Where Atheism Can Get You Killed [View all]

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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/ananta-bijoy-das-bangladesh-atheist-murder-118223.html#.VWBrukvtHXk


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Secular bloggers are being butchered on the streets of Bangladesh.

By JOSEPH ALLCHIN
May 22, 2015

On Tuesday of last week, Ananta Bijoy Das, 32, had just left his house in the northeastern Bangladeshi city of Sylhet when four masked assailants chased and then hacked the bank clerk to death with machetes. He was the third secular blogger hacked to pieces on the streets of Bangladesh this year. The targeted killing of minorities and dissenting intellectuals is part of what turned the country’s independence struggle from East Pakistan into one of the late 20th century’s genocides in 1971. The brutal theologically inspired murders in today’s Bangladesh mimic those gruesome pogroms. The worrying question asked of Bangladesh now is whether it is coming to resemble the quasi-theocratic state so many Bangladeshis fought to leave—Pakistan.

It’s not a new concern. Over the decades I’ve visited this young nation of 160 million people, the rise in religiosity has been a fiercely debated. The questions are many: Are there more veils worn on the bustling arteries of its cities and towns? How can the empowerment of the country’s women be balanced with their daily acts of religious submission? And, most controversially, what can be done to protect religious minorities and the country’s traditions of religious pluralism?

Rejections of faith, questioning and godlessness are as indigenous to this region as is the staple food, rice. As early as 600 BC the ideas of Carvaka, a philosophy that rejected then-predominant Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, was openly debated and contemplated. That former tolerance is being lost.

Despite being a nominally secular nation, Bangladesh has seen the proportion of religious minorities slowly bleed away. In just over 40 years, non-Islamic minorities have gone from around 30 percent of the population to around 10 percent now. Minority religious expression is now conspicuous by its absence. In the capital Dhaka, where I am based, reminders of this variegated society come seldom, for instance in the glimpse of a Hindu idol in my hole-in-the-wall barber shop. Low caste Hindus perform this traditionally “impure” profession, even in Muslim-majority Bangladesh.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/ananta-bijoy-das-bangladesh-atheist-murder-118223.html#ixzz3axjiDfLL