Islam and politics in Bangladesh: the followers of Ummah

Mubashar Hasan, an young academic from Bangladesh who was kidnapped and later released after 44 days in November 2017 (21), delivers a nuanced, refined, and well researched book on the growing nexus between Islam and politics in contemporary Bangladesh. He does so by employing socio-political and historical approaches, an area of knowledge which has so far attracted inadequate scholarly attention, be it at home or abroad. For the analysis and conceptualisation of the book, the author relies mainly on the Islamic concept of ummah, which is further reinforced by another Islamic ideal, 'Muslim brotherhood'. This ideology of ummah is for Muslims as powerful as Western liberalism (204) because it addresses a broader Muslim community beyond national boundaries and time periods. In this respect, it competes with the dominant value system of western societies. This book thus clearly demonstrates that the underlying spirit of political ummah undermines the spirit of liberal democracy and secularism. It can thereby also foster interfaith intolerance and conservative religiosity, and concurrently welcoming religious fundamentalism (2).