One night in February, Rajib Haider was set upon near his Dhaka home by five knife-wielding youths. His face was so lacerated that a relative who found the body wasn’t sure it was him until he called Haider’s cellphone and heard it ring inside a pocket.
Haider was a blogger, one of hundreds in Bangladesh demanding the death penalty for Islamist leaders accused of wartime atrocities, whose grisly murder swelled the crowds at student-led rallies many hailed as a “Bangladesh Spring”.
But now, a radical pro-Islam movement has emerged to counter the students it sneers at as “atheist bloggers”.
Known as Hefajat-e-Islam, it has given the government until May 5 to introduce a new blasphemy law, reinstate pledges to Allah in the constitution, ban women from mixing freely with men and make Islamic education mandatory – an agenda critics say would amount to the ‘Talibanisation’ of Bangladesh. [Reuters Blogs - FaithWorld] Read more
