After weeks of agony, a young Ahmadi Muslim, who had been assaulted for no reason during the anti-government riots in August, breathed his last.
by Marco Respinti
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Yet another victim of violence against freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) paid with his life for no reason except his faith. He was just 16. Shahriar Rakeen, a Bangladeshi Ahmadi Muslim, died in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on November 8 after weeks of agony because of the severe wounds he had suffered during an attack of fanatics against his village on August 5, 2014. His brain was severally damaged, which eventually led him to death.
To the far north of Bangladesh lies the village of Ahmednagar in the District of Panchagarth, Division of Rangpur. This writer knows the area well for having visited it in Spring 2023 for research and interviews. The village is inhabited by a significant Ahmadi population. It is home to the Jamiya Ahmadiyya Bangladesh, the national theological institute of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at (AMJ, “jama’at” meaning “community”) in the country. And its area is the location chosen by the Bangladeshi AMJ for the Jalsa Salana, or their annual gathering of prayer.
Young Shahriar was beaten on his head with weapons that proved lethal. Trying to save his life, he was treated in several medical institutions, but his condition became more serious each day. He finally died at Dhaka Neuroscience Hospital, where he had been a patient since August 7.
This story is not only sad, but absurd too. There was no reason to hit the boy, there was no guilt on his side. A memorial video made by MTA, or Muslim Television Ahmadiyya International, shows, with footage and images, the total absurdity of this death.
During the assault against Rakeen, twenty-two other people were also injured, again with no reason. Because it is a principal place for the Bangladeshi AMJ, the village of Ahmednagar is in fact a favorite target of fanatics. In March 2023 it was attacked by hundreds of thugs during the Jalsa Salana simply because Ahmadis are considered heretics by mainline Sunni Muslims. Jahid Hasan, reportedly around 25 years of age, on March 3, 2023, was also beaten to death. The International Human Rights Committee (IHRC), an NGO based in Mitcham, Surrey, England, conducted a fact-finding mission on the incident to ascertain responsibilities.
Some background is important to understand the context in which the aggression against Shahriar Rakeen was perpetrated. The world has already forgot, but in July and August 2024 Bangladesh, a country that knows the meaning of the word “suffering” quite well, underwent a period of great turmoil that some considered similar to a civil war. The country was stormed by protests for weeks, with the government employing the army to repress demonstrations. This was ignited by the government’s decision to reserve a 30% quota in the public sector for the relatives of the veterans who had fought during the 1971 Liberation War against Pakistan. The war was accompanied by the genocide of Bangladeshis perpetrated by Pakistani armed forces and led former East Pakistan to gain independence under the present name of Bangladesh.
In fact, many considered the government’s initiative on jobs to be discriminatory which did not placate even after the Supreme Court reduced the real range of that measure. Following on from this, protests exceeded the original reason and transformed into a deep, general objection to the government, accusing it of corruption. The Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed and her party, the Bangladesh Awami League (AL), which had played a key role in the Liberation War (Sheikh Hasina is the daughter of “the father of the nation,” Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, 1920–1975) were labelled as authoritarian. Even the elections, held in January 2024, when Sheikh Hasina gained her fourth straight term, were deeply criticized by protesters.
After a long arm-wrestling between protesters and the government, Sheikh Hasina, whose official residence had previously been assaulted, resigned on August 5, taking refuge in India. A provisional government was installed by the Army’s Chief of Staff, Four-star General Waker-uz-Zaman. A provisional government was formed by representatives of three opposition parties: the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the Jatiya Party (Ershad), and Jamaat-e-Islami, which is an Islamist group.
Bangladeshi politics is complicated. A center or center-left party, AL was born at the end of the 1940s as a Muslim national(istic) party offering Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) an alternative to the centralizing Muslim politics of Pakistan. After independence, the party intertwined its fate with that of Bangladesh itself. It was opposed by parties that many times were judged to be in cohort or pandering to Muslim religious fanatics. Muslim minorities, like the Ahmadis, are in fact caught in the middle, becoming scapegoats as it happens to non-Muslim believers, be they Hindus or Christians.
Shahriar Rakeen was hit to death on the very day of the Prime Minister’s resignation, for the simple reason of being Ahmadi. Evidently, those anti-government riots harbored, at least in part, other goals, including targeting minorities and FoRB.
