Bangladesh Empowered, An Ambassador Serajul Islam Foundation
AUTHORED BY: Dr. Rashiduzzaman, Professor Emiritus of Political Science, Rowan University, USA
“(Amb. Serajul Islam) Shobuj’s relentless opinion pieces in the newspapers and magazines aimed at educating masses---to empower them as this team’s title rightly highlights that goal. This Foundation is committed to stay with Shobuj’s intellectual legacy in Bangladesh and elsewhere for public empowerment and leadership development through appropriate intellectual trajectories.”
1. Distinguished Participants here! Greetings! ---Salam! --- We assemble here at this hour to celebrate the first public conference of the Bangladesh Empowerment Inc, an Ambassador Serajul Islam Foundation (BESIF in my abbreviation) jointly held here at the North-South University in Dhaka. The BESIF, is a non-profit private family establishment--- dedicated to upholding the intellectual and professional legacies of Ambassador (retd) Serajul Islam, popularly called Shobuj). Both Shobuj and his wife Shahana happened to be my former students at Dhaka University, and I have known them for decades.
2. To write/speak about a one-time student from the second half of the 1960’s is an emotional and intellectual homecoming for me, and I thank Allah, for keeping me alive for such a long life. However, I am speaking to you through Zoom and from the other side of the world. At my age, I feel more like an old bird sitting on the branch of a rippling waterway that I have crossed so many times and from different directions. Now I have the privilege as well as the sadness of recalling someone whom I had known for over half a century--- he is no longer with us today, but his bequests continue to resonate.
3. A stalwart amongst the public servants, Ambassador (retd) Serajul Islam (I would mostly call him Shobuj here) dedicated his life to serving Bangladesh, first with a teaching spell, and then as a member of Pakistan’s CSP cadre from where he switched to Civil Service/Foreign Service of Bangladesh after 1971. One of the brilliant students during my stretch as a Dhaka University teacher in Political Science from 1958 to 1970 when I left for my post-doctoral work at Columbia University, New York. He was also a student at the Salimullah Muslim Hall, where I was a House Tutor from 1964 to 1968.
4. Outside Dhaka University, I had occasional contact with him. After years of not-so-regular exchange with him, my solid meeting with Shobuj took place in 1985 in New Delhi—I was staying at a hotel in New Delhi from where Shobuj took me and my wife to his house. We enjoyed enormous hospitality of Shobuj and Shahana for three days. Not long after our meeting in New Dehi he had a diplomatic posting in Washington, DC when we had intermittent chats. Our conversations over shared intellectual interests and prolonged phone calls developed since Shobuj started spending summer months every year with his daughter in Washington DC’s neighborhood. But WhatsApp connected us while he was in Dhaka.
5. Besides being an experienced diplomat and a bright student previously, I discovered that Shobuj was a prolific writer; with his lucid style, imagination, and intellectual range, he contributed to a couple of Dhaka newspapers sometimes twice a week. More than a retired Ambassador, Shobuj was better known as an inexhaustible writer---a public thinker. We debated issues in American and global politics. Now, those ruminations waft between an old teacher and a former student, who is no longer with us. We agreed that people should know more about politics and foreign affairs to overcome their daily existential challenges.
6. Shobuj’s relentless opinion pieces in the newspapers and magazines aimed at educating masses---to empower them as this team’s title rightly highlights that goal. This Foundation is committed to stay with Shobuj’s intellectual legacy in Bangladesh and elsewhere for public empowerment and leadership development through appropriate intellectual trajectories. Shobuj was in the real world of diplomacy at the highest echelons, but I was only an academic though I taught international politics and foreign policy imperatives for decades. Sometimes, I forwarded the latest articles from journals like Foreign Affairs, and Shobuj responded to the emerging ideas in such articles. I remember when Jo Biden became President, he was looking for a new president’s diplomatic course. There was at least one article projecting that the new US President will focus on the American “soft power” goals--- promoting democracy, human rights, fair election, to mention only a handful items. And he fired off frequent articles warning Hasina’s authoritarian regime that a dramatic uprising would end her despotic rule---it happened in August 2024, as we know. But Shobuj barely missed it.
7. He had an avid interest in history. While we dribbled our conversations, I was revising an old book on the British Indian Central Legislature (earlier published in 1965) and later completing a book on Muslim social history (IDENTITY OF A MUSLIM FAMILY IN COLONIAL BENGAL: Between Memories and History, Peter Lang). We pooled each other’s readings of pre-1971 and pre-1947 anecdotes. More seriously, he helped me recalling student politics in the 1960s for PARTIES AND POLITICS IN EAST PAKISTAN 1947-71: The Political Inheritance of Bangladesh (Peter Lang) that came out earlier this year. Sometimes, I take the liberty of labeling Bangladesh history as an “occupied territory,” held by certain parties, dynastic leaders, vested interests, and partisan intellectuals. Shobuj loved that characterization of Bangladeshi history since 1971.
8. I am glad to see that Shobuj’s ideals and intellectual resolve are still alive and well through this family Foundation and this Conference. He envisioned a sustainable relationship between Bangladesh and China. On Dhaka-New Delhi diplomacy, Shobuj pleaded for developing a “correct,” not an emotional relationship between the two great neighbors. He wanted to draw lessons from history and believed that people should be clear about their identity roots in the yore.
