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    Piety, music and gender transformation: reconfiguring women as culture bearing markers of modernity and nationalism in Bangladesh
    (© 2011 Taylor & Francis.) Huq, Samia; BRAC Institute of Governance and Development
    The rise in an intense, textually-based piety, which has become increasingly prevalent in many circles in Bangladesh in the past decade, sees music as taking away from an ideal pious disposition, and therefore considers its removal from everyday life as a requisite to becoming a good Muslim. The removal of music is critically looked upon by secular Bengali Muslims, where singing, especially songs of the Nobel Laureate Tagore, is equated with cultural pride and Bangladeshi nationalism in the secular-liberal, especially the intellectual imaginary. The shunning of such music is thus tantamount to shunning 'Bengaliness' and a source of anxiety for the nationalist. In this article, through a deeper exploration of women's struggles of and sense of achievement in giving up music, I argue that for the women in pursuit of piety, what the act of giving up music speaks to is inner changes that enable them to critically reflect upon roles and relationships that have long been the defining features of a particular kind of middle class, Bengali, feminine self. The paper argues that shunning music is taken as a medium through which women critically rethink their positions at home, reconfigure old roles and expectations and come out of the process with a greater sense of control and ability to write their own identities as Muslim wives and women.
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    Defining self and other: Bangladesh’s secular aspirations and its writing of islam
    (© 2013 Sameeksha Trust, 2013-12) Huq, Samia
    Bangladesh’s experience with secularism has been a checkered one. Beginning with a strong constitutional mandate and political rhetoric, the word secularism has been changed, removed and restored, while Islam remains the state religion. While aspirations to the principles of secularism, i.e., tolerance, peaceful co-existence and equal treatment of all religions by the state, have been battled at the level of constitutional amendments and political affiliations, these aspirations also undergird a certain epistemic ground, framed by hermeneutic approaches, which produces particular ways of understanding the self as Muslim and its non-Muslim others. This article takes a look at that epistemic ground- tracing the changes in constructions of self and other brought by the manner in which the Islamic Foundation, Bangladesh has approached the Quran, methods for reading it and the manner in which it has advocated attachment to the Islamic tradition. The article not only traces a shift over time, but highlights how an increasingly muted understanding of power has led, amidst calls for the restoration of secularism in an ever-growing democracy, to an ever expansive gap between Muslims and the non-Muslim others they share the nation state of Bangladesh with.