Zia’s middle path

In the northern Bangladeshi city of Rajshahi, a young woman folds her janamaz after the dawn prayer and picks up a harmonium. On some evenings, she performs a hamd, an Islamic hymn of praise. On others, her fingers navigate the delicate contours of Rabindranath Tagore’s "Amar Shakal Dukher Pradeep." 

To her family, this seamless transition between Islamic devotion and Hindu-influenced Bengali literature presents no psychological rupture. She feels no imperative to choose between piety and poetry. That effortless synthesis represents the enduring legacy of a political experiment launched on September 1st 1978, when a military commander turned president, Ziaur Rahman, consolidated a disparate assembly of political factions to form the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Standard historical accounts view the BNP’s creation through a utilitarian lens. It is typically framed as a tactical maneuver—a nineteen-point manifesto designed to confer civilian legitimacy upon a former general while countering the dominant Awami League. That assessment is correct, but incomplete. Beyond the immediate mechanics of power, Zia built a cultural permission structure. 

He constructed an umbrella wide enough to seat a Sufi qawwal and a syncretic Baul singer at the same table without demanding mutual recantations. He declined to force Bengali Muslims into choosing between the minaret and the cultural stage. Instead, he designed a public square where both were recognized as authentic expressions of national identity.

That refusal to enforce a choice challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of Bengal’s twentieth-century politics. For decades, the nation’s political class insisted on an unresolvable division. On one side stood an urban, secular elite—often more comfortable in English than in rural dialects—that viewed visible Islamic piety as a backward habit best confined to the private sphere. 

On the other stood a conservative religious faction that viewed music, dance, and classical arts with deep doctrinal suspicion. The vast majority of Bangladeshi Muslims inhabited the space between these extremes: praying, fasting, and singing without feeling that these practices conflicted. Yet neither major faction seemed willing to accept them on their own terms.

The BNP functioned as the institutional response to this false dichotomy. Under Zia’s framework, a woman practicing bharatanatyam classical dance and a man reciting naat in praise of the Prophet could both be affirmed as valid members of the national community. 

The spring festival of Basanto Utsav, complete with yellow saris and falling blossoms, coexisted within the same national register as Thursday night gatherings at Sufi shrines. The pastoral folk romances of Jasimuddin were celebrated alongside heavier literary works depicting rural hardship. This was not a fragile compromise brokered between two antagonistic factions. It was the formal recognition of an integrated middle ground occupied by citizens who had never felt internally divided in the first place.

Skeptics might argue that this inclusive policy was merely opportunistic electoral math dressed up as political philosophy. Yet the historical record suggests a deeper calculation. A purely cynical regime would have courted the single largest cultural bloc to maximize its voting base. Instead, Zia’s administration distributed state patronage to both camps simultaneously. 

It supported the secular literary establishment at the Bangla Academy while formalizing state backing for Islamic foundations and religious institutions. It did so publicly, preventing either side from claiming exclusive ownership of the state. Paying the political cost of supporting competing factions suggests conviction alongside strategy.

Zia gave formal institutional backing to a cultural synthesis that rival parties found difficult to accommodate. The Awami League, shaped by the language movement and the secular liberation struggle of 1971, struggled to embrace public religious expression without appearing to compromise its foundational principles. 

The religious right, meanwhile, viewed the traditional arts as unwelcome distractions. The BNP’s innovation was to stop treating faith and culture as zero-sum rivals for the nation's soul. When a rickshaw artist painted a line of folk poetry next to Quranic calligraphy, he was not torn between competing loyalties. He was simply reflecting the lived reality of Bengali Muslim identity.

In political theory, this synthesis served as a check against cultural hegemony. Left unmanaged, one cultural register inevitably becomes the unmarked default of "respectable" nationalism, while all others are treated as suspect. 

A country where classical arts are coded as elite-secular and devotional music is branded as backward has already narrowed the boundaries of citizenship. Zia’s key contribution was to resist that outcome from either direction.

This framework was not without its contradictions. The BNP patronized Sufi shrines while forming pragmatic political alliances with hardline Islamist parties like Jamaat-e-Islami. That ideological tension was never fully resolved. Yet the underlying political insight remained sound: Bangladesh’s majority population would never fit neatly into isolated secular or religious categories, and any attempt to force that division would alienate the electorate.

That legacy is particularly relevant today. The Bangladesh that returned the BNP to power this year differs sharply from the country of 1978. Emerging from a student-led uprising, the current political landscape includes a rejuvenated Jamaat-e-Islami and a younger generation focused on structural reform. The party leadership inherits a critical question: does this foundational synthesis still reflect a living national ethos, or has it devolved into a convenient rhetorical trope for anniversary speeches?

A political movement that once made room for both the shrine and the stage must now decide how to govern. It faces pressure from a rising religious right seeking to narrow the public sphere, and an old secular establishment intent on reclaiming its traditional authority. 

Meanwhile, in Rajshahi, a musician tunes her harmonium after evening prayers, moving effortlessly between traditional genres without reflecting on the political architecture that makes it possible. That is the ultimate test of a well-constructed institution…when it functions effectively, the supporting walls become entirely invisible.

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Mahmud Newaz Joy is a Dhaka-based freelance feature writer & political analyst