Mosque as a Tool of Crime Prevention

'The 13th Warrior' flopped in the box office even with Vikings, violence, Banderas and a heavily sensational theatrical release poster back in 1999.  However, the plot couldn't elude many viewers. People revisited the "Eaters of the Dead '' and scanned the historicity of many formless narratives only to conclude that the Arabs were in Europe at least one thousand years ago.

The Umayyad Caliphate covered 5.02 million square miles of land while the Abbasid Caliphate covered 4.29 million square miles of land until it eventually lost out to the Turks.  The same is almost equally correct in the case of the Ottoman Empire, the Mughal Empire and the Safavid Empire. 

What made the process of expansion through Islamization and secularization impervious to the vagaries of political, social, economic, military, and religious landscape across different territories is difficult to account for.  However, it's evident that distinctive art and architecture was central to the process. The subtlest and most nuanced aspect of art was given a palpable form by constructing mosques in each point the Muslim ruler stepped.

That Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was sent by Caliph Muqtadir as a diplomatic envoy to modern Russia in 921 to advise Almis ibn (Shilki) Yiltawar, the ruler of Volga Bulghar, on Islamic faith and jurisprudence might sound counterintuitive to what we understand by the "white man's burden" today.  Ibn Fadlan dispassionately detailed the unclean, unhygienic and inhibited lifestyles of Viking traders in his famous Risala "The land of Darkness'.

  He established mosques there for congregational prayer. Mosques with mihrab and other orientations served as a declaration of sovereignty and a visual symbol of power. Numerous mosques were built in Bengal during the five and a half centuries of Muslim rule before the British colonial period.  Bakhtiyar Khalji, the founder of Muslim rule in Bengal, had constructed several mosques, madrasas and khanqas.

The Mughals who were Central Asian by birth, Arabian by religious association, Iranian by culture and Hindustani by adoption built a huge number of mosques in Bengal and instilled the currents and crosscurrents of their social and religious associations into the ambience of the mosque.  Throughout history, Muslim communities have always been attached, in one form or another, to the mosque or the masjid as it is known in Arabic.

The masjid was not restricted to being a place of worship, a location for performing rituals, or a social and political dimension of the Muslim community. Instead, it has served as a symbol of belonging and identity, as a social institution in different historical and national contexts. However, the increasingly minimalist role of mosques in Bangladesh now delinks rituals of religion from sociology of individual and community. 

The mosques are made to stand like a point of redemption which is used to salvage only one's own betterment in the troubled seas of life, tragically ignoring the needs of the community. One may attribute this hapless condition of Muslims to the inherent fault lines of Islam itself. We can see how a cloistering sense of arranging the sacred place cripples their sense of arranging life as a whole while the mosque in Islam not only acts as a space for worship, rather it develops as a space for worship complemented with community activities in its premises.

But very few mosques in our country can play that role anymore simply because they are just buildings. Interestingly architecture in Bangladesh is practiced in the same way we think of a mosque, only constructing a building ignoring the role of its surroundings. The conditions of mosques are so pathetic that one is bound to feel stuffy seeing its squeezed demeanor.

A mosque with ample spaces used to play very significant role in society. With hundreds of mosques being built, people are being able to perform prayers close to their doors. Muslim community spends more time in mosque now. However, no cultural, political or social issues are discussed in mosques. Against such a backdrop, Dhaka Range, Bangladesh Police has initiated an institutional experimentation of introducing a culturally sensitive approach to policing based on mosques.

Officers-in-charge of 96 police stations under the jurisdiction of Dhaka range attend Friday Jummah prayers and deliver speeches to engage all in community policing.   Essentially a spiritual and religious institution, the mosque offers an enabling setting of community engagement during the weekly Friday congregational prayers when a sermon can address religious, moral, or social issues as well as deal with current affairs that affect Muslims. 

Dhaka range police have perfectly captured the spirit of weekly congregation in mosques where people of all ages demonstrate collective submission to God through prostration. Such a humbling spiritual setting provides police with a unique impressionable time to sensitize the community about law and order. Choosing a mosque as the place of engaging people with police in preventing and detecting crime is a clear testament to the commitment of Bangladesh Police to inform, engage and serve citizens in a more effective manner which brings along new assurance of security and safety.

It also signals the start of a transformed service from the traditional to a more people-oriented modern mode of operation backed by new and innovative ideas. It's impressive to see that the central pledge of this approach is to serve the citizens through partnership and collaboration. This way of community policing is more efficient from the perspective of economics of law enforcement. While all community members become police, the government has to spend less on collection of intelligence, prevention and detection of crime.

Unlike any other service, policing in a democratic society involves immense occupational discretion during dispensation of duties as the scope and limit of law-enforcement are often tethered to the letters of laws and mandates. This new approach duly reveals the road to be taken to address the challenges facing individual officers and the organization to enforce laws fairly and impartially for the people. As the approach suggests, amid unprecedented pace of modernization in every spheres of life, there will be a paradigm shift in basic concepts and experimental practices of policing in the years to come.

In fact, upholding the code of honor through professional enforcement of law as a 24-hour deal will have to be a serious focus as policing involves an extensive range of discretion like investigation, interrogation, search, seizure, arrests, prosecution, negotiation and other related matters which are apparently connected to the criminal justice system.Massive sensitization programs based in mosques will greatly help police ensure justice more effectively.

Crime these days has become an extremely sophisticated phenomenon. In an ever-shrinking digital world, police have to improvise and adopt new strategies to overcome new threats. Mosque based policing reduces fear of crime among the community members. As mandated by our Constitution, one of the most fundamental purposes of the civil government is to establish order and protect citizens from crimes that make life uneasy. It is good to see that Bangladesh Police is accordingly focused on allaying fear of crime rather than crime by addressing the community in mosques.

Dhaka range, Bangladesh Police has made this plan fit to fight organized crime, violent extremism, and other sophisticated crimes with the help of the community. It will embrace emerging technologies and continue to build upon innovative strategies such as intelligence-led and predictive policing.  This is a long-term journey to build and to evolve with this capability, and concerted endeavors involving all stakeholders.

Dhaka range top cop DIG Habibur Rahman masterminded this predictive and preventive policing in an increasingly cloudy climate of terrorism, radicalization, extremism and other ideological perversions. Installation of 288 CCTVs in 96 police stations, designing and developing algorithms to monitor police stations is one of the best practices of responsible policing.  


Shahabuddin Kabir Jewel is an Additional Superintendent of Police