Bangladesh's Atheist Blogger Still Wants to Talk
August 27, 2013
By Austin Dacey
Austin Dacey is a representative to the United Nations for the International Humanist and Ethical Union and author of The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights (Continuum, March 29, 2012).
What do you say to someone who tried to stab you to death?
The unlikely opportunity to find out presented itself to Asif Mohiuddin not long ago in a jail in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Taken into custody for a second time for allegedly posting “offensive comments about Islam and Mohammed” on his blog, the outspoken atheist blogger and anti-Islamist political activist found himself in a cell next to one of the three assailants who had been waiting outside his office building when he arrived for the night shift on the 14th of January 2013. Without a word, they had come from behind with knives and machetes, attempted to slit his throat and rained down lacerating blows on his back and neck, one of which missed his spinal column by half an inch.
“The 19-year-old boy’s name was Kamal,” Asif explained to me in English over a Skype chat. “I talked to him very politely, trying to understand what they want from me. We had a little chat about religion and humanity.”
What Asif learned is that his would-be murderer, ten years his junior, did not want anything from him in particular, declining even a neighborly offer of food between the bars. Kamal and the other young incarcerated members of Bangladesh Islami Chhatra Shibir—or Shibir, the youth wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, the leading Islamist political party in the country—seemed genuinely to enjoy their captive colloquies, seemed to like Asif “as a human being.”
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/7271/bangladesh_s_atheist_blogger_still_wants_to_talk/
Imagine the setting. A man in a cell for blasphemy next to the man who tried to kill him for blasphemy. And they have a conversation. It's like the opening scene in a play by Sartre.