Mujibism is a ‘religion'. Deny that at your own peril

I was scrolling through Facebook when a woman in her thirties, wearing a beautiful red Jamdani sari, caught my attention. She had apparently spent a small fortune on something she fancied and was happily explaining the damage to her purse. 

I clicked on her profile and found that her biography contained a declaration, “Sheikh Mujib is my father’s father. Any problem?” Her cover photograph was of Sheikh Mujib as well. She appeared, judging by her other posts, to live somewhere in the West. 

I had come across this sort of devotional posts before. Quite a few times I would say. Sheikh Mujib's face appears on social media profiles (or cover photos) with a regularity usually reserved for romantic partners and religious figures. His ‘admirers’ speak of him as a permanent moral authority.

I know a bookseller in Nilkhet who is an atheist. An atheist bookseller in Nilkhet is itself an interesting specimen. He has rejected the supernatural but retained an impressive capacity for worship. His chosen object of veneration is Sheikh Mujib.

So, this brings me to a proposition that might irritate a number of people…Mujibism is a religion.

Well, it has no doctrine of the afterlife, no divine revelation and no recognised clergy. But as a faith, with its sacred personality, prescribed rituals, authorised interpretations and an elaborate system of heresies, it has acquired almost all of a religion's institutional habits.

Consider the qualifications.

A founding figure whose moral authority must remain beyond serious dispute? Checked. A body of approved teachings? Checked. Regular commemorations, portraits, monuments and ceremonial declarations of loyalty? Checked.

A community of believers for whom criticism of the founder is not an argument to be answered but an offence to be punished? Checked.

An expanding library of devotional literature, in which every achievement is attributed to the founder and every failure to his enemies? Most certainly checked.

The important difference is between admiration and faith. Admiration permits revision. Faith requires submission. A political leader can be admired for his achievements while being held responsible for his failures. A sacred personality cannot. His failures must be explained away, preferably by invoking conspiracies or insufficient devotion among the population.

Mujibism has become particularly accomplished at this last exercise.

The Awami League's own account of the ideology is instructive. In a 2021 essay, the party itself described ‘Mujibism’ as a political philosophy based on nationalism, democracy, socialism and secularism. These were the four founding principles of Bangladesh's 1972 Constitution. 

There is nothing inherently objectionable about them. Indeed, they provide perfectly respectable material for political argument. But observe what happens when a political programme becomes inseparable from the personality of its author. 

To challenge the programme becomes to challenge the man. To challenge the man becomes to challenge independence. And to challenge the party claiming exclusive inheritance of his legacy becomes, by a remarkable feat of political theology, an attack on Bangladesh itself.

This was the central trick of Mujibism…the conversion of a historical contribution into perpetual political ownership.

Mujib's role in Bangladesh's independence movement was undeniable. His leadership, the Six-Point programme, the 1970 electoral victory and his March 7 speech helped transform Bengali nationalism into a mass political force. These achievements need neither exaggeration nor compulsory reverence.

But the Mujib who helped lead the people towards independence was also the Mujib who governed Bangladesh between 1972 and 1975. The two cannot be separated merely because one makes a more attractive portrait. And therein lies the difficulty for the faithful.

The years after independence brought reconstruction, administrative collapse, corruption, political violence, the devastating famine of 1974 and mounting allegations of abuses by the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini. Mujib faced extraordinary problems, many inherited from war and some aggravated by his government's decisions. His response was increasingly authoritarian.

In January 1975, the Fourth Amendment concentrated power in the presidency. The subsequent creation of BAKSAL established a one-party political system. In June, the government closed all but four newspapers, which came under state control.

Yet the faithful have developed an ingenious explanation. BAKSAL was not the destruction of political pluralism but a noble experiment in national reconstruction. The restrictions on the press were unfortunate necessities. The economic failures were somebody else's doing. Had Mujib survived, Bangladesh would apparently have become a model society.

The Awami League's official account goes so far as to imagine the remarkable development that would have followed his proposed administrative reforms. Every district, it suggests, might have enjoyed the prosperity of Dhaka or Chattogram. 

This is history conducted in the future perfect tense. The evidence is conveniently unavailable because the experiment was never completed.

Of course, Mujib's assassination on August 15, 1975, was an atrocity. The murder of his family was indefensible. But being murdered does not retroactively make every decision of one's government correct. Martyrdom is not an administrative performance review.

Also, the difficulty with political saints is that their lives are often inconveniently well documented.

Ancient religious figures emerged from societies in which the preservation of records was expensive and largely controlled by literate elites. Modern political leaders enjoy no such protection. They leave speeches, parliamentary proceedings, newspapers, photographs, policy decisions and witnesses. Mujib lived in the age of recorded history.

There are people who remember 1971 with gratitude and 1974 with horror. Their memories need not contradict each other. Sheikh Hasina however understood the political value of suppressing that distinction.

During her long tenure, Mujib's image became inseparable from the machinery of the state. His portrait was everywhere. His speeches acquired the status of civic scripture. Anniversaries became elaborate official observances. Government institutions participated in commemorations, and the political ownership of the Liberation War grew increasingly exclusive. 

There was a prescribed vocabulary and an approved interpretation of history. The language of patriotism became indistinguishable from the language of party loyalty.

And then, on August 5, 2024, Hasina fell.

The uprising that drove her from office also brought an assault on the symbols of her father's political legacy. A cult painstakingly constructed over fifteen consecutive years of rule was being dismantled in days. Yet the religion somehow survives.

It survives in admirers who have inherited the emotional vocabulary of the Awami League without necessarily examining its historical claims. It survives among people for whom defending Mujib is an act of identity rather than an exercise in historical judgment.

But the danger begins when a historical figure becomes the test of national belonging. Bangladesh then ceases to be a country whose citizens may disagree about their past and becomes a congregation divided between believers and heretics.

Which brings me back to the woman in the red Jamdani sari.

She is entitled to admire Mujib and claim whatever symbolic kinship she wishes. But the interesting part of her biography was not the claim that Mujib was her grandfather's equivalent. It was the challenge that followed. “Any problem?”

There, in two words, is the essence of political religion. Belief is not merely declared. The possibility of disagreement is treated as an offence. And that is why Mujibism deserves to be examined as a faith…a faith whose founder was a politician, whose scriptures are political speeches, whose ceremonies were once underwritten by the state and whose adherents can still confuse historical scrutiny with sacrilege.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa