ABSTRACT
The media when discussing the political climate in Bangladesh has always highlighted incidents of Islamic militancy, thus indirectly providing evidence of Bangladesh becoming less secular, descending into an unstable and dysfunctional Muslim country and becoming another haven for Islamist extremism. This chapter shows how this book counters this argument by focusing on the importance of understanding the dynamics between religion and secularism within specific cultural contexts. This argument has been elaborated by analysing literature from history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. Electoral results, reports and interviews with contemporary Bangladeshi political commentators, intellectuals, activists, and academic researchers having views of secular and religious ideology were gathered to understand the historical relationships of secularism and religion in Bengal right from the pre-British period to the contemporary Bangladesh. This book primarily explores the social and political effects of the confrontation of syncretistic religious traditions such as those in Bengal with colonial and orthodox Islamic influences. The chapter concludes that, despite external support and sympathy among the public for Islamic values, the orthodox and more extremist interpretations of Islam, which generally lead to the creation of a theocratic state, have failed to influence the syncretistic and pluralistic religious and cultural life of Bangladesh.
