/ARTS WEEKLY/BANGLADESH: Film Offers Rich Portrait of Madrasahs

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Qurratul-Ain-Tahmina

DHAKA, Dec 3 2002 (IPS) - ‘Matir Moina’ (Clay Bird), which recently won hearts in the West, portrays life in an Islamic Madrasah or religious school, and in so doing confronts issues of tolerance and the perception that Madrasahs are a breeding ground for Islamic fundamentalists.

The film is set in the 1960s against the backdrop of Bangladesh’s (then East Pakistan) national liberation war and follows the life of Anu, a quiet teenager who is sent off to a madrasah by his orthodox father because the boy’s left-thinking liberal uncle is exposing him to ”heathen” festivals.

But coming from a financially comfortable family, Anu is a misfit at the madrasah where most of the children belong to Bangladesh’s underclass. But soon the teenager finds a receptive ear in an affectionate, liberal teacher who tells his class mythological stories and encourages them to open their minds.

Anu also finds a friend in Rokon, a highly imaginative orphan who tries to cope with the seminary’s strict order by creating his own world, leading the director to explore themes of freedom of thought and belief within the confines of the madrasah.

The setting of this 98-minute feature also coincides with the period during which East Pakistan rejects the political ideology of Muslim Pakistan, culminating in the West Pakistani military regime targeting millions of Bengalis in a systematic campaign of mass murder.

”Ours was a madrasah, essentially non-political,” reminisces Tareque Masud, the film’s director, about his early schooling in an Islamic seminary, ”but feeling threatened by the secularist views getting stronger outside, some of my teachers began taking a stand.”

In the film, the head teacher tells his Friday congregation: ”We should be ready if needed for ‘jihad’ (holy war) in order to save our Muslim country from the irreligious influences of the secularists.”

But the liberal teacher declares: ”We are to raise the poor and orphan children given into our care as true Muslims, not to involve them in politics.”

In many ways, ‘Matir Moina’ is a film about human bondage in all its forms as embodied in the film’s ‘Clay Bird’ metaphor and given life by the movie’s mystic singer who implores: ”why did you infuse my heart with longing if you did not grant my wings the strength to fly?”

In today’s Bangladesh around 15,000 primary-school level madrasahs, with over 2.6 million children enrolled, provide the only shelter available to many of the country’s poor kids and orphans.

The film offers a sympathetic view of madrasahs. ”But it’s not a film about madrasahs,” says Masud. ”It’s essentially about the conflict between rigidity and openness, about relationships between people blindly or naively stuck with a belief system and people open to life.”

”Such contradictions and such relationships exist in all societies,” says Masud, ”within families, at social and cultural levels, in politics, and even within strict institutions like madrasahs.”

Denouncing madrasahs as breeding grounds for Islamic militants neither portrays the reality in Bangladesh, nor helps these children, says Masud.

Bangladesh, after all, has not been spared the fallout from the U.S.-led hunt for terrorists and the concurrent representation in the mainstream media that sees potential militants and fanatics lurking in all Islamic countries and in Islamic schools.

”I wanted to address the ‘Islamophobia’ of the wealthy Western nations, and also to explain to our upper middle-class, more-western-than-western, secularist intelligentsia the complex role of madrasahs in our society. It simply cannot be perceived in black and white,” Masud explains.

At the Marrakesh Film Festival in Morocco, where the film won the best screenplay award this year, reviewers said ‘Matir Moina’ brings out the inner beauty of Islam while exploring the dangers of its false facade.

The film in October also won the Director’s Award at the Cannes Film Festival and received French government financial backing early in its conceptual stage after winning a screenplay competition for projects from the developing world.

”Islam essentially encourages individual pursuit of knowledge and provides the scope for debates and dialogues while agreeing on the basic faith,” says Masud of the other themes explored in the film. ”In rural Bangladesh, propagated mainly by the mystics or the Sufis, Islam evolved into an inclusive faith.”

Masud believes this syncretism, the blending of different beliefs or religious practices, to be a ”living culture” in Bangladesh, despite the population being overwhelmingly Muslim, and despite arguments that ”room for debate within Islam there is shrinking”.

The people in ‘Matir Moina’ are neither demons nor heroes. They are human beings with insecurities, pain, hopes and frustrations. What is more, it is a depiction that has gripped audiences abroad and at home.

A nominally censored version of the movie premiered in Bangladesh in late October after being cleared by government censors, who had initially said it was unfit for screening within the country on the grounds of ”religious sensitivity”.

The censor’s code terms such sensitivity as material that has the potential to create communal disharmony, to hurt a section of the religious community’s feelings, or which may ridicule religious sentiment.

The intervention provoked a lot of curiosity and debate, and generated reports, editorials, and letters-to-the-editor in the major newspapers, overwhelmingly supportive of the film’s message and its screening.

”The film takes a very sympathetic view of Madrasah education, which contrasts radically with Western depiction of Muslim religious education in such institutions,” an editorial appearing in the English-language Daily Star said.

”Whatever has been sown in the movie would be critical of any religion based education system in any society in any part of the world,” the editorial said.