Bangladeshi court rejects bid to remove Islam as state religion

Bangladesh’s top court this week finally rejected an almost three-decade-old bid to remove Islam as its state religion. The trio of high court judges said the original 1988 appeal of the law was illegitimate, since it was never registered with national authorities. The decision came as no surprise but sparked pushback nonetheless.

“Bangladesh was founded as a secular state, and having a state religion contradicts the basic structure of the constitution,” Professor Anisuzzaman, a leader of the petitioning organization, told Al Jazeera.

But Islamic leaders praised the ruling.

“We thank the court on behalf of the nation for rejecting the petition,” said Fazlul Karim Kashemy, a leader of the Bangladeshi group Hefjat-e-Islam. “Muslims and non-Muslims in our society have been maintaining good relationship for long.”

But do Muslims and non-Muslims in Bangladesh really get along so well? In recent months, a string of grisly murders perpetrated by Islamic extremists suggests otherwise. In four separate incidents last year, masked gunmen slaughtered four atheist bloggers openly critical of Islam. Many free-thinking secular Bangladeshi writers and educators have been intimidated into silence by anonymous death threats on social media.

“In Bangladesh, Islamic groups control the mainstream media and TV channels—and they were trying to control the blogs as well,” Asif Mohiuddin, a secular writer and political activist who survived a machete attack in 2013, told The Guardian.

There are whispers of Islamic State’s growing presence in the country, along with al-Qaeda’s influence, prompting the government to crack down with an increasingly heavy hand as it tries to reassure the international community Bangladesh is safe.

According to a recent New York Times report, some believe the recent surge in bloodshed is directly correlated to the country’s official religious identity.

“[Official status as a Muslim nation] changed the whole atmosphere of the country,” said Serajul Islam Choudhury, a former English professor who signed the 1988 petition to re-establish Bangladesh as a secular state. “It gives a kind of impunity to those who act in the name of Islam. People have over the years gotten away with a lot in the name of religion, and it has led us to last year’s murders.”

Since it gained independence from Pakistan in 1971, Bangladesh’s national identity has ping-ponged between an Islamic and a secular state. Two decades after the country’s birth as a secular nation, military dictator Hussein Muhammad Ershad declared Islam the state religion in an effort to win popular support. Then in 2011, current Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina reintroduced secularism as the political standard in a constitutional amendment but continued to support Islam as the official state religion.

Bangladesh follows Pakistan and Indonesia as the world’s third-largest Muslim-majority country, with 9 out of 10 Bangladeshis claiming allegiance to Islam. Hindus are the largest religious minority, at 8.5 percent, and Christians make up less than 2 percent of the nation’s 160 million people. In theory, the religious minorities of Bangladesh coexist harmoniously, with constitutional protection against discrimination or persecution.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.