Avijit Roy, an American activist and blogger who denounced religious extremism, was murdered in Bangladesh on Feb. 26 after walking home from a book fair where he was promoting his latest book, Virus of Faith. His daugher, freshman Trisha Ahmed, has been working to spread awareness throughout the Hopkins community and beyond about Roy’s writings and about the circumstances of his death.
Two men attacked Roy and Rafida Ahmed, Trisha’s mother, with machetes while bystanders stood nearby watching.
“On Bangladesh, the United States condemns in the strongest terms the brutal murder of Avijit Roy, which was horrific in its brutality and cowardice,” State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki wrote in a statement to The News-Letter. “Avijit was a journalist, a humanist, a husband, and a friend, and we extend our condolences to his family and friends. He was taken from us in a shocking act of violence. This was not just an attack against a person, but a cowardly assault on the universal principles enshrined in Bangladesh’s constitution and the country’s proud tradition of free intellectual and religious discourse.”
Ahmed learned of her father’s death from Facebook messages sent from her cousins in Bangladesh. Her roommate, freshman Isabella Bowker, tried to comfort her after the news broke.
“Between the lack of information and the communication barrier, it was confusing and frustrating, and it made the final declaration that much harder because we had both been holding out this hope for probably half an hour, 45 minutes,” Bowker said.
Ahmed then posted about the incident on Facebook and encouraged fellow students to share the news through social media using the hashtag #WordsCannotBeKilled. Many students followed suit, sharing links to news articles and sharing Trisha’s personal words.
“What would help me the most right now is if everyone (even people I’ve never met) could share his story,” Ahmed wrote in a post on her personal Facebook profile. “If you could just do all you can to spread word of what’s happened, I would appreciate it so much. Inform your schools, your communities, write all that you can. Please don’t allow my dad to die in vain.”
Ahmed said she appreciates her classmates’ sentiments and prayers. However, she said that the fact that people are praying for her family strikes her as strange since Roy was a prominent atheist and an advocate of secularism. She also became an atheist at the age of 12.
“He’s technically my step-dad, but he fulfilled every role a dad would fill,” Ahmed, who has known Roy since she was six years old, said. “I’ve been calling him dad since I was 10, and he’s been a large influence in my life ever since I met him.”
Ahmed was so inspired by the work Roy did in the secular community in Bangladesh that she formed Philosoraptors, a science and philosophy club, at her own high school. She also occasionally co-wrote pieces with her father, helping him translate his Bengali works into English.
“Anytime I wanted to get my opinion out there he always encouraged me to write,” Ahmed said. “He was very outspoken in his beliefs in science and nationalism, but in person he was a very approachable, unintimidating [and] compassionate person.”
Ahmed has traveled to eight countries with her parents since the family finds it important to be well-cultured and open to different perspectives. She explained that her parents especially encouraged a traveler’s mindset particularly when it came to food.
The only instance in which they were intolerant, according to Ahmed, was when it came to religious fundamentalism, which was something Roy criticized consistently over the course of his life. A strong proponent for rationalism and secularism, Roy was popular with the scientific community in Bangladesh, especially among university students. To facilitate discussion about non-religious philosophies, Roy founded an online forum called Mukto-Mona, which means “Free Thought,” which has thousands of users from Bangladesh and around the world.
Roy had received significant backlash for his views, especially from conservative Islamist militant groups.
About a year ago a group in Bangladesh threatened Roy’s publisher to stop selling his works at a particular venue. Opposed to this action, Roy asked Ahmed to look over his report in English and check his grammar before submitting a formal complaint.
Roy had also received death threats. Last year, Farabi Shafiur Rahman, whom Bangladeshi Rapid Action Battalion police force describe as a member of the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, had posted threats targeted at Roy on Facebook.
“I really didn’t think the death threats were the real deal,” Ahmed said. “It was taken more lightly than it should have been taken. I wish I had paid more attention.”
On Monday, Rahman was arrested as the prime suspect behind Roy’s murder despite the fact that a previously unknown militant group, Ansar Bangla 7, had claimed responsibility for the attack.
A week and a half ago, prior to leaving for Dhaka, Roy and Rafida Ahmed visited their daughter at Hopkins. They did not take her with them to Bangladesh because they knew they were facing a direct threat.
“Trisha kept telling me her mom wanted my phone number to text me if anything ever happened to Trisha,” Bowker said.
Ahmed believes that now more than ever the culture in Bangladesh is becoming radical and fearful as people are being killed at random by extremists. According to Walter Andersen, the Administrative Director of the South Asia Studies Program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, this increasing militancy has been growing since the 1980s as a result of three factors.
There was a coup against the secular civilian government in 1975 that led the military to use Islam to condone the growth of militant groups in order to allow it to maintain power and gain legitimacy. Additionally, many young Bangladeshi men from poor families traveled to the Middle East and brought home a more militant form of Islam called Wahhabi. Finally, missionary societies with Wahhabi orientations, located primarily in Saudi Arabia, recently founded more madrasas, or secular and religious educational institutions, and funded various militant groups.
“Muslims in Bangladesh have been historically Sufi-tolerant, eclectic and absorbing aspects of Hindu culture that was in that area before Islam came,” Andersen, who recently retired as chief of the U.S. State Department’s South Asia Division in the Office of Analysis for the Near East and South Asia, said. “Sufi was and still is the major form of Islamic orientation in Bangladesh, but now you have this dangerous element in a society that is otherwise largely non-militant. And these militant groups are beginning to assert themselves.”
While there has been opposition to this extremism, Andersen said it has been largely unsuccessful in part because of the considerable corruption in the government. She added that Bangladesh’s large poor population is also more susceptible to militant messages and thus more likely to support madrasas, many of which are deobandi and have a strict literary interpretation of Islam.
“It doesn’t take a lot of people to create chaos, and so you have organized militant groups that have substantial numbers that are not huge, but large enough that they can create trouble,” Andersen said. “It’s very difficult to [organize opposition], particularly when the government is inefficient at doing it. A lot happens under the radar and so until it becomes effective in doing this, you’re going to have continued problems.” Andersen said that the violence in Bangladesh has not approached the levels seen in other areas of the Middle East, such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan, but that the killings are creating widespread fear of speaking out against militancy. Andersen thinks that Roy’s murder will galvanize the government and the population to crack down on these groups.
A bipartisan group of six representatives from the U.S. House of Representatives has sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry urging him to work with the U.S. Embassy to not only bring Roy’s attackers to justice but also to ensure that all threats to secularist bloggers are taken seriously.
