No one knows if this story is true. But it is widely disseminated by Islamic clerics. I heard it from Mufti Fezlul Haq Amini, a leading fundamentalist moulana (religious teacher) in the capital city of Dhaka. He sat in a bare room, lit only by a fluorescent bar, surrounded by young men who were his acolytes, all of them dressed in white. He spoke softly. He said the new, nongovernmental programs that loaned money to women, or attempted to educate them, were unnatural and insidious. They were like the English merchants, the East India Company, who came to do business during the Moghul Empire “but stayed to become our rulers. They must be driven from the country.”
This is probably an idle threat, but not an insignificant one. The Mufti has cause for concern. A quiet revolution is taking place in Bangladesh, and seems to be spreading to other poor countries. It is a revolution led by an oxymoron a charismatic economist named Mohammed Yunus, who founded the Grameen (“Rural”) Bank in 1976. His intent was straightforward enough: he wanted to lend small amounts of money to the rural poor. He devised a system where they would organize themselves into groups of five and assume responsibility for each other’s loans. He once loaned $1 to a beggar woman, who used it to buy bangles, which she sold door to door-but most of his loans were larger: $50, $75. People used the money to buy cows, to buy simple mining equipment, to become street vendors. More than 97 percent of them repaid the loans (at 20 percent interest). But by 1982, Yunus had noticed something very curious: the program worked better for women than for men. Women used profits to feed their children and build their businesses. “Men used the money to entertain themselves,” he says. “The social benefits were much greater when we loaned money to women. We decided to concentrate on them.”
He did, to great effect-there are about 2 million Grameen borrowers in Bangladesh now, nearly all of them women-and other groups, seeing the results, began to do the same. “It’s an idea spreading very rapidly to other countries,” says Lilah Webster of the World Bank. “It may be the quickest, most effective way to alleviate poverty.” Yunus had successfully challenged the most basic assumptions of Third World economic development: money was better spent on women than on men; and it was better channeled through private groups (called nongovernmental organizations, or NGOS, by international lending sorts) than through state bureaucracies. This was bound to cause trouble.
In Bangladesh, the trouble began in 1993. There was a sudden surge of Islamic fundamentalism in rural areas. Fatwas-religious sanctions-were issued against women for a variety of “nontraditional” behaviors. The most famous case involved Tashma Nasrin, a feminist poet, who was threatened with death and forced to leave the country. But there were many others: women involved in “business outside the home” were set upon by local mullahs, confined to their homes, forcibly divorced or declared outcasts. Dozens of NGO-run elementary schools for girls were burned to the ground. A woman was stoned to death for adultery. Another was burned at the stake. Another was threatened with 101 lashes (but was spirited out of town by feminists). All of which was considered odd: Bangladesh had never been a particularly orthodox Islamic country. Why the sudden backlash? “These NGOs have challenged the most basic traditions of Islam,” says a powerful Bangladeshi politician. “They have challenged the authority of the husband.”
But that is not all they have challenged: they have begun to challenge the authority of the state. Politics in Bangladesh tends to be insubstantial but fierce, a perpetual family feud among a tiny elite. The current government, led by Khaleda Zia, is paralyzed and jittery. It welcomes international donors, but can’t be thrilled by the millions of dollars going directly to NGOS. Far more important, programs like Grameen have taught women how to assert themselves -and that may soon have political consequences. Women are running for local office and often winning. A national grass-roots sorority is growing. Last month an alliance of NGOs-including several with left- wing and labor ties-was about to stage a rally of 100,000 supporters in Dhaka but was stopped by the government. “Why is it necessary for the NGOs to move into the political arena?” said M. A. Mannan, the minister in charge of nongovernmental organizations. “Such demonstration would have drawn the attention of enemies.”
In fact, the mere threat of a march did. just before Hillary Clinton arrived in Bangladesh to visit Grameen, the muhahs staged-with government permissions small but well publicized counterdemonstration and issued an ultimatum: the government had one month to ban NGOs or face a religious war. No one took the threat very seriously, but a new political dynamic-mothers vs. mullahs-may be emerging. “The government clearly is more scared of us than it is of the mullahs,” says Salma Sobhan, the leader of a legal-aid group that defends women who have been threatened with fatwas. “The vested interests hide behind religion. We’re always so respectful, so accommodating-of their traditions and morality and culture. Islamic fundamentalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iran, Algeria … Maybe this time we shouldn’t hand them our country on a platter.”
