Thanks For Coming Back
This week’s Unbelief Brief begins in Bangladesh, where a Sufi teacher was murdered by a mob after accusations of “insulting Islam”. We also note a rare reprieve, as a Baul singer accused under similar circumstances has been released on bail. Finally, we turn to the United States, where a federal Religious Liberty Commission has concluded its hearings with recommendations that challenge the very idea of church-state separation.
Unbelief Brief
A recent mob murder shows that Islamic fanaticism in Bangladesh is far from quelled. A Sufi spiritual teacher, Abdur Rahman alias Shamim al-Jahangir, was “hacked to death” after being beaten by hundreds of assailants. Back in 2023, he had been accused of unspecified “objectionable remarks about Islam” in videos that had circulated on social media. Syed Tarik, a fellow Sufi and poet, stated that Abdur Rahman had not insulted Islam but only criticized what he saw as an inaccurate interpretation of the Quran. A social media campaign against the man over the last couple of weeks, which police say they are now investigating, culminated in this horrific murder.
Abdur Rahman’s death at the hands of an angry mob grimly recalls a spate of similar killings directed against Bangladeshi atheist bloggers in the mid-2010s, including Avijit Roy. For a time, police crackdowns seemed to curtail lynchings specifically. However, Islamic militancy in Bangladeshi society remained. Often overlooked in the wake of its neighbor Pakistan’s admittedly more egregious persecution of accused blasphemers and apostates, Bangladesh still has an enormous amount of work to do to combat the scourge of religious violence.
Conversely, however, there is some good news out of Bangladesh as well. Baul singer Abul Sarkar, who had previously been imprisoned on accusations of insulting Islam, has been released on bail. Similarly to Abdur Rahman, he had been accused of insulting Islam over unspecified remarks in a video that circulated on social media. Supporters claim he was criticizing religious fundamentalism, not Islam itself. Sarkar has fortunately been spared the grisly fate of Abdur Rahman, and we hope he remains safe.
Lastly, in the US: the Religious Liberty Commission established last year by the Trump Administration has held its final hearing. It plans to send policy recommendations to the president next month. That this commission has been established with the intent of bringing religion, specifically Christianity, into closer integration with the state is now obvious. During the hearing, Texas Lieutenant Governor and Commission Chairman Dan Patrick went as far as to say that, constitutionally, there is “no such thing” as separation of church and state. He additionally said in a statement that “witness after witness testified that the so-called ‘separation of church and state’ was used to take their God-given religious liberty rights away.”
The hostility to secularism, couched in the language of “religious freedom,” is palpable. The Commission’s recommendations are ironically likely to further erode religious liberty in the US by attacking the separation of church and state that Patrick claims does not exist. Its goals sit in direct conflict with those of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), which explicitly aims to advance religious liberty for people of all faiths or no faith. The imposition of Christian doctrine onto the public sphere, aided directly by actors within federal and state governments, is certainly not religious freedom as we or Thomas Jefferson understand it.
Until next week,
The Team at Ex-Muslims of North America
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