Filtering out the Arsenic of Corruption
As Bangladeshis watch enthralled the reeling in of the corrupt 'big fish' by the military-backed caretaker government, and let out a collective exultation of “finally!”, an event in the United States has added to this exultation.
Dr. Abul Hussam, a chemistry professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, won the 2007 “Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability” for developing an inexpensive, easy-to-make system for filtering arsenic from well water. Of Bangladeshi origin, the chemist plans to donate the $1 million prize money for distributing these filters to needy communities around the world.
Dr. Hussam was moved by the plight of millions of Bangladeshis poisoned by tube-well water laced with arsenic - leading to serious skin conditions, tumors, breathing difficulties, cancer, and ultimately to agonizing death - and made it his quest to find a solution.
After experimenting with hundreds of prototypes, he finally found the right combination of sand, charcoal, brick and cast iron to filter out almost any trace of arsenic from well water. In the northern district of Kushtia now, these systems are being produced at the rate of about 200 per week, at a cost of about $40 each. Over 30,000 filtration systems have already been distributed throughout the country.
Coming in the wake of Dr. Yunus’s Nobel Peace Prize last year, Dr. Abul Hussam’s achievement should lift the heart of even the most stubborn pessimist.
In light of Bangladesh’s current attempt to make corrupt kingpins accountable for their past misdeeds, the success of Dr. Hussam’s discovery suggests a compelling question: Will Bangladesh be able to filter out the arsenic of corruption, greed, nepotism and misrule once and for all from the roots of its government, no matter who may be in power?
Conscientious Bangladeshis hung their heads in shame when the Berlin-based Transparency International ranked the country as the most corrupt in the world five years in a row, beginning with 2000. They witnessed with horror the powerful and the unscrupulous looting the country’s treasury, the Faustian bargains political parties made with one another and the terribly widening gap between the rich and the poor. (What a contrast, for instance, to a Bangladeshi taxi driver in New York named Osman chowdhury who returned a lost bag of diamond rings worth $500,000 to the owner after she had left it in the trunk of his cab. If only Bangladeshi politicians and their sycophants could learn honesty and integrity from this humble man!)
Both the Awami League and the Bangladesh National Party indulged in thievery and gangsterism with impunity, and functionaries of both parties – mercenaries, really - created a twilight zone in which their words were the law. Only the ‘fittest’ thrived in this twilight zone, the fittest being those in or close to power, and their henchmen down the food chain.
Now there is hope that the darkness may be lifting, that those who abused power and amassed fortunes at the expense of the nation and its citizens will be brought to justice.
Because it is the army, backed by the interim government, that is spearheading the crackdown and the cleansing mission, some Bangladeshis are already protesting that democracy is in danger.
What planet are they on? Democracy cannot flourish in a vacuum. It can thrive only in the fertile soil of accountability, responsibility, and good governance. When the soil is saturated with the arsenic of greed, nepotism and solipsism, what thrives is “thugocracy,” not democracy. This has been the sad lot of Bangladeshis since 1991, following the overthrow of the military dictatorship of General Ershad.
The country has been kept afloat not by any government in power, but by the innate genius of common Bangladeshis – the human capital - and their entrepreneurship and creativity against all odds.
What is critical is for the interim government to proceed with prudence, and not try to bite off more than it can chew. One measure of this prudence can be seen in the systematic way in which the army is being used to snag progressively ‘bigger fish’ with each passing day. Ultimately the biggest fish – an unholy group of crooks and criminal masterminds across party lines – will have to be hauled in for justice to prevail.
Visiting Bangladesh last November, friends and relatives repeatedly told me that if only the government got off the back of the people and the powerful were held accountable for their actions, the country could achieve wonders. While neighboring India was earning billions of dollars in foreign exchange through the Internet-driven boom in IT services and products, Bangladesh was moving backward through debilitating strikes and plundering of the nation’s assets by the privileged.
Will decades of national nightmare be soon over, and will a new and responsible government usher in an era of enlightened democracy, of accountability, of law and order, of economic and educational opportunity for all? Let’s hope the groundwork is now being laid for such an outcome, so that future generations can look to this interim government as one that, after fits and starts, found its calling and made good on its promise.
Showing posts with label Yunus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Yunus. Show all posts
Friday, February 09, 2007
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Gender Equality, Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize
Gender equality in the heterogeneous Muslim world is a work in progress. The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize gave a boost to this work when it was awarded to Bangladeshi economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded in 1976.
Mainstream media have been abuzz with inspiring stories of millions of poor Bangladeshi women lifting themselves out of poverty by borrowing little sums of money from Grameen (a Bengali word meaning ‘village-based’) Bank and starting their own businesses, a model now emulated in over 100 countries. (97% of Grameen clients are women.)
What has received little attention is the contribution Dr. Yunus has made in helping disenfranchised women challenging a patriarchal society that often practices misogyny against them in the name of Islam.
Whereas the husband’s (or the father’s) word was the de facto law before, particularly in villages where illiteracy is high and sacred text is manipulated to suit the male viewpoint, economic freedom gave women entrepreneurs the courage to question religious chauvinism and resist attempts to undermine their dignity.
Speaking to a reporter a few years ago, Dr. Yunus explained the psychological barriers to his bank this way: “The first hostile person to our program is the husband. We challenge his authority. In the family, he is a macho tyrant. He starts to see that she is not as stupid as he thought. He says, ‘Now she cannot nag me about money, because she understands how hard it is to make.’ The tension eases and they become a team.”
A team can function only when there is mutual respect. A husband accustomed to obedience from his wife begins to respect her opinion on religious matters, too, since she has shown her worth by financially supporting the family.
This has been the noteworthy byproduct of the microcredit revolution that Muhammad Yunus launched three decades ago. Unwittingly, he forced a predominantly conservative Muslim society to confront its ingrained habits and customs, inspiring countless women to question dogma and realizing their God-given rights.
Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer-activist and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, evoked the gender issue in her Nobel Lecture: “The discriminatory plight of women in Islamic states, whether in the spheres of civil law or in the realm of social, political and cultural justice, has its roots in the patriarchal and male-dominated culture prevailing in these societies, not in Islam. This culture does not tolerate freedom and democracy, just as it does not believe in the equal rights of men and women, and the liberation of women from male domination (fathers, husbands, brothers …), because it would threaten the historical and traditional position of the rulers and guardians of that culture … The patriarchal culture and the discrimination against women, particularly in the Islamic countries, cannot continue for ever.”
It certainly cannot, and the work of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the “banker to the poor” who proved that poverty was not destiny, that, in fact, destiny was what one made of it, vindicates Ebadi’s hope and assertion.
In the post-9/11 world, Muslim women in affluent western countries are engaged in the battle of ideas to shape their faith and reclaim it from traditionalists and extremists.
In March of last year, for instance, Dr. Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Quran and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, delivered a sermon and led a public, mixed-gender Friday congregational prayer in New York City.
This symbolic but seminal act received widespread support, and criticism, from Muslims around the world, stirring vigorous debate and soul-searching.
Asra Nomani, a journalist and author of Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, is on a mission to reclaim the rightful role of woman in Islam defined by the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad but denied by centuries of cultural accretions.
“We joke that we want to take the “slam” out of Islam – that’s our American generation’s way of understanding it,” she says. “But it’s really that simple: we’re just so tired of going to our mosques and feeling unworthy or worthless or less than faithful. It says in the Quran, “There is no compulsion in religion,” and yet the fanatics in all religions want to make it compulsory that you follow their path of faith.”
Theological debates and reclaiming interpretive rights to sacred text by educated Muslim women activists constitute one path toward gender equality. The other is by empowering poor women engaged in daily existential battles to achieve financial freedom so that they too can challenge the myth of patriarchy in traditional societies and experience the egalitarianism that permeates Islam.
Only when the two paths converge – intellectual and existential, selective and grassroots - will true gender equality flourish in the heterogeneous Muslim world. Only then can we expect the sequence of events such as the following becoming a reality.
A seamstress in a village in Chittagong, Bangladesh, delivers garments to a demanding but honest merchant, and makes a tidy profit. The ripple from this transaction reaches Kandahar, Afghanistan, where a twenty-something teacher briskly walks along an earthen road to her one-room school, smiling to herself as she anticipates the fresh, eager faces of girls and boys waiting to learn arithmetic from her. A local cleric approaching from the opposite direction alights from his bicycle and respectfully acknowledges her.
The ripple from this gesture spreads to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where a middle-aged housewife patiently maneuvers her car heavy traffic and heads for the English-medium school in the center of town to pick up her two children. She has an appointment to see the principal about introducing more challenging curricula in the school and mentally rehearses her presentation.
The ripple from the rehearsal propagates to Katsina, Nigeria, where a judge raises her gavel to bring order to her courtroom in a complex inheritance case as she prepares to dispense justice tempered by mercy.
Gender equality in the heterogeneous Muslim world is a work in progress. The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize gave a boost to this work when it was awarded to Bangladeshi economist Dr. Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he founded in 1976.
Mainstream media have been abuzz with inspiring stories of millions of poor Bangladeshi women lifting themselves out of poverty by borrowing little sums of money from Grameen (a Bengali word meaning ‘village-based’) Bank and starting their own businesses, a model now emulated in over 100 countries. (97% of Grameen clients are women.)
What has received little attention is the contribution Dr. Yunus has made in helping disenfranchised women challenging a patriarchal society that often practices misogyny against them in the name of Islam.
Whereas the husband’s (or the father’s) word was the de facto law before, particularly in villages where illiteracy is high and sacred text is manipulated to suit the male viewpoint, economic freedom gave women entrepreneurs the courage to question religious chauvinism and resist attempts to undermine their dignity.
Speaking to a reporter a few years ago, Dr. Yunus explained the psychological barriers to his bank this way: “The first hostile person to our program is the husband. We challenge his authority. In the family, he is a macho tyrant. He starts to see that she is not as stupid as he thought. He says, ‘Now she cannot nag me about money, because she understands how hard it is to make.’ The tension eases and they become a team.”
A team can function only when there is mutual respect. A husband accustomed to obedience from his wife begins to respect her opinion on religious matters, too, since she has shown her worth by financially supporting the family.
This has been the noteworthy byproduct of the microcredit revolution that Muhammad Yunus launched three decades ago. Unwittingly, he forced a predominantly conservative Muslim society to confront its ingrained habits and customs, inspiring countless women to question dogma and realizing their God-given rights.
Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer-activist and the first Muslim woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, evoked the gender issue in her Nobel Lecture: “The discriminatory plight of women in Islamic states, whether in the spheres of civil law or in the realm of social, political and cultural justice, has its roots in the patriarchal and male-dominated culture prevailing in these societies, not in Islam. This culture does not tolerate freedom and democracy, just as it does not believe in the equal rights of men and women, and the liberation of women from male domination (fathers, husbands, brothers …), because it would threaten the historical and traditional position of the rulers and guardians of that culture … The patriarchal culture and the discrimination against women, particularly in the Islamic countries, cannot continue for ever.”
It certainly cannot, and the work of Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the “banker to the poor” who proved that poverty was not destiny, that, in fact, destiny was what one made of it, vindicates Ebadi’s hope and assertion.
In the post-9/11 world, Muslim women in affluent western countries are engaged in the battle of ideas to shape their faith and reclaim it from traditionalists and extremists.
In March of last year, for instance, Dr. Amina Wadud, professor of Islamic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Quran and Women: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective, delivered a sermon and led a public, mixed-gender Friday congregational prayer in New York City.
This symbolic but seminal act received widespread support, and criticism, from Muslims around the world, stirring vigorous debate and soul-searching.
Asra Nomani, a journalist and author of Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, is on a mission to reclaim the rightful role of woman in Islam defined by the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad but denied by centuries of cultural accretions.
“We joke that we want to take the “slam” out of Islam – that’s our American generation’s way of understanding it,” she says. “But it’s really that simple: we’re just so tired of going to our mosques and feeling unworthy or worthless or less than faithful. It says in the Quran, “There is no compulsion in religion,” and yet the fanatics in all religions want to make it compulsory that you follow their path of faith.”
Theological debates and reclaiming interpretive rights to sacred text by educated Muslim women activists constitute one path toward gender equality. The other is by empowering poor women engaged in daily existential battles to achieve financial freedom so that they too can challenge the myth of patriarchy in traditional societies and experience the egalitarianism that permeates Islam.
Only when the two paths converge – intellectual and existential, selective and grassroots - will true gender equality flourish in the heterogeneous Muslim world. Only then can we expect the sequence of events such as the following becoming a reality.
A seamstress in a village in Chittagong, Bangladesh, delivers garments to a demanding but honest merchant, and makes a tidy profit. The ripple from this transaction reaches Kandahar, Afghanistan, where a twenty-something teacher briskly walks along an earthen road to her one-room school, smiling to herself as she anticipates the fresh, eager faces of girls and boys waiting to learn arithmetic from her. A local cleric approaching from the opposite direction alights from his bicycle and respectfully acknowledges her.
The ripple from this gesture spreads to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where a middle-aged housewife patiently maneuvers her car heavy traffic and heads for the English-medium school in the center of town to pick up her two children. She has an appointment to see the principal about introducing more challenging curricula in the school and mentally rehearses her presentation.
The ripple from the rehearsal propagates to Katsina, Nigeria, where a judge raises her gavel to bring order to her courtroom in a complex inheritance case as she prepares to dispense justice tempered by mercy.
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