Serious Golmal

The world assembly of civil society organisations, CIVICUS, got underway in Glasgow yesterday. However no Islamic non-government organisations are attending, as reported by IPS. This “invisible dividing line” has been picked up by attendees from a number of Muslim countries.

“The Islamic groups are also civil society, though the groups are not registered, and they are influential groups, they can get a lot of other groups to follow them.”
-Sarra Osman Eisa from a Sudanese NGO

Whether Islamic NGOs are being sidelined because of ideological reasons or because of a horrible accident of self-defeating political correctness, the end result is that CIVICUS has excluded organisations that represent people. Forgive me, but aren’t orgs that represent people who this assembly is for?

Naved Choudhury, an NGO worker from Bangladesh points out:

“A lot of schools in Bangladesh, the madrassas, run by religious groups reach out to millions. A few of them have been found to have had links with terrorist groups. But the development work they are doing cannot be ignored, they need to be brought into the mainstream of the development discourse.”

I think CIVICUS decision to distance itself from Islamic civil-society groups is short-sighted. It is because of assemblies like theirs that religious groups can be brought out into discourse with secular donor-funded groups. At the same time, these Islamic NGOs are able to reach out to huge numbers of people. They would be most valuable when it comes to implement the much-needed and universally accepted calls for madrasa reforms.

The dichotomy is that in Muslim countries, Islamic political groups now head up much sought voting blocks, as shown in these pornographic foreplay shots between secular and religious politicians. Whereas, civil society groups that quietly work away at the grass-roots not only get used by those politicians that puportedly represent them, but they are also, as shown in Glasgow this week, ignored by donors and their peers from other NGOs. What a shame.

This entry was posted Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Bangladesh, Politics, Religion. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.