Baishe February: Awami government guns roar at post jummah demonstrations

This is hard to explain, but important that you understand, at least slightly.

Today (friday) after Jummah in Bangladesh there were a lot of demonstrations flowing out of mosques in Bangladesh.  A day after the exploitative commemoration of students shot and killed by government forces in 1952, four people are reportedly killed by the police and scores if not hundreds injured.

Protestors were objecting to insulting antiIslamic writings on the web somewhere, from authors quite close to the centre of the Shahbag movement. The Shahbag movement consists of a large trendy mob demanding executions of prominent leaders of political Islam accused of war crimes, and the exclusion of political Islam from the body politic. The Awami League government is broadly aligned and supportive of this movement. One of its student leaders, Dr Imran H Sarkar in fact is one of Shahbag's defacto spokesperson.

The picture below shows police firing at people in Baitul Mukkarram, the national mosque. Maybe you've prayed there or seen it in your namaz time calenders, or visited the Islamic Foundation on a trip to Dhaka. There are other pictures, of brothers bloodied and lying motionless, other cowering as police fired indiscriminantly at them.

It is the kind of image we are used to seeing coming out of Palestine or Chechnya, not an independant Muslim majority country.

My thinking is now that the wheels are starting to come of the Shahbag Bandwagon more sensible heads will prevail. We hear this as more reasonable figures for fromm inside the awami camp distance themselves from the offending bloggers and Shahbag. 

The religious establishment is a lot larger than jamat, and the party has pissed a lot of people off in its history.The processions across the country today were not pro jamat but more an alliance against a common threat, the autocratic awami league. 

Decolonial duas for all who live and die.