Monotheism, Certainty, and Baul Persecution in Bangladesh

Islamists in Bangladesh have increased their attacks against Bauls and Sufis while the interim government stands by passively. We need to re-examine our concepts of tolerance and monotheism.

A cultural purge is afoot in Bangladesh. Sufi mystics, Baul artistes and practitioners, who more than any other group embody Bengal’s spiritual heritage, find themselves victims of targeted attacks. If being victims of harangues, threats, and insults wasn’t enough, they are now being assaulted, humiliated, and uprooted from their spiritual abodes scattered across the country. Sufi shrines, Baul Akhras, are being desecrated, vandalised, and looted, with hundreds of cultural performances being cancelled since last year.

The self-styled Islamist iconoclasts carrying out these attacks, who once belonged to the fringes, supposedly champion god’s oneness. However, that their campaign is sowing widespread societal discord, something abhorred by mainstream Muslim society, is none of their concerns, nor is the human dignity of their victims.

Worse still is the interim government’s role as an idle bystander. By extolling these attackers as “pressure groups”, it is unwittingly — or, perhaps wittingly — jeopardising Bangladesh’s return to the democratic path. While taking no meaningful steps to hold the perpetrators of these violent attacks accountable, it has instead kowtowed to their demands. More and more practitioners of the ‘deviant’ arts, of ‘deviant’ religious beliefs, are being thrown behind bars, with their professions and beliefs pathologised and their lives permanently under peril.

Protecting the Bauls is not only about preserving cultural inheritance and an endangered community. It also means reaffirming the monotheistic conviction that no single clerical authority, political power, or militant faction can, in good faith, represent or embody the oneness or wholeness of the divine.

If Bangladesh’s democratic edifice had always stood on shaky ground, its relatively pluralistic and humane tradition of syncretic coexistence had been its coping stone — not only deflecting many of the criticisms of its failings as a nation, but also inspiring hopes of a promising future, within and without. Today, despite the fall of an autocratic regime, the weight of authoritarian impulses is hardly any lighter, further crumbling its democratic pillars. And the coping stone, in the form of its pluralist heritage, is cracked clean through the middle.

The fall of the Awami League government has been followed by a revival in Islamist revanchism. A group that the previous regime had handsomely rewarded with tangible material benefits for not rocking its boat now claims an exclusive monopoly over victimhood. Buoyed by their sense of victimhood and the intoxicating pleasure of certitude, they preach the correct way to be Muslim and practice Islam in the streets, in homes, and on social media. Meanwhile, Baul artistes, who occupy the liminal space between immanence and transcendence, between certainty and uncertainty, have become obvious targets.

To the extent that theological motifs are being deployed to sustain this purge, we cannot allude to such modern concepts as democracy and human rights and hope for a corrective to follow. In other words, a battle needs to be fought on the sacred terrain as well. Only by confronting these zealots in the very idiom they claim to monopolise can we expect to expose the vacuity of Islamist justification for Baul persecution.

Consider how the issue of tolerance is often raised whenever religious tensions flare. Predictably, thus, much has been written and discussed in the media about the intolerance writ large in this recent purge. An almost universal agreement among progressive Bangladeshis has since emerged, positing tolerance as the sine qua non of a well-functioning democracy. Islamists in particular, and the majority population at large, are urged to be tolerant towards minority groups.

Before we follow suit, however, we must ask ourselves whether tolerance is a virtue in the first place. Consider the following contrast as an example: Person A and Person B are almost alike in that they share similar traits except one is tolerant of slavery, while the other isn’t. Person A disapproves of the institution of slavery but deems it a necessary evil for greater economic progress. Person B not only disapproves of slavery but also actively strives to dismantle the practice.

Or, take the position of the interim government on the Baul issue. Despite there being no indication that it actively supports this ongoing persecution, it has remained tolerant throughout, shying away from taking any decisive action to protect the Baul community.

What seems clear in both cases is that tolerance has failed to deliver what most of us would have wanted. At best, we can ask others to be tolerant selectively. In that case, tolerance loses both its intuitive appeal and its moral purchase, and its advocates are accused of hypocrisy. More importantly, every political order — including a democratic one, liberal or otherwise — draws a line between views it can accommodate and those it cannot. Even the most inclusive political order may find certain ideas incompatible, albeit not permanently. Its legitimacy, then, rests less on how tolerant it is of those ideas and more on the legitimacy of the methods it employs in dealing with those who advance them.

If tolerance fails as a moral framework in this case, how should we hold the persecutors of Bauls accountable? We must dive deeper, into the theological grammar that shapes their bellicose rhetoric. At their core, all monotheistic creeds, including Islam, tend to draw and enforce boundaries between a “true” and “false” religion, a dynamic Jan Assmann calls the “Mosaic distinction”. They embody an intolerant streak where they refuse to translate their sovereign god into any other gods, while simultaneously resisting any alliances, cultural or political.

While cosmotheistic religions such as those of ancient India and Egypt view the supreme deity as both transcendent and immanent, the Abrahamic faiths have emancipated their supreme being from the mundane immanence of this world from the outset. These new religions are best understood as “counterreligions”, where proclaiming a truth also means intolerance of falsehoods, of heretics and pagans who spread false doctrines and superstitions, practice idolatry and magic.

In its worst excesses, this intolerance found its manifestation in events such as the Maccabean Revolt in Judea, in the Byzantine Iconoclasm, and in the Wahhabi sack of Karbala, among others. In each instance, the rhetoric of god’s oneness was invoked to purge monotheistic traditions of practices and beliefs condemned as pagan accretions. In each case, the targets of persecution weren’t so much followers of paganism as fellow co-religionists judged to have strayed from the rightful path. A similar purifying impulse animates the current assault on Bauls, who are cast as bearers of unacceptable accretions.

The solution, however, cannot be any categorical rejection of monotheistic intolerance, as many have advocated. For, as Christopher A. Haw has shown, the intolerance monotheistic traditions contain is also apophatic, in which their adherence to an absolute and transcendent truth, which lies beyond humanity’s complete comprehension, relativises all political imaginaries. It is an intolerance of any attempt to locate the ineffable absolute within a single framework, whether that framework is political, theological, or otherwise. Apophatic intolerance thus has a liberatory dimension, paradoxically opening a space for pluralistic coexistence.

The Islamist persecutors of Bauls attempt precisely the opposite, in which they claim a monopoly on the absolute. In their violent attempt to suppress any religious practice they find deviant, they fall prey to the false belief that any finite political system or religious dogma can be a complete or ultimate representation of what is absolute and transcendent, thus vitiating the very creed they hold sacrosanct.

Restoring the apophatic humility at the heart of monotheistic thought, a humility that recognises the absolute as fundamentally beyond human capture, may offer the most potent antidote to the violent certainty now unleashed by the zealots across Bangladesh. Such humility does not ask anyone to surrender belief. Instead, it asks them to abandon any illusion that they alone possess the final word. It refuses idolatry of any political or religious system, urging instead that we acknowledge the limits of our own moral and intellectual horizons.

Interpreting intolerance in such fashion is also key to decoupling it from violence. If we cannot insist that Islamists be tolerant of the Baul community, we can still demand that their intolerance doesn’t translate into violence. Similarly, we should hold the perpetrators of Baul persecution accountable, without resorting to reciprocal violence or excluding them permanently from civic life.

Protecting the Bauls is not only about preserving cultural inheritance and an endangered community. It also means reaffirming the monotheistic conviction that no single clerical authority, political power, or militant faction can, in good faith, represent or embody the oneness or wholeness of the divine. It is about insisting that the transcendent divinity, precisely because it exceeds us, obliges us to coexist. Bangladesh’s future, if it is to be democratic, humane, and prosperous, depends not on the triumph of one interpretation of faith over others, but on the continuity of the many ways its people have sought the divine throughout the centuries.

Image credit:  “Traditional baul festival in Bangladesh 4” by Rayhan9d, licensed under CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.