That day, three men stood lookout in the hallways, while the other three entered the office, closing the door behind them. Once inside, they hacked Deepan to death with machetes. They focused on his face and neck, and left him in a pool of blood. Then they fled, padlocking the door behind them, apparently unnoticed by the other traders.Deepan's father, Abul Kashem Fazlul Haq, an intellectual in his own right and professor of Bengali at the prestigious Dhaka University, found his body early that evening. He had rushed over when he heard of an attack that same day on another publisher with offices nearby and was unable to reach his son by phone. That publisher, Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, along with two writers who were also attacked that night, survived, though Tutul lost his hands."The medical examiner's report said that he was 'murdered with the least possible pain,'" Deepan's father said. 'Those are the exact words: 'Murdered with the least possible pain.'"
It was November 2015, and I had been invited to Bangladesh to participate in Dhaka Lit Fest, a prominent international literary festival that had been, in one form or another, in existence since 2011. First impressions weren't promising. The road from the airport was a congested mess of stationary vehicles that, every ten or so minutes, would clear up, allowing cars to creep another hundred meters before clogging again amid a constant barrage of honking. The driver told me that this was normal. The scene looked like a post-apocalyptic New Delhi. Extreme privilege rubbed shoulders with extreme want more violently than anywhere I'd ever been. Half the vehicles, battered to the edge of extinction, could be pulled straight off these streets and used unaltered in the next Mad Max movie, while many of the others, polished to a high sheen by diligent servants, would fit in on a boulevard in Malibu.
Almost immediately after attacks on Faisal Deepan and Ahmedur Tutul in October, al Qaeda in the Indian subcontinent claimed responsibility "as vengeance for the honour [sic] of the messenger of Allah and the religion of Islam. These two publishers were worse than the writers of such books, as they helped to propagate those books and paid the blasphemers handsome amount of money for writing them."The books they referred to were by Avijit Roy, the blogger who had been brutally murdered in February, one of the few attacks that was witnessed. An outspoken atheist and humanist, he wrote books with titles such as The Virus of Faith and The Philosophy of Disbelief , certain to enrage a dimwitted but violent segment among Bangladesh's ultra-religious.Roy's name had originally appeared on a hit list of 84 so-called atheist bloggers that started circulating in 2013. It was the first of many such lists, and Faisal Deepan's name would appear on one later, but its exact origins remain murky. While almost certainly drawn up by fundamentalist Islamic organizations, it was originally handed to the pro-secular government as a list of names to investigate and arrest, and preferably hang, for what the compilers called "the crime of atheism." He was killed outside the grounds of the Bangla Academy, where the festival was also being held. In photographs from that night, his wife stands over his body, covered head to foot in blood. She pleads for help while onlookers, including police officers, surround her, watching impassively.
"For years, Islamists have been increasing their presence in the country," 45-year old K. Anis Ahmed, a prominent publisher and novelist and one of the co-directors of the festival, told me. "But you also have to remember that about forty percent of the country never wanted independence. That number hasn't changed much, and that's the reason the BNP continues to have the support it does." He was referring to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, founded in 1978 by Ziaur Rahman, who reintroduced multi-party politics to the country after a 1975 military coup.Since the nation's founding in 1971, Bangladeshi politics has been dominated by a tenuous compromise between a secular Bengali worldview, one shared by a majority of Bangladeshis, and the reactionary forces who opposed independence from Pakistan, favoring instead the creation of a fundamentalist Islamist state. To this day, those forces remain committed to some form of "Talibanizing" Bangladesh.When Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, leader of the secular Awami League and the country's first prime minister, was assassinated in the 1975 coup, the new military regime amended the previously secular constitution to make Islam the state religion. In the years since, increasingly large amounts of foreign money have been funneled into the country. The money has come from wealthy and conservative Bangladeshis abroad and hardliners in Saudi Arabia, and has been used to fund extremist organizations like Ansarullah Bangla Team (ABT), a group that would claim responsibility for killing the blogger Avijit Roy.Who could possibly want to murder C? He wasn't a blogger, writer, or activist; rather, he lived a regular life in a provincial city where he was a professor in a highly uncontroversial subject, which under normal circumstances would never raise anyone's hackles. But these were hardly normal circumstances.
On the first morning of the festival, opening ceremonies were delayed an hour and several of the day's events canceled or rescheduled because of the hartal. I entered by walking through a phalanx of officers wielding 7.62mm SKS rifles. Once inside the heavily secured gates, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and standing there was a friend of almost 20 years, and someone I hadn't seen in over a decade, not since he had returned to his native Bangladesh from the US. I'll call him C, as he asked that his name not be published. Three days before he had received a frightening phone call from a friend.
It was the second list, the one drawn up by the government, that interested Kamal most, and indeed, four bloggers on this list had been arrested by Sheikh Hasina's government in April 2013 on the charge of defaming Islam. It was hardly the move of a fiercely secular administration.The brand of Islam practiced in Bangladesh, Kamal told me, has never been the prohibitive and austere style that's trumpeted by oil-rich Saudi sheikhs. It was a different religion, having emerged out of the religious and intellectual tumult that characterized medieval India, and heavily influenced by mystical strands of Sufism and its long history living alongside Hinduism and indigenous Bengal religions. "We're a soft people," he said. "A musical people, a mystical people. Our religion is not the religion they practice in the Middle East. We're not extremists, and we never have been.""If I want to go anywhere else, I have to call the police a day before, and they send six officers to accompany me," Kamal said. "But if you're a young writer and you find yourself on one of those lists, they won't do anything for you."
As the festival continued, I was surprised to hear little talk of the killings. Rather, the city's turbulence seemed to melt away as we passed through layers of security and walked along winding lanes that passed the quaint, neo-Victorian buildings of the Bangla Academy. It was a relief to listen, instead, to excited chatter over newly published books and the rising place of Bengali in world literature. Yoss, a Cuban rocker and sci-fi novelist who dressed every inch the part, caused a minor stir wherever he walked, along with a flurry of requests for selfies with him. We sat on a panel together discussing the state of contemporary sci-fi writing where I admitted to being a huge Doctor Who fan in my youth. Leaving the auditorium, whole classes of local schoolgirls in their pristine uniforms mobbed me, wanting to know who my favorite doctor was and pose with me for one group selfie after another. The prevailing atmosphere wasn't one of danger but of possibility. The air felt charged with an electric optimism, and no topic was off-limits, from atheism to the erotic. Bangladesh, not only as a literary force but as a nation, people kept telling me, was ready to take its place on the world stage.
In the days after Faisal Deepan's murder, Avijit Roy's widow, Rafida Bonya, penned an open letter attacking the ruling Awami League and the country's leader, Sheikh Hasina, blasting their continued inaction and what she called their outright pandering for Islamist votes:
When I met Faisal Deepan's father, Abul Haq, at Dhaka University, he greeted me with a disarming smile and led me into sitting room attached to the offices of the Bangla Language Department, where he has taught for years. The room overlooked a grassy quad, where in 1952 students gathered to protest the imposition of Urdu over Bengali and other regional languages in what was then still East Pakistan. The Language Movement that was born here would lead to the schisms that gave birth to Bangladesh, and, according to the Awami League argument, these were the same forces that ultimately propelled Deepan's assailants.
When I left, it was early afternoon and a soft golden light filtered through the bedraggled halls of Dhaka University. On a wall, a handwritten poster for a student group meeting discussing the murders proclaimed, "We Must Not Die Before We Are Killed."That outside forces are increasingly involved in the unrest in Bangladesh, according to many people I spoke to in Dhaka, is an argument the US government has been putting forward, calling them "violent extremists"—which these days, and in the context of Bangladesh, they would tell me is diplo-speak for ISIS. But the term could equally refer to disaffected Islamists inside the country, perhaps without any specific political affiliation.Two months after Roy's murder, al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) joined the party and claimed responsibility, as it later would for Deepan's murder. The killings of two foreigners in late September and early October were claimed by ISIS, and that same week, three men were arrested for putting up ISIS recruitment posters reading, "The call of the Middle East." After the attack on the Italian priest on the day before the Dhaka Lit Fest, ISIS published an article in its mouthpiece outlet Dabiq titled "The Revival of Jihad in Bengal," in which it condemned Jamaat-e-Islami as insufficiently Islamic along with other indigenous Islamist organizations and called for their followers to join ISIS in its pure war, which it planned to spread from Bangladesh to India.Sheikh Hasina's government continues to scoff at such reports. "I can say surely," she claimed in early October when she invited a group of journalists to her home, "that ISIS or any such type of organization or their activities have not sprouted in Bangladesh." When I asked Ahmed, he laughed at the idea. "ISIS wouldn't be able to find its way through Dhaka traffic!" The case that the murderers are homegrown fundamentalists, and their motives relate to the government's newly found determination to bring the killers of 1971 to justice is indeed strong. It's not hard to send a tweet claiming responsibility, which is how ISIS stakes its claims, or publish an article outlining how you're going to conquer a nation. And at the heart of ISIS's media strategy and projection of power is its exploitation of our fears of its potential reach. Yet it seems equally unlikely that ISIS wouldn't be recruiting operatives in Bangladesh, if only to lay the groundwork for a future operation. Hasina's public denials of any foreign involvement are potentially as dangerous as American arguments, at least as locals characterized them to me, that these murders are the work of foreign infiltrators."It's about economic power, here in Bangladesh," Ahasan insisted. "It's about getting it. It's about keeping it. They didn't die for their ideas; they died so someone else could get rich!"
We were driving to the lit fest's closing night party at a sprawling private residence when we got the news. The driver had been listening to the radio and briefly turned around. "It's done," was all he said. Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid, Jamaat's number-two man, and Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, a BNP lawmaker and one of opposition leader Zia's top aides, had just been hanged, within days of their final appeal being rejected. US officials had seriously objected to what they called the lack of a fair trial, with many key defense witnesses barred from taking the stand. The Bangladeshi writer Ahmed Ikhtisad acknowledged the problems with the trial but rationalized the court's lack of due process. "The thing you have to understand is that these were horrific killers," he said. "It's been forty years, and we've been waiting, and most people just want this over with."I would be leaving two days later, and in my brief time in Bangladesh, I had spent most of it either at the hotel or on the protected grounds of the Dhaka Lit Fest, or being shuttled somewhere, often with an armed police escort for protection. What surprised me most was how easily I'd become accustomed to what on my first night had felt like an apocalyptic landscape. Now it felt ordinary, and I could understand how people simply lived here. As to the question of who killed Faisal Deepan, I realized the answer was less important than untangling the web of Islam, fanaticism, political rivalry, history, and power that had dominated Bangladesh. I had started with a simple question and soon found myself plunged into a story as complex and ambiguous as any Graham Greene could write.On my last afternoon, I sat with the distinguished 77-year old novelist Hasan Azizul Huq by the hotel pool. He too was recently threatened. "Let them come and kill me," he said, "but if they do, they'll kill a free man." We talked for an hour, but not about the killings, or the rising influence of fundamentalist Islam, or the failures of this party or that party, but about writers and art, and the people we admired and who had influenced us and taught us something vital and beautiful about the world. It felt necessary, on my last day here, to breathe a little of the giddy and romantic air that had called for freedom of thought, freedom of religion, or freedom to just be—those freedoms that inspired the independence struggle of 1971, when Bangladesh was born.Ranbir Singh Sidhu's debut novel Deep Singh Blue is out this month from Unnamed Press.