The Gathering Storm

(Page 5 of 5)

As I travel through Bangladesh, many of my informal encounters reinforce this impression of moderation. In the southern town of Bagerhat, for instance, I'm buttonholed by Mohammed Helal Uddin, the black-bearded imam of the historic 77-domed Shait Gumbad mosque. He shoos away a crowd of Bangladeshi pilgrims and visitors. "No talk for you," he chides, "only people from America." The combination of his fractured English, my nonexistent Bangla, and a translator gone temporarily AWOL doesn't make for the easiest of exchanges. But the gist of what he wants to say is clear enough.

"Islam is very peaceful religion," the imam insists. "Holy Koran says all people created equal, no difference. Ladies and gentlemen, different prayers, but also same, equal. Islam always speaking truthful, no bad work."

I ask him about Cyclone Sidr and global warming. "Is very difficult for us," he answers. "People come here to mosque to be shelter." He waves a hand at the huge palm trees lying horizontal across a brick wall, still there three months after the catastrophe.

"What do you think is responsible for all these changes in the climate?" I ask.

"We see the will of Allah," he replies. "We see as da'wa" -- a call to follow Islam.

"Is it just an act of God, then?" I ask. "Because some people think the rich countries are also to blame. Do you believe that?"

He purses his lips, thinks about it, then looks me straight in the eye and says softly, "Yes."

A group of women in burkas stands at a distance, curious about our conversation.

Those who work with the poor in southern Bangladesh are made apprehensive by all the black burkas and new madrassas they are seeing among the saline fields and the shrimp farms. Some are also fearful that the Islamists benefit from the quiet support of the region's secular authorities, though they're reluctant to talk about this on the record.

"A lot of money is also coming in from Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries to build mosques," says one local NGO activist who prefers not to be identified. "Jamaat-e-Islami, the Islamic political party, is very strong here. It's part of an international network. In 1971, during the war of liberation, its members took up arms in favor of Pakistan."

Khushi Kabir, the director of Nijera Kori, has no particular religious affiliations but shares these anxieties. She is willing to talk more freely about them, perhaps feeling that living in Dhaka and having good international connections give her some added protection.

"You have to understand," she says, "that this isn't so much a Muslim culture as a Bengali culture. At the village level, Muslims and Hindus live together quite harmoniously. But what's being imposed now is an Islamic identity. It's a global thing, this move to create a big Muslim brotherhood." Her lip curls with disdain. "I just hope they don't go for a Muslim sisterhood. I want nothing to do with that."

There's a further twist to the story, she adds, a perverse side effect of the well-intentioned involvement of outside agencies. "For example, the World Bank and UNDP" -- meaning the United Nations Development Program -- "have this model that they've developed in other Muslim countries like Egypt. In the name of strengthening communities, they've insisted on giving a central role to the imams. But this is not a society that's been dominated by the dictates of the imam. In Bangladesh the role of the imam has basically been restricted to the rituals of birth, marriage, and death. That's changing now. The lack of secular space is becoming a big threat."

I ask her how this manifests itself in everyday life.

"There always used to be a lot of cultural activities in the villages where the lines between Muslim and Hindu were very blurred," she answers. "The jatra, for example, which was a stylized theater performance by traveling troupes of actors, based on local history and folklore. Or the Gazi-Kalu, where you could debate any issue you liked through songs and poetry. But now all I see are the waaz -- the Muslim prayer gatherings and sermons."

Until recently, the environment and climate change have not played a big role in Islamic theology. That, too, is beginning to change. Fazlun Khalid, director of the Islamic Foundation for Ecology and Environmental Sciences in Birmingham, England, believes that "conserving the environment is simply an expression of worship." Far from being alien to Islam, Khalid argues, environmentalism is rooted in four core principles of shariah, or Islamic law: the unity principle (tawhid), the creation principle (fitra), the balance principle (mizan), and the responsibility, or stewardship, principle (khalifa).

The religious scholar Mawil Izzi Dien, who was educated in Iraq and now teaches at the University of Wales, quotes the Koran in support of this view. "Do no mischief on the earth after it has been set in order," one verse says. And elsewhere, in Izzi Dien's paraphrase: "Those who corrupt the earth or its contents will suffer an awful doom."

Sentiment on these issues has begun to stir internationally, for example in the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), a group of 57 Muslim states. "The OIC has recently started doing more work in the area of climate change," Saleemul Huq, a Bangladeshi who was one of the lead authors of the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report, tells me when I call him at his London office. "And certainly the inequities of climate change are going to feed generally anti-Western feelings in the Islamic world."

In Bangladesh the debate is still pretty much limited to Dhaka's educated secular elite. Those who are most at risk don't yet use the vocabulary of climate change, says Shahidul Islam. "But what they understand is this: last year the tide was here" -- he chops a hand against the wall, then raises it a few inches -- "and this year it's here." Yet at the local level, too, there are signs of a shift. Bangladesh's Imam Training Academy, which operates under the auspices of the lavishly funded Islamic Foundation, now includes the environment in the list of topics its trainers use "to inspire the Imams of Mosques in order to create consciousness in the society."

"Most people still think the cyclones and sea-level rise are an act of God," says Mozaharul Alam, the climate expert at the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies. "But as the topic gets incorporated into the educational system, awareness grows. When people realize that they're not an act of God but the act of someone else, well... it's unpredictable how they will react."

In Dhaka's Zia International Airport, waiting for the Emirates flight that will take me home, I'm startled by the realization that everyone else in the waiting area -- every single person -- is a young Bangladeshi male, all of them bound, like me, for Dubai. I wonder how many of them have been driven from their villages by floods, by cyclones, by the salinity of the soil; how many of them have found the overcrowded, polluted chaos of Dhaka too much to endure; what they will have learned about other kinds of Islam by the time they come back. This time I look at them a little differently and even, I have to confess, a little nervously.

I'm reminded of something that Haroon ur Rashid, the architect, said when we talked about India's fear of al Qaeda-inspired terrorism taking root in Bangladesh. "That's crap," he snorted. "The general mass of people here are God-fearing, but they're not fundamentalists."

Then he paused and modified the thought. "But of course that could change quickly, because this is a worldwide trend. And all you need is a few people to disrupt things. As Che Guevara once said: give me 11 good people and I can overthrow a government." The line may be apocryphal, but it kept playing in my head.

It's easy to sink into despair here, but Bangladeshis, despite being battered by centuries of natural and man-made disasters, seem the least despairing, the most resilient, of people.

"We Bengalis are a poetical people," Rashid told me. "As we say here, it's hope that keeps us alive. If we lose our hope, we might as well not live."

But what about the rest of us? Because the actions of the outside world are going to be critical in determining whether Bangladesh's future is survival or an apocalypse that may touch us all.

Well, says Alam, "the first thing is to build sufficient infrastructure to protect us in the future. Better embankments, wider canals, sluice gates."

"Which will cost a fortune," I suggest.

He smiles wryly and nods. "Yes, I know. And it probably won't be enough anyway. And if it's not enough, then the estuaries will move inland and the whole area will become one big tidal floodplain."

And if India, the United States, the world, begin to look at Bangladesh as a geopolitical Rorschach test, and see in the inkblot only the shape of radical Islam? Just last year, pointing to desertification in sub-Saharan Africa and sea-level rise in Bangladesh and other coastal areas in Asia and the Pacific, a group of 11 retired U.S. generals and admirals described global warming as a "threat multiplier" and warned that "the chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide, and terrorism."

"True," Alam says, "that may happen. Although it isn't necessarily a bad thing. If there's a security response, you can use that to draw attention to the severity of the problem and so increase the pressure to restrict greenhouse gas emissions."

All of which will require concerted international action on a scale we've never seen before. The current machinery of the United Nations won't remotely be enough to deal with the kind of complex humanitarian emergencies that will be forced on us by global warming, says Sir Crispin Tickell, a former British ambassador to the U.N., when I meet him for lunch at his office at Oxford University. "One answer is to create a World Environment Organization," he tells me. "And it'll have to have real enforcement powers, like the World Trade Organization."

These are big thoughts -- utopian, a skeptic might say -- and Bangladeshis think mainly of tomorrow. Will there be enough rice? Enough clean drinking water? Will the tiger get me? All of us have the same human tendency to plan for the next day, next week, next year. Projecting political developments 10, 20, 50 years into the future is a chancy business, as imprecise a science in its way as the modeling of climate change. But those are undoubtedly the terms, and the timescales, on which we now have to think.