Islam and Democratization in Asia By Shiping Hua

The spectrum of extremism has thus widened with the interplay of religion with a failed social and political order. War on terrorism, global Islamic revival, and tensions with the West expanded the influence of Islam. Many Islamic thinkers are engaged in an intellectual effort to bring Islamic values to the center of the debate in the Islamic world, as a means of renewing their societies that are under siege from Western cultural and political assault. There is thus a new wave of predominantly religion-based revisionism in which religion has become a medium of expression of social discontent, economic dissatisfaction, political activism, and personal unhappiness. The Islamists are riding this wave.

In chapter 5, “Bangladesh: The New Front-Line State in the Struggle between Aspiring Pluralist Democracy and Expanding Political Islam,” Ambassador Tariq Karim remarks that Bangladesh, with its more than 147 million people who are hostage to widespread poverty, presents itself as a most interesting case study: a third-world nation struggling to establish, preserve, and consolidate democracy against the grain of a legacy of deep-rooted political schizophrenia that is apparently embedded in its identity and history. The country's bloody birth itself was indelibly framed within the larger contestation that then defined the Cold War paradigm. At its independence in 1971, Bangladesh emerged as a uniquely homogenous nation in South Asia, with its population comprised of 98 percent ethnic Bengalis. Despite 88 percent of its people being Sunni Muslims, it had rejected political Islam as the defining logic for state-foundation and consolidation, and proclaimed secularism along with democracy, nationalism, and social justice as the core pillars of the state.

Bangladesh was considered until recently as a possible role model for developing Muslim nations because of its inherited secular tradition, its democratic aspirations, and inclusive world vision. It has a long history of struggle against authoritarianism for democratic rights, and is a democracy in which voting gives each individual a say in electing leaders of their choice and in governance issues. However, the progressive abdication of the pluralist vision of democracy and good governance by successive political parties elected to government, whose indulgence of a zero-sum politics relentlessly undermined and corrupted the core