Islamic preacher Rafiqul Islam Madani has sharply criticised Jamaat-e-Islami’s current activities and what he called its efforts to win Western support, in a long Facebook post on Friday (2 October).
In the post he compared a Jamaat woman MP to Momtaz, the folk singer who was an Awami League MP, writing that the Awami League had one Momtaz and now Jamaat had one too. The difference, he wrote, was that the Awami League’s was open about what she was, while the Jamaat MP was deceiving people in the name of Islam while wearing a hijab, and harming Islam.
Madani wrote that he felt Jamaat was directly and indirectly challenging the country’s Islamists in the hope of gaining power with Western backing. In his view, the party believes the Awami League chapter is closed, the BNP is in power and voters will not return any party for two terms in a row, so it expects to win next time, and sees its only obstacle in the West, which would not let it come to power if it saw it as Islamist.
So, he wrote, Jamaat was trying to prove to the West that it was even more secular than the Awami League and the BNP, citing a women’s basketball event at Dhaka University held in shorts and a Jamaat woman MP presenting the prizes despite criticism across the country.
Addressing Jamaat and Shibir, he wrote that they had helped him in hard times and he felt sympathy for them, did not oppose them for the sake of it and did not criticise for criticism’s sake, but if they openly challenged people like him to please the West, his opposition would not be limited to single issues. He urged them not to drag down a party “coloured by the martyrdom of Allama Sayeedi”.
By the time this report was written, the post had drawn about 13,500 reactions.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report