
\nthe children of the middle class. These are the representatives
\nof the pinched under-employment of a generation raised on the
\npromise that if only they study business, they will be sure of a
\nmanagerial job, big money, a security greater even than that
\nguaranteed by government service.<\/p>\n
Business culture has seized the imagination of the young all
\nover the world. It has brought new hope to a generation whose
\neducational aspirations have been transformed by its revelations
\nof wealth- creation. They carry textbooks, published in the U.S.,
\npages of which they learn by rote. Many are from poor families,
\nfrom small towns and distant villages, who have sold precious
\nland or gone into bottomless debt for the sake of a better life
\nfor their children.<\/p>\n
For them, to study in the capital enhances prestige --
\ndistance from the homeplace, it seems, adds value, no matter how
\nacademically thin the object of study, no matter how shaky the
\ninstitution. It is already clear that most of these young men
\nwill not find the place they covet in the global economy. They
\nare dupes of the latest fad to reach the third world, a reach-me-
\ndown form of study formulated in the West, and now a major
\nexport, of only marginal value to the countries whose young have
\ntaken it up with such zeal.<\/p>\n
Global business culture is calculated to pacify yet another
\ngeneration of impatient young people. Bangladesh, Indonesia,
\nIndia are full of unemployed graduates. Twenty-five years ago,
\ntheir counterparts would have been studying politics and
\nsociology, while their grandparents applied themselves to
\nliberation and neo-colonialism. At that time, they would have
\nbeen quoting Marx and Fanon, animated by a shining-eyed
\nconviction that they would inherit the earth.<\/p>\n
In the process they are committed to a learning as remote from
\ntheir experience as the study of Tudor history was in the
\ncolonial era. Many of the devotees of business have already been
\ndisillusioned, embittered that their efforts have yielded no
\ntangible reward. There are no prizes, no salary, no job. They
\nprowl the streets of the capital, hungry, predatory, angry, their
\ntrousers frayed, fake logos on their dusty trainers, haunted by a
\nsocial injustice which the dogmas of their teachings require them
\nto interpret as personal failure.<\/p>\n
One consequence of all this has been a profound disturbance to
\ntheir sense of self. Some deal with this by a determination to
\nleave the country, to find a job, any job, as long as it is far
\nfrom personal witnesses to their humiliation -- a driver in
\nRiyadh, a security guard in Singapore, a cook in Abu Dhabi.<\/p>\n
But other able young men have been readily enlisted by
\ncriminal gangs, often attached to political parties. Extortion,
\nblackmail, protection money are part of the daily life of the
\nslums. When the Bangladesh National party won the elections in
\nOctober, the first big changeover of personnel was not in the
\nministries, but among the mastaans, or gangs, running the river
\nghats, railway terminals and bus stands.<\/p>\n
Gang warfare, fallout from the corruption which occupants of
\nreal jobs (especially in the police, customs and excise, the
\nbureaucracy, property speculation and transport) are in a
\nposition to practice, do sometimes lead to business opportunities
\nfor former students in the lengthening shadow-world cast by the
\nmarket economy. Killings are to be made, it turns out, often
\nliterally: Bodies are found on garbage dumps from kidnappings
\nthat go wrong, contracts for the murder of territorial rivals or
\ndisputants over smuggled goods.<\/p>\n
But there is an alternative for those repelled by a world
\nwhich has rejected their attempts at self-improvement. The
\npoliticizing of religion offers another kind of self-expression.
\nThe money that has poured in from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
\nstates in the past two decades has led to the construction of
\nthousands of madrasas (Islamic schools) and mosques, and the
\nsetting up of Islamic charities, many of which are informed by
\nfundamentalist ideology. The courtyards of the big mosques are
\nfull of elderly beggars and orphans, the sick and disabled,
\nleprosy and tuberculosis patients, who receive food and shelter
\nprovided by no other agency.<\/p>\n
The number of children educated in Islamic schools has
\nincreased dramatically, especially since governments have been
\nunder pressure from western financial institutions to implement
\nstructural adjustments, and have cut spending on education,
\nhealth and nutrition. It is said that in government schools, the
\nteachers don't show up.<\/p>\n
Those who see symbols of decadence in western culture are led
\nto the austere purification rituals of a backward-looking version
\nof Islam. The "purely" economic prescriptions of the IMF, World
\nBank and WTO have repercussions far beyond the merely economic
\nsphere: They profoundly affect social relationships, culture,
\nreligion. Many people see in these a fundamental assault on the
\nsensibility and tradition of the people; a form of the very
\nfundamentalism which they call forth in response, and which is
\nmet with astonished incomprehension in the west.<\/p>\n
In this way, the very ideology of business serves indirectly
\nas a recruiting agent for a vengeful fundamentalism, for versions
\nof religion and faith unrecognizable to tradition and piety
\nalike. The purveyors of these elegant doctrines of self-
\nenrichment dissociate themselves from the consequences of their
\napparently secular preachings; with the results that we have
\nseen.<\/p>\n
There are, of course, other elements in the business
\ndevelopment model and the reactions it provokes. In Bangladesh,
\nthe battleground of the warring ideologies of modernized
\ncolonialism and politicized Islam is an older, rooted Bengali
\nculture. The Islam of Bengal was generous and inclusive. It co-
\nexisted, not only alongside Hinduism, animism, Buddhism and
\nChristianity, but also the humanism of a thousand-year-old
\nBengali tradition, with its song, poetry and drama of Lalon,
\nNazrul Islam and Tagore, as well as the ancient music of the
\npaddy fields of Bengal. This culture is being ground between
\nalien ideologies, its antique beauty a dwindling force in lives
\nto which it not so long ago gave meaning.<\/p>\n
It was stated by the U.S. and the coalition against the terror
\nof Sept. 11 that the response would be military, diplomatic and
\nhumanitarian. No question of any effort to deepen an
\nunderstanding of the roots of fundamentalism; and for a very good
\nreason. If it were our objective to anticipate, and perhaps even
\nto forestall, such developments, this might require an
\nacknowledgment of our own role in the creation of the cycle of
\nhope, disappointment and anger.<\/p>\n
In the vacuum left by the extinction of socialism and the
\ndecay of secular cultural identities, people have found in the
\ndisciplined asperities of a regressive version of Islam a
\nhopeful, and sometimes, murderous alternative. It seems we are
\ncontent to rest in an idle laissez-faire of the spirit, which
\npermits events to take their course, and only then to seek to
\nrectify them by intensifying a violence which we have already
\nhelped to unleash in the world.<\/p>",
"url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/jp4fundam-1447899208",
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