JP/4/Fundam

JP/4/Fundam

Encouraging vengeful fundamentalism

Jeremy Seabrook
Guardian News Service
London

You see them everywhere on the streets of Dhaka, Jakarta,
Karachi, the boys with their qualifications: a Master's in
personnel, a diploma in management, a degree in marketing. You
meet them on the battered buses, in the dusty parks, in the fly-
blown eating-houses, clutching copies of their "biodata" in
plastic folders.

They are on their way from house to house, giving tuition to
the children of the middle class. These are the representatives
of the pinched under-employment of a generation raised on the
promise that if only they study business, they will be sure of a
managerial job, big money, a security greater even than that
guaranteed by government service.

Business culture has seized the imagination of the young all
over the world. It has brought new hope to a generation whose
educational aspirations have been transformed by its revelations
of wealth- creation. They carry textbooks, published in the U.S.,
pages of which they learn by rote. Many are from poor families,
from small towns and distant villages, who have sold precious
land or gone into bottomless debt for the sake of a better life
for their children.

For them, to study in the capital enhances prestige --
distance from the homeplace, it seems, adds value, no matter how
academically thin the object of study, no matter how shaky the
institution. It is already clear that most of these young men
will not find the place they covet in the global economy. They
are dupes of the latest fad to reach the third world, a reach-me-
down form of study formulated in the West, and now a major
export, of only marginal value to the countries whose young have
taken it up with such zeal.

Global business culture is calculated to pacify yet another
generation of impatient young people. Bangladesh, Indonesia,
India are full of unemployed graduates. Twenty-five years ago,
their counterparts would have been studying politics and
sociology, while their grandparents applied themselves to
liberation and neo-colonialism. At that time, they would have
been quoting Marx and Fanon, animated by a shining-eyed
conviction that they would inherit the earth.

In the process they are committed to a learning as remote from
their experience as the study of Tudor history was in the
colonial era. Many of the devotees of business have already been
disillusioned, embittered that their efforts have yielded no
tangible reward. There are no prizes, no salary, no job. They
prowl the streets of the capital, hungry, predatory, angry, their
trousers frayed, fake logos on their dusty trainers, haunted by a
social injustice which the dogmas of their teachings require them
to interpret as personal failure.

One consequence of all this has been a profound disturbance to
their sense of self. Some deal with this by a determination to
leave the country, to find a job, any job, as long as it is far
from personal witnesses to their humiliation -- a driver in
Riyadh, a security guard in Singapore, a cook in Abu Dhabi.

But other able young men have been readily enlisted by
criminal gangs, often attached to political parties. Extortion,
blackmail, protection money are part of the daily life of the
slums. When the Bangladesh National party won the elections in
October, the first big changeover of personnel was not in the
ministries, but among the mastaans, or gangs, running the river
ghats, railway terminals and bus stands.

Gang warfare, fallout from the corruption which occupants of
real jobs (especially in the police, customs and excise, the
bureaucracy, property speculation and transport) are in a
position to practice, do sometimes lead to business opportunities
for former students in the lengthening shadow-world cast by the
market economy. Killings are to be made, it turns out, often
literally: Bodies are found on garbage dumps from kidnappings
that go wrong, contracts for the murder of territorial rivals or
disputants over smuggled goods.

But there is an alternative for those repelled by a world
which has rejected their attempts at self-improvement. The
politicizing of religion offers another kind of self-expression.
The money that has poured in from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf
states in the past two decades has led to the construction of
thousands of madrasas (Islamic schools) and mosques, and the
setting up of Islamic charities, many of which are informed by
fundamentalist ideology. The courtyards of the big mosques are
full of elderly beggars and orphans, the sick and disabled,
leprosy and tuberculosis patients, who receive food and shelter
provided by no other agency.

The number of children educated in Islamic schools has
increased dramatically, especially since governments have been
under pressure from western financial institutions to implement
structural adjustments, and have cut spending on education,
health and nutrition. It is said that in government schools, the
teachers don't show up.

Those who see symbols of decadence in western culture are led
to the austere purification rituals of a backward-looking version
of Islam. The "purely" economic prescriptions of the IMF, World
Bank and WTO have repercussions far beyond the merely economic
sphere: They profoundly affect social relationships, culture,
religion. Many people see in these a fundamental assault on the
sensibility and tradition of the people; a form of the very
fundamentalism which they call forth in response, and which is
met with astonished incomprehension in the west.

In this way, the very ideology of business serves indirectly
as a recruiting agent for a vengeful fundamentalism, for versions
of religion and faith unrecognizable to tradition and piety
alike. The purveyors of these elegant doctrines of self-
enrichment dissociate themselves from the consequences of their
apparently secular preachings; with the results that we have
seen.

There are, of course, other elements in the business
development model and the reactions it provokes. In Bangladesh,
the battleground of the warring ideologies of modernized
colonialism and politicized Islam is an older, rooted Bengali
culture. The Islam of Bengal was generous and inclusive. It co-
existed, not only alongside Hinduism, animism, Buddhism and
Christianity, but also the humanism of a thousand-year-old
Bengali tradition, with its song, poetry and drama of Lalon,
Nazrul Islam and Tagore, as well as the ancient music of the
paddy fields of Bengal. This culture is being ground between
alien ideologies, its antique beauty a dwindling force in lives
to which it not so long ago gave meaning.

It was stated by the U.S. and the coalition against the terror
of Sept. 11 that the response would be military, diplomatic and
humanitarian. No question of any effort to deepen an
understanding of the roots of fundamentalism; and for a very good
reason. If it were our objective to anticipate, and perhaps even
to forestall, such developments, this might require an
acknowledgment of our own role in the creation of the cycle of
hope, disappointment and anger.

In the vacuum left by the extinction of socialism and the
decay of secular cultural identities, people have found in the
disciplined asperities of a regressive version of Islam a
hopeful, and sometimes, murderous alternative. It seems we are
content to rest in an idle laissez-faire of the spirit, which
permits events to take their course, and only then to seek to
rectify them by intensifying a violence which we have already
helped to unleash in the world.