Irreligion in Bangladesh is rare and uncommon publicly. [1] A Gallup survey conducted between 2014 and 2015 found that approximately less than 1% identified as convinced atheists in the poll. [2] Bangladesh has 165.2 million people as of the 2022 census. [3] [4]
Many secularist or irreligious bloggers who supported the anti-Islamist protests came under attack following the protests. [5] Amnesty International noted with concern the rise in communal violence against religious minorities, including attacks on Hindus. [6] [7]
In early April 2013, the police began arresting bloggers for hurting religious sentiments. Four bloggers, Subrata Adhikary Shuvo, Russell Parvez, Mashiur Rahman Biplob and Asif Mohiuddin (who was still recovering from his wounds), were arrested within days of one another. The blog, Amar Blog, was also taken down. [8] A religious group called Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh called for the hanging of the bloggers. [9] Asif Mohiuddin's blog was shut down by the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, and he was jailed for posting "offensive comments about Islam and Mohammed." [10] [11] The secular government arrested several other bloggers and blocked about a dozen websites and blogs, as well as giving police protection to some bloggers. [12]
International organisations, including Human Rights Watch, [13] Amnesty International, [14] Reporters without Borders [15] and the Committee to Protect Journalists [16] condemned the imprisonment of bloggers and the climate of fear for journalists. Worldwide protest and demonstrations were held on in 2013 to put pressure on the Bangladeshi government to free the arrested bloggers. Several humanist groups (including the IHEU, the Center for Inquiry, the British Humanist Association, American Atheists and the Secular Coalition for America) called for their release, among others including [17] Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Hemant Mehta, Maryam Namazie, PZ Myers, Avijit Roy, Abu Ahammad, Ajoy Roy, Qayyum Chowdhury, Ramendu Majumdar and Muhammad Zafar Iqbal. [18]
Taslima Nasrin, an author and self-described atheist, used to criticise rising religious fundamentalism and government inaction in her newspaper columns and books. In early 1992, mobs began attacking bookstores stocking her work. The same year she was assaulted at a book fair and her passport was confiscated. In July 1993, her novel Lajja was banned by the government on the claims that it created misunderstanding among the communities. On 23 September 1993, a fatwa was issued for her death. After international pressure, her passport returned in April 1994. She travelled to France and returned via India. On 4 July 1994, an arrest warrant was issued for hurting religious feelings and Nasrin went underground. On 3 August, she was granted bail, but she fled to Sweden and remained in exile. In 1998, she visited her critically ill mother in Bangladesh. In 2005, she moved to India and applied for citizenship. [19]
In 2003, Bangladeshi author Humayun Azad wrote a book about an Islamic fundamentalist group Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh collaborating with the Pakistani army during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Azad received numerous death threats from fundamentalists until his death the next year. [20] In May 2015, Humayun Azad's son, blogger Ananya Azad, was repeatedly threatened with death after publishing critiques of Islamist fundamentalism. [21] He was subsequently forced into exile in Europe. [22]
On 15 January 2013, Asif Mohiuddin, a self-styled atheist blogger (rational, gentle and Anti-Islamist), was stabbed near his office in Dhaka. He survived the attack. [23] On 15 February 2013, Ahmed Rajib Haider, a prominent anti-Islamist blogger, was found murdered by a machete outside his Dhaka home. [24] Mohiuddin, a winner of the BOBs award for online activism, was on an Islamist hit list that also included the murdered sociology professor Shafiul Islam. [25]
On the night of 7 March 2013, an atheist blogger Sunnyur Rahaman was attacked by two men who swooped on him and hacked him with machetes while shouting "Allahu Akbar". He came under attack around 9:00 pm near Purabi Cinema Hall in Mirpur. By the support of local police he was rushed to Dhaka Medical College and Hospital with wounds in his head, neck, right leg and left hand. [26]
On 26 February 2015, Avijit Roy, the founder of the Mukto-Mona blog, and his wife were attacked in Dhaka with machete-wielding assailants. Roy died on his way to the hospital. His wife was also seriously injured and lost a finger. [27] [28]
On 30 March 2015, blogger Washiqur Rahman was killed in a similar attack in Dhaka. The police arrested two suspects near the scene and recovered meat cleavers from them. The suspects said they killed Rahman due to his anti-Islamic articles. [29]
On 12 March 2015, another blogger Ananta Bijoy Das was attacked and murdered by masked men wielding machetes. Ananta Bijoy Das was the editor of the science magazine Jukti. [30]
Humanists International is an international non-governmental organisation championing secularism and human rights, motivated by secular humanist values. Founded in Amsterdam in 1952, it is an umbrella organisation made up of more than 160 secular humanist, atheist, rationalist, agnostic, skeptic, freethought and Ethical Culture organisations from over 80 countries.
Political repression of cyber-dissidents is the oppression or persecution of people for expressing their political views on the Internet.
The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) is an independent commission founded under the Bangladesh Telecommunication Act, 2001. The BTRC is responsible for regulating all matters related to telecommunications of Bangladesh. The chairman of the commission has the status of a judge of the Bangladesh High Court. Md. Emdad-Ul-Bari is the chairman of the commission.
The People's Republic of Bangladesh went from being a secular state in 1971 to having Islam as the state religion in 1988. Despite its state religion, Bangladesh uses a secular penal code dating from 1860—the time of the British occupation. The penal code discourages blasphemy by a section that forbids "hurting religious sentiments." Other laws permit the government to confiscate and to ban the publication of blasphemous material. Government officials, police, soldiers, and security forces may have discouraged blasphemy by extrajudicial actions including torture. Schools run by the government have Religious Studies in the curriculum.
2013 (MMXIII) was a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2013th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 13th year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the 4th year of the 2010s decade.
On 4 April 2013 all Bengali blogs were blacked out for an indefinite time to protest the arrest of four bloggers in Bangladesh. The blackout was to back a demand for the unconditional release of the arrested bloggers. A fundamentalist group named Hefajat-e-Islam Bangladesh started a campaign to hang freethinking bloggers, and demanding tough blasphemy laws. In response, the government started monitoring Bengali blog sites and sending letters to their authorities to terminate the alleged "anti-religious" blogs and provide information about the alleged "anti-religious" bloggers. Individual bloggers showed their solidarity with this blackout by changing their profile photos on Facebook and by tweeting with the #MuzzleMeNot hashtag. Different international organizations expressed deep concern about taking free-thinking bloggers into custody. After 92 hours of blackout, blogs returned online by publishing a press release on their central Facebook page.
Ahmed Rajib Haider was a Bangladeshi atheist blogger. He used to blog in the blogging communities namely somewhereinblog.net, amarblog.com and nagorikblog.com and used the pseudonym Thaba Baba.
The Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), also known as Ansar-al Islam Bangladesh or Ansar Bangla is a pan-Islamist militant organization in Bangladesh, implicated in many terrorist activities including attacks and murders of atheist bloggers from 2013 to 2015. The organisation was outlawed by the Ministry of Home Affairs on 25 May 2015, days after the Ashulia bank robbery. The group has also been linked by the Detective Branch of Bangladesh Police to Islami Chhatra Shibir, the student wing of the Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami party.
The Worldwide Protests for Free Expression in Bangladesh were a series of rallies outside Bangladeshi embassies and consulates to demand the release of four Bangladeshi bloggers who had been arrested on charges of blasphemy. The protests took place on 25 April – 2 May 2013 and were organised by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), American Atheists, and the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Demonstrations were held in Dhaka, New York City, Washington, D.C., London, Ottawa and other cities around the world. Secularists sought to express their solidarity with those jailed for speaking their minds about religion. Protesters drew attention to those who were being persecuted for exercising free speech, seeking to convince the international community to exert influence to have the bloggers set free by the Bangladeshi government.
2015 (MMXV) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2015th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 15th year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the 6th year of the 2010s decade.
Bangladesh has experienced terrorism in the past conducted by a number of different organisations. In the past, both ISIL and other terrorist organisations had claimed to be active in the country. However, the Bangladeshi government believes that they mainly operated through local affiliates, before being neutralised by security forces.
Avijit Roy was a Bangladeshi-American engineer, online activist, writer, and blogger known for creating and administrating the Mukto-Mona, an Internet blogging community for Bangladeshi freethinkers, rationalists, skeptics, atheists, and humanists. Roy was an advocate of free expression in Bangladesh and coordinated international protests against government censorship and imprisonment of atheist bloggers. He was killed by machete-wielding assailants in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on 26 February 2015; the Islamic militant organization Ansarullah Bangla Team claimed responsibility for the attack.
Asif Mohiuddin is a Bangladeshi atheist and secular activist, religious critic and feminist. In 2012, he won The Bobs-Best of Online Activism award from Deutsche Welle, who stated that "Asif's blog was one of the most read web pages in Bangladesh and is known for its strong criticism of Islamic fundamentalism in Bangladesh's "anti-people politics", his blog was later blocked and banned in Bangladesh by its government. On 15 January 2013, he survived an assassination attempt by Islamic extremists. A few months later, he was imprisoned twice by the Bangladesh Government for posting "offensive comments about Islam and Mohammad". Due to sustained international pressure, Mohiuddin was released, after which he fled from his country to Germany in 2014. In 2015, he received the Anna Politkovskaya Prize for Journalism, awarded by Italian magazine Internazionale.
Rafida Bonya Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-American who is a writer, blogger, and humanitarian activist. In 2020, she founded the educational channels Think Bangla and Think English on YouTube. Along with her husband Avijit Roy, she was attacked and badly wounded by machete-wielding Islamic extremists at the Ekushey Book Fair in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2015, and Roy was killed.
Attacks by Islamist extremists in Bangladesh took place during a period of turbulence in Bangladesh between 2013 and 2016 when a number of secularist and atheist writers, bloggers, and publishers in Bangladesh; foreigners; homosexuals; and religious minorities such as Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Ahmadis who were seen as having offended Islam and Muhammad were attacked in retaliation, with many killed by Muslim extremists. By 2 July 2016, a total of 48 people, including 20 foreign nationals, had been killed in such attacks. These attacks were largely blamed on extremist groups such as Ansarullah Bangla Team and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. The Bangladeshi government was criticized for its response to the attacks, which included charging and jailing some of the secularist bloggers for allegedly defaming some religious groups; or hurting the religious sentiments of different religious groups; or urging the bloggers to flee overseas. This strategy was seen by some as pandering to hard line elements within Bangladesh's Muslim majority population. About 89% of the population in Bangladesh is Sunni Muslim. The government's eventual crackdown in June 2016 was also criticized for its heavy-handedness, as more than 11,000 people were arrested in a little more than a week.
Mukto-Mona is a Bengali language blog for secularists, atheists, and freethinkers. It was founded by Avijit Roy who was subsequently killed by militants in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The attackers are believed to be members of Ansarullah Bangla Team.
Kaberi Gayen is a Bangladeshi academic, author, and social activist known for her outspoken views on the oppression of minorities and gender inequality in Bangladesh.
Hizb ut-Tahrir is an international pan-Islamist and fundamentalist organisation which also has a national outfit in Bangladesh. The organisation was banned by the Government of Bangladesh under the Anti-Terrorism Act. It is affiliated with its international counterpart, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the regional branch, Hizb ut-Tahrir Central Asia.
Blogging in Bangladesh is dominated by a community of around 200 blogs. Some personal blogs have been around since the mid-2000s, but there are now blogs about self help, cities, science, law, digital marketing, entrepreneurship, and fashion magazines.
Asaduzzaman Noor, better known as Asad Noor, is an exiled Bangladeshi blogger and human rights activist. Noor is an advocate for freedom of expression and LGBT rights, who has criticised religious fundamentalism in Bangladesh. He has been prosecuted multiple times by Bangladeshi authorities for alleged blasphemy and hurting religious sentiments. He has been living in exile since 2019.
Blogger Asif Mohiudeen, arrested on 3 April for allegedly posting blasphemous comments online, remains in detention and at risk of torture
Reporters Without Borders condemns the baseless judicial proceedings brought against the detained blogger Asif Mohiuddin, who could be tried and convicted on a charge of blasphemy and "hurting religious sentiments" at his next hearing