Protests in Dhaka over inheritance law

Large protests took place in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladeash (the former East Pakistan), despite a prohibition against such assembly under the interim, military-backed regime. The protesters were from the Islamic Constitution Movement, one of a number of Islamist movements in Bangladesh campaigning for a non-secular constitution (the Bangadeshi constitution is secular, though the state religion is Islam, and the the country is Muslim-majority, but there are minority populations of Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and indigenous belief adherents).

The cause of the riot was report of a draft law to grant equal inheritance rights to men and women. The protesters insist they are in favour of women’s rights, but feel that they must exist within the framework of Islam. While the two are hardly mutually exclusive, and such a balance is certainly possible, the fact that a violent protest broke out over a draft law (it will not be legally binding, it will merely act as a guideline for the forming of legislation by the Parliament expected to be elected at the end of this year) suggests that these men are fighting to protect priviledge, rather than faith.

Islam is an adaptable faith, as evinced by the rise of Islamic banking (since Muslims cannot earn interest from other Muslims, Islamic banks offer customers “gifts” at regular intervals, calculated using the interest rates of other banks). Muslims can communicate their desire to submit and live in the modern world. There weren’t any protest from the ICM or Jamaat-e-Islami (Bangledesh’s largest Islamist organization) when they first started getting a reasonable rate of return. Islamists and even Islamic fundamentalists (the two are not synonymous, Islamism is a political ideology that holds that Qur’anic principles should guide the governance of Muslim nations) now collect what is essentially interest but don’t call it interest. So men and women can gain equal inheritance rights and call it something else. But Bangladesh’s “Islamist” movements won’t stand for that.

These men are defending their priviledge. It’s just like men who insist that women must be convered head to to at all times – that certainly isn’t in the Qur’an. Rather like how Western imperalists used Christianity to justify oppression of other nations and enslavement of other races, the ICM, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the Ahkame Sharia Hefazat Committee (another group that took part in the protest) are using Islam to justify sex-inequality.