I REMEMBER Beirut in the years after its wars, when the city still carried the smell of cordite beneath the perfume of its cafés. The walls were patched, the militias renamed, the checkpoints gone — or hidden behind ministries and men in suits — but the divisions remained embedded like old shrapnel in the masonry of everyday life. I once asked both Sunni and Shia clerics there why reconciliation seemed so impossible among people who shared the same God, the same streets, even the same dead. They answered with a melancholy that belongs only to societies exhausted by certainty: ‘Because we understand each other too well.’
Reading Commodore Syed Misbahuddin Ahmed’s reflections in The Deltagram alongside the anxious bureaucratic prose emerging over the Qoumi madrasa question, I hear the same weary echo on the banks of the Buriganga. Bangladesh today suffers not from a lack of conviction, but from an overabundance of mutually isolated certainties. Every segment of society speaks its own moral language with complete confidence, while remaining almost entirely illiterate in the vocabularies spoken by its neighbours.
The state, naturally, responds as states do. It counts. It codifies. It produces wildly contradictory statistics — 13,000 madrasas one year, perhaps 30,000 the next — as if arithmetic itself were governance. Officials stare at the immense Qoumi ecosystem and see merely a ‘policy gap,’ a population insufficiently domesticated into the secular grammar of the global labour market. They mistake surveillance for statecraft. They believe modernisation is something that can be imposed administratively, preferably through a committee and a donor-funded framework.
But this reveals how little the governing classes understand the country they govern.
For millions of poor families, the Qoumi madrasa is not some grand ideological rebellion against modernity. It is the last functioning welfare structure in a state that abandoned welfare long ago. It feeds children. It houses them. It gives dignity to families whom the developmental slogans of Dhaka have passed by entirely. To discuss these institutions purely through the antiseptic vocabulary of ‘extremism,’ ‘regulation,’ or ‘skills integration’ is to speak about hunger without mentioning bread.
And yet the madrasa question exposes something far deeper than educational policy. Bangladesh is no longer a society sharing a common civic imagination. It has fractured into parallel intellectual civilisations.
There is, first, the English-medium archipelago: the urban elite raised on imported secular-liberal orthodoxies, fluent in the moral idioms of London, New York and NGO conferences in Geneva. Their suspicion of religious language in public life is not accidental. It is the product of deliberate ideological grooming. To them, the public invocation of Islamic ethics sounds less like cultural authenticity than latent authoritarianism.
Then there is the sprawling national curriculum system — the great factory of the republic — where morality changes colour with each incoming regime. Here nationalism is endlessly recited but rarely interrogated. Citizens emerge politically mobilised yet philosophically hollow, equipped with slogans but deprived of any stable ethical tradition deeper than the state itself.
And finally comes the madrasa universe, where the classical vocabulary of Islam — amanah, adl, shura, ihsan — still survives with organic fluency. But it survives in institutional isolation, detached from the machinery of modern governance, economics, diplomacy and technological power.
These are not educational tracks. They are separate civilisations sharing the same passport.
This is the real crisis of Bangladesh: not the clash between secularism and religion, but the collapse of a shared moral grammar.
Our intellectuals romanticise this divide because they do not have to inhabit its consequences. It sounds noble to demand that Muslim scholars confidently deploy Islamic ethical concepts within modern civic life. Fine. But who, exactly, will translate amanah into anti-corruption procurement systems? Who will operationalize shura inside a brutally centralised Westminster structure where executive power routinely suffocates consultation? How does one inject adl into a judiciary still staggering beneath colonial architecture and partisan appointments?
The tragedy is almost geological in its depth. Those who understand the mechanics of modern institutions no longer possess an indigenous ethical vocabulary. Those who preserve the ethical vocabulary possess little access to the institutions themselves.
So the nation floats between symbolism and technocracy — between sermons without systems and systems without soul.
And into this fracture enters geopolitics, that old imperial disease disguised as concern.
After the Monsoon Revolution — the student-led uprising that shook Bangladesh’s exhausted authoritarian order — the reaction from much of the Indian media was depressingly familiar. ‘Instability.’ ‘Radicalisation.’ ‘Extremist infiltration.’ An organic democratic eruption by young Bangladeshis was immediately reduced to a regional security malfunction. The old colonial reflex surfaced instantly: Bangladesh could not possibly be acting on its own historical agency. Someone else must be pulling the strings.
Because in the imagination of regional hegemony, Bangladesh is permitted only two identities: obedient client or dangerous instability.
An independent Bangladesh — intellectually self-defining, morally self-confident and politically sovereign — remains intolerable to both domestic status quoists and regional managers alike.
This is why the state’s obsession with ‘stabilising’ the Qoumi sector is so revealing. Stability, in the language of power, rarely means justice. It means predictability. It means populations rendered administratively legible. It means citizens who no longer surprise the ruling order.
But societies cannot be repaired through bureaucratic assimilation. You cannot bulldoze centuries of moral culture with donor terminology and census spreadsheets. Nor can rights-based frameworks imported from international conventions become rhetorical weapons used selectively against community institutions while the state itself fails to provide credible alternatives.
Real reform demands something infinitely harder than surveillance: translation.
Translation between the English-medium child who speaks the language of global rights but not inherited faith. Translation between the madrasa student who understands metaphysics but not macroeconomics. Translation between the nationalist citizen trained to worship the state and the marginalised believer who trusts only the mosque because every other institution has failed him.
Without such translation, Bangladesh will continue speaking to itself in mutually unintelligible dialects of conviction.
And perhaps that is the most dangerous illusion of all — that a nation can survive indefinitely without a common moral language.
The sounds now echoing through post-revolution Bangladesh are not necessarily the noises of collapse. They are the groaning tensions of an artificial order struggling to preserve itself against a younger generation unwilling to live forever by borrowed scripts — whether imported from Delhi, Washington, Riyadh or the drawing rooms of Gulshan.
The task before Bangladesh is not to forcibly secularise its believers nor romanticise its clerics. It is to rebuild a republic where its fragmented civilisations can finally speak to one another again before they harden permanently into rival nations occupying the same territory.
Abdul Monaiem Kudrot Ullah, a retired captain of the Bangladesh navy, is an informed voice on institutional reform, geo-strategy, strategic governance and supply chain management.
