Bangladesh professor ’hacked to death’ by suspected militants

By Dilip -
Shafiul is the third professor of the university killed since 2004
http://www.dhakatribune.com/crime/2014/nov/16/another-ru-professor-killed

Bangladesh professor ’hacked to death’ by suspected militants
Published: 12:30 GMT, 16 November 2014
Suspected Islamic militants have hacked to death a university professor in western Bangladesh, several years after he led a push to ban students wearing full-face veils, police said Sunday. Police have arrested at least 20 people for questioning over the murder near Rajshahi University in the west of the Muslim-majority country where the victim was a professor of sociology, a senior officer said.

The victim, Shafiul Islam, followed the folk sect Baul, popular in parts of western Bangladesh, whose members call themselves followers of humanism rather than a particular religion. Rajshahi University staff protest against the death of the university professor Shafiul Islam in Rajshahi, on November 16, 2014. Rajshahi University staff protest against the death of the university professor Shafiul Islam in Rajshahi, on November 16, 2014

The murder has triggered protests in the capital Dhaka and in Rajshahi where mainly students have marched through university campuses and boycotted classes since news of the killing broke on Saturday. "We are working on several possible motives behind the killing," Rajshahi police commissioner Mahbubur Rahman told AFP, adding that the "leading" one was that the murder was  carried out by Islamist militants. He said some 20 people have been arrested but declined to say which religious or political groups they were connected to.

A previously unknown Islamist group calling itself the Ansar al Islam Bangladesh-2 claimed responsibility for the killing, after opening a Facebook page late on Saturday. "Our Mujahideens have today murdered an apostate who had prohibited female students from wearing veils in his department and the classrooms," a posting said. "Beware all the anti-Islamic apostates and atheists!"

The Facebook page quoted a local news report from 2010 saying the professor forced female students to remove their veils before entering his classroom, when he headed the sociology department. Bangladesh is the world’s third largest Muslim-majority nation with the vast majority following a moderate form of the religion. Hardline Islam has gained strength in recent years, but killings carried out in the name of Islam are rare.

Militant Islamists attacked a famous writer in 2004, and killed a well-known atheist blogger in February last year. In August, militants were accused of killing a moderate cleric who hosted popular shows on TV. Sirajul Islam, also a sociology professor, said the slain teacher was not anti-Islam but was against full-face veils. "He moved to ban full-face veils from the classrooms and examination halls. He thought full-face veils could be used to cheat in the examinations and it was impossible to identify a student who wears a full-face veil," he told AFP. Rajshahi University had been a stronghold of the student activist wing of the country’s largest Islamist party before police launched a crack down on the group, after the secular government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina took over in 2009.

Islamist group claim responsibility of RU teacher murder
Staff Correspondent, bdnews24.com Published: 2014-11-16 
A group named ’Ansar al Islam Bangladesh-2’ has claimed responsibility for the killing of Rajshahi University teacher AKM Shafiul Islam. The sociology teacher was struck with sharp weapons by several youths in front of Bihashpalli when he was on his way home on Saturday afternoon. He suffered grave injuries on his head and shoulder, and died at the Rajshahi Medical College and Hospital.

The group’s Facebook page, which was opened around five hours after the murder, says: "Our Mujahideens (fighters) executed a ’Murtad’ (apostate) today in Rajshahi who had prohibited female students in his department to wear ’Burka’ (veil)." The page shows a picture of the slain teacher with a red X-mark on it. Below it is written in Bangla: "AKM Shafiul Islam (file closed)/ Offence: Apr, 2010/ Punishment: Nov, 2014." t follows with an English statement: "We don’t forget. Insha’Allah we will not forget others." The group’s Facebook page also names who these ’others’ are. The page carries the photographs of five people.

Three of them are those of RU teacher Islam, murdered blogger Rajib Haider, and one Ashraful Islam. They are marked with red ’X’ marks, and captioned: ’finished’. The other two pictures are of bloggers Asif Mohiuddin and Rakib Mamun. The caption for them says: "First attempt: completed; second attempt: coming soon." The page also issues a threat, reading: "Beware all the Islam opposing atheists-apostate!!!". The few posts in it quote reports by a Bengali newspaper, ’Doinik Sangram’, known to be the mouthpiece of Jamaat-e-Islami.

One of the posts reads: "Professor Shafiul Islam, while being the chair of the sociology department, recruited teachers on condition of being clean-shaved and not wearing kurta-pajamas. He barred female students from wearing burka in classes. This led to many students abandoning burka against their will." Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist militant outfit, began operating in Iraq and Syria, where the ’Shariah’-based Islamic State is active. Another Facebook page styled ’Ansar al-Islam’ in Bangla found on the social media, was opened on Sep 9 this year. Meanwhile, the Facebook page of ’Ansar al Islam Bangladesh-2’ was opened around 8pm on Saturday.

RU teacher Islam, 48, was hacked around 3pm and was declared dead by the doctors an hour later. Police say they were aware of the Facebook post claiming responsibility for the murder. "We have noticed the post on Facebook. It’s being looked in to," Matihar police OC Alamgir Hossain told bdnews24.com on Sunday. Two persons have been detained from the Bihashpalli area after the murder, said the police officer, but he declined to reveal their identities.

Meanwhile, the Detective Branch (DB) of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police is yet to confirm whether Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh at all exists. "We do not know of any organisation by this name. But new outfits are emerging now and then. So the existence of Ansar al-Islam Bangladesh cannot be ruled out," a DB deputy commissioner, working on militant outfits, told bdnews24.com on condition of anonymity.

http://www.sacw.net/article10005.html

Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more