Insāniyat for peace: survivors' narrative of the 1971 war of Bangladesh

The scholarship on post-conflict resolution is growing and new light continues to be shed on the larger field of peacemaking from multiple non-Western perspectives. Although the earlier focus of scholarship on the usefulness of truth and reconciliation commission, war criminals tribunal, implementation of human rights and international monitoring remains relevant, there is also a need to move beyond these existing models to explore new ways of empowering people for developing indigenous methods of peacemaking. Non-institutional practices based on religio-cultural models can be particularly relevant if they are narrated and constructed by survivors in post-conflict societies. Focusing on the war of 1971 of Bangladesh within Pakistan, this article highlights the historical construction of an ‘enemy’ who was victimized during the war and the subsequent struggle of perpetrators to come to terms with loss of their humanity, insāniyat, in violence. Are victims' and perpetrators' understandings of humanity, insāniyat, different in Bangladesh and Pakistan? How do the discourses on insāniyat impinge on the narrative of violence upheld by official institutions in Pakistan and Bangladesh? In what ways can survivors' alternate discourses open the space for dialogue for writing larger histories of peace in the region? In particular, perpetrators' acknowledgement of violence in the war and their repentance, tauba, contain powerful vocabularies appealing to the principles of compassion and forgiveness, rahm. The concepts of insāniyat, tauba and rahm are Islamic values of peacemaking that, I suggest, can be utilized for restoring the rights of people, huquq al-ibād, and empowering the reconvened human collectives. This method, I argue, would be acceptable to the Muslim communities of Pakistan and Bangladesh because it is connected to their religio-cultural values that inform them of their fundamental identity as Muslims and human beings. The Islamic method of peacemaking is highly relevant and useful for restorative justice in the contemporary Muslim world.