Human Rights in Bangladesh

The politics of religion and blasphemy in Bangladesh | | | | | | It all began with a remark made by Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islam Dhaka city leader Rafiqul Islam Khan. Since Sheikh Hasina’s government came into office in early 2009, it has been thwarting political activity of Jamaat and of its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir and harassing the leaders and activists of these two organizations in the street and in their offices and residences. In such a context, in a discussion program organized by Shibir on the life of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) in Dhaka on 17 March 2010, Rafiqul Islam Khan tended to compare the difficulty the Islamic party people were facing to that of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions in the seventh century. He also reportedly said that Jamaat chief Motiur Rahman Nizami was made a target of political vendetta by Sheikh Hasina’s government, and in this respect he pointed to the fact that Prophet Muhammad also faced a comparable situation when he was preaching Islam.

That was it. The ruling party Awami League got the cue and presumably used a man called Syed Rezaul Haque to file a blasphemy case against Shibir’s leader ASM Yahia and against four topmost prominent Jamaat leaders: Matiur Rahman Nizami (Jamaat Chief), Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed (Jamaat Secretary General), Delwar Hossain Sayedee (Jamaat Deputy Chief) and Rafiqul Islam Khan (Chief of Jamaat’s Dhaka city unit and the party’s Acting Secretary General). The plaintiff Syed Rezaul Haque filed the case on 21 March 2010 and claimed that Rafiqul Islam Khan compared Nizami to the Prophet Muhammad and thus hurt the religious sentiment of Muslims. Before the case was filed, few people gave any heed to what Rafiqul Islam Khan had said in the small gathering of 17 March 2010.

People in Bangladesh were flabbergasted for the obvious reason that Jamaat-Shibir people are the ones who regularly protest against any offensive remarks on Islam or on its holy