📷 One-man Newsroom Collage

Sharif Khiam Ahmed, Dhaka

In a chilling sequence of frames captured by a perpetrator’s own live broadcast, Abdur Rahman, better known as Shamim Reza, or Qalandar Baba Shri Shamim Al Jahangir Al Sureshwari, a folk spiritual practitioner, is dragged from a second-floor room in Philipnagar village.

The air vibrates with the rhythmic, bloodthirsty chants of “Beat him! Beat him!” as the mob closes in. Even as his body begins to convulse under a hail of relentless blows, Shamim Al Jahangir’s face maintains a haunting, almost surreal composure.

Only minutes passed before the spiritual figure his followers called ‘Qalandar Shah Baba’ met a violent end at the hands of the mob on a staircase. He is the latest casualty of a violent surge in religious intolerance, a ‘mobocracy’ that threatens to dismantle the thousand-year-old mystic landscape of Bangladesh.

The murder of Shamim Al Jahangir on April 11 was not a random act of violence but a symptom of a deliberate “cleansing” of folk traditions. Hospital authorities in Kushtia reported that his face bore “15 to 18 random wounds from sharp weapons.”

A physician told the Daily Prothom Alo that excessive bleeding from these facial injuries was the cause of death. Despite this gruesome end, local authorities refused to allow his burial at his own Akhra.

In a final act of displacement, he was buried in a public graveyard, monitored by heavy police presence, outside the spiritual sanctuary of his own shrine. A harrowing trend has emerged in just 24 days, characterized by at least two incidents where folk practitioners were denied burial within the precincts of their own shrines.

On March 17, Habibur Rahman, a 90-year-old folk practitioner and founder of the Habib Shah Darbar in Barisal, passed away. The next day, when devotees attempted to bury him within his shrine, a mob under the “Towhidi Janata” banner attacked the funeral, smashed their musical instruments, and forced the interment to a remote cemetery.

The denial of burial rights has become a strategic tool of suppression. By preventing a leader from being buried at their Akhra (monastery), the mob ensures that no new shrine can be established, effectively killing the site’s future as a pilgrimage center.

In Bangladesh, the Mazar (shrine) has historically served as more than a tomb; it is the spiritual epicenter of folk Islam. These are pluralistic spaces where the rigid boundaries of dogma dissolve into music and mysticism.

Today, however, those roots are being systematically hacked away. This pattern is unfolding under the oversight of the interim government led by Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus.

The brutality has reached unprecedented levels; in September 2025, in Rajbari’s Goalanda, a mob desecrated the grave of the mystic Nurul Huq, known as ‘Nural Pagla.’ They exhumed his body and burned it publicly, an act of desecration that has sent a chilling message through the country’s spiritual community.

Makam, a Sufi research organization, documented at least 97 shrine attacks between August 2024 and December 2025. Yet, only 11 cases left the perpetrators of the other 86 incidents effectively unaccountable. In Shamim Al Jahangir’s case, his family, also paralyzed by fear of further retaliation, has declined to seek justice through the law.

Roots of his lynching stretch back to 2021. The catalyst was a viral video of a funeral conducted with traditional drums, music, and dance. On June 29, 2021,  Khalid Hossain Sepahi, a representative of the Haqqani Darber, filed a lawsuit against Shamim Al Jahangir, accusing him of “insulting religion.”

Shamim subsequently spent four months in jail, during which he became a lightning rod for both political and internal sectarian rivalries. He reportedly lost the protection of the then-local Member of Parliament, AKM Sarwar Jahan Badshah, and also faced hostility from factions within his own spiritual lineage.

Though released on bail, the “anti-Shamim digital ghost” again emerges in April. Another piece of footage was weaponized and recirculated on social media to incite the villagers against him, effectively signing his death warrant.

Law enforcement’s presence at the site only adds to the tragedy’s gravity. Even with a dedicated police detail assigned to safeguard Shamim Al Jahangir, the mob’s momentum was unstoppable.

Mohammad Jasim Uddin, Superintendent of Police (SP) in Kushtia, admitted to the press that the police presence was effectively negated by the crowd’s size, leaving Shamim defenseless despite being under official protection.

This admission reveals a terrifying reality! The state’s security apparatus stood by as a helpless witness when a citizen was dragged out and executed in broad daylight. It highlights a disturbing trend where mob numbers now dictate the law, superseding the state’s mandate to protect life.

Just ten days before Reza’s murder, the local administration had summarily shut down the historic Soleman Lengta’s Fair (Lengtar Mela) in Chandpur, a centuries-old gathering of folk spiritualists.

The preemptive closure of such festivals, citing ‘security concerns’ or ‘religious sensitivity,’ has emboldened extremist groups to believe they have a state-sanctioned mandate to dismantle Sufi traditions by force.

Dehumanization by framing

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of this crisis is the role of the mainstream press. Following Reza’s murder, major national outlets, including Prothom Alo, Jugantor, and Jamuna TV, framed the victim as a “Kathito Peer” (so-called or alleged spiritual leader).

Media critics argue this constitutes a form of “secondary victimization.”

Nirjhor Alam Munawar, founder of Bangladesh Media Monitor (BMM), observed that the use of ‘alleged’ in headlines creates a negative framing that biases the reader.

“This triggers an emotional bias in the public. Unconsciously, readers begin to believe the person was ‘bad’ and that killing him was somehow justified. Whether intentionally or not, the media is legitimizing this murder.”

Qadaruddin Shishir, editor of the fact-checking outlet The Descent, echoed this concern, noting that a victim’s perceived spiritual legitimacy is irrelevant to the crime committed against them.

“When the media puts a victim’s status inside quotation marks or uses the word ‘alleged,’ it plants a seed in the reader’s mind: ‘Well, if he is a fake saint, the public would get angry!’

This indirect justification of murder is a crime. We saw this during the previous regime with terms like ‘crossfire’ and ‘gunfight.’ This practice must stop.”

Shamim Al Jahangir frequently identified himself as the ‘Sanskarer Imam’ (leader of reform), drew sharp criticism from orthodox circles, and eventually fueled accusations of spiritual heresy.

As Bangladesh navigates a volatile political transition, its thousand-year-old heritage of Sufi pluralism is being dismantled frame by frame.

When the state’s security apparatus admits ‘inability’ to intervene, and the media uses linguistics to justify a killing, the message is undeniable: the folk spiritual community is under siege.

If this trend continues, the shrines that once defined the soul of rural Bangladesh will remain only as hollowed-out monuments to a tolerance that the ‘mobocracy’ decided to kill.

For the One-man Newsroom, documenting these moments is an act of preserving the memory of a culture that is being buried, literally and metaphorically, in the wrong place.