Highlighting the dynamic, pluralistic nature of Islamic civilization, Sufia M. Uddin examines the complex history of Islamic state formation in Bangladesh, formerly the eastern part of the Indian ...province of Bengal. Uddin focuses on significant moments in the region's history from medieval to modern times, examining the interplay of language, popular and scholarly religious literature, and the colonial experience as they contributed to the creation of a unique Bengali-Islamic identity.During the precolonial era, Bengali, the dominant regional language, infused the richly diverse traditions of the region, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and, eventually, the Islamic religion and literature brought by Urdu-speaking Muslim conquerors from North India. Islam was not simply imported into the region by the ruling elite, Uddin explains, but was incorporated into local tradition over hundreds of years of interactions between Bengalis and non-Bengali Muslims. Constantly contested and negotiated, the Bengali vision of Islamic orthodoxy and community was reflected in both language and politics, which ultimately produced a specifically Bengali-Muslim culture. Uddin argues that this process in Bangladesh is representative of what happens elsewhere in the Muslim world and is therefore an instructive example of the complex and fluid relations between local heritage and the greater Islamic global community, or umma.
Since its hard-won independence from Pakistan, Bangladesh has been ravaged by economic and environmental disasters. Only recently has the country begun to emerge as a fragile, but functioning, ...parliamentary democracy. The story of Bangladesh, told through the pages of this concise and readable book, is a truly remarkable one. By delving into its past, and through an analysis of the economic, political and social changes that have taken place over the last twenty years, the book explains how Bangladesh is becoming of increasing interest to the international community as a portal into some of the key issues of our age. In this way the book offers an important corrective to the view of Bangladesh as a failed state.
"Open access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295749624 Perilously close to sea level and vulnerable to floods, erosion, and cyclones, Bangladesh is one of the top recipients of development aid earmarked for ...climate change adaptation. Yet, to what extent do adaptation projects address local needs and concerns? Combining environmental history and ethnographic fieldwork with development professionals, rural farmers, and landless women, Misreading the Bengal Delta critiques development narratives of Bangladesh as a “climate change victim.” It examines how development actors repackage colonial-era modernizing projects, which have caused severe environmental effects, as climate-adaptation solutions. Seawalls meant to mitigate against cyclones and rising sea levels instead silt up waterways and induce drainage-related flooding. Other adaptation projects, from saline aquaculture to high-yield agriculture, threaten soil fertility, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Bangladesh’s environmental crisis goes beyond climate change, extending to coastal vulnerabilities that are entwined with underemployment, debt, and the lack of universal healthcare. This timely book analyzes how development actors create flawed causal narratives linking their interventions in the environment and society of the Global South to climate change. Ultimately, such misreadings risk exacerbating climatic threats and structural inequalities. Misreading the Bengal Delta is available in an open access edition through the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation."
Winner of the 2012 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize presented by the National Women's Studies Association Acid attacks against women and girls have captured the attention of the global media, with ...several high-profile reports ranging from the BBC to The Oprah Winfrey Show. In Bangladesh, reasons for the attacks include women's rejection of sexual advances from men, refusal of marriage proposals, family or land disputes, and unmet dowry demands. The consequences are multiple: permanent marks on the body, disfiguration, and potential blindness. In Transnationalism Reversed, Elora Halim Chowdhury explores the complicated terrain of women's transnational antiviolence organizing by focusing on the work done in Bangladesh around acid attacks—and the ways in which the state, international agencies, local expatriates, US media, Bangladeshi immigrants in the United States, survivor-activists, and local women's organizations engage the pragmatics and the transnational rhetoric of empowerment, rescue, and rehabilitation. Grounded in careful ethnographic work, oral history, and theoretical and filmic analysis, Transnationalism Reversed makes a significant contribution to conversations around gendered violence, transnational feminist praxis, and the politics of organizing—particularly around NGOs—in the global South.
In To Be an Entrepreneur, Julia Qermezi Huang focuses on Bangladesh's iAgent social-enterprise model, the set of economic processes that animate the delivery of this model, and the implications for ...women's empowerment. The book offers new ethnographic approaches that reincorporate relational economics into the study of social enterprise. It details the tactics, dilemmas, compromises, aspirations, and unexpected possibilities that digital social enterprise opens up for women entrepreneurs, and reveals the implications of policy models promoting women's empowerment: the failure of focusing on individual autonomy and independence. While describing the historical and incomplete transition of Bangladesh's development models from their roots in a patronage-based moral economy to a market-based social-enterprise arrangement, Huang concludes that market-driven interventions fail to grasp the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which poverty and gender inequality are embedded and sustained.
Drawing on years of research and direct experience in Bangladesh, Stiles pulls together theoretical strands from economics, sociology, and anthropology to help explain an emerging social structure in ...the Third World. These structures, which he calls intermestic development circles, bring together international donor agencies with various domestic community and private organizations. In Bangladesh not-for-profit agencies are dramatically transforming their operation and organizational cultures, while in turn Western NGOs are themselves changing in subtle ways. Scholars of development will find Stiles's intriguing account of the reciprocating effects of extensive interaction, cooperation, and tensions between international donors and domestic recipients informative and provocative.Moving through three discernable phases, each one explainable by resort to different theories, these development circles grow from mere trading arrangements to a coherent social structure, separate from the rest of civil society in Bangladesh. While in the process of the not-for-profits receiving assistance become wealthier and more effective, they lose much of their local identity and become part of a transnational network. At the same time, donors must recast themselves in order to work effectively with these agencies, which often creates tension between local and home offices. The book closes with some recommendations that might attenuate some of the more troubling effects of this transformation.