The screw tightens in Bangladesh as publisher arrested and his stall shuttered at Dhaka book fair
Police seize six books that might be ‘insulting to Islam’, in a country that has in recent years seen bloggers and freethinkers murdered in the streets by Islamists
At Bangladesh’s annual book fair held in Dhaka last month, police handcuffed Shamsuzzoha Manik, the 73-year-old publisher of the small press Ba-Dwip Prakashan, and shut down the his book stall.
They seized six books. Their target was a translation anthology titled Islam Bitarka (“The Islam Debate”), published in 2013, but they also grabbed five others: Aryans and the Indus Civilization; Jihad: Forced Conversions, Imperialism, and Slavery’s Legacy; Islam’s Role in Social Development; Women’s Place in Islam; and Islam and Women, in case they were “insulting to Islam”.
Alongside Manik, two of his associates were arrested under the country’s infamous Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Act.
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The book fair, popularly known as Ekushey Boi Mela, is the largest event for Bangladeshi writers, publishers and readers, and has been organised by the state institution Bangla Academy since 1978.
In a BBC Bangla interview, Bangla Academy director general Shamsuzzaman Khan defended Manik’s arrest and the closure of the stall because of the “obscenity” of the book. To prove that it was obscene, he proposed that the BBC “send someone and I will read to him”. The interviewer did not take him up on the offer.
However, someone else did. On February 17, Zafar Iqbal, a popular science-fiction writer who is outspoken on public issues, said he couldn’t bear it when Khan read him lines from the “obscene” Islam Bitarka, and he urged everyone to use “caution when writing”.
