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Dear Mastermind,
   I understand from reading your blood-smeared leaflet that you and your fellow Islamic aficionados have detonated the bombs on Wednesday to disseminate the message that the democratic doctrines that are being pursued by the nation at the moment are not good enough. Therefore, you have taken it upon yourselves to wage war against the entire nation to establish Islamic rule in the mould of the Koranic Sharia laws, which you believe would give us the answers to all our terrestrial and extraterrestrial questions. You and the likes of you take the liberty to think that others who call themselves Muslims are no-good-Muslims as they are not madrasa-educated, do not wear ‘Islamic’ dress or sport a beard, and wear the dress of the infidels, hence are deviating from the dictums of God. In your judgement, these heretics need to be purged of their evil ways and thoughts and subjected to strict punishment as per the laws ordained for the purpose. You even indulge yourself in the belief that other Islamic leaders and thinkers of the country who are peddling their own brands of Islam are no good either and will go to hell straightaway as they oppose your vision and mission. With this messianic fervor tucked under the belt you have managed to raise a band of followers from amongst the rank and file of various orphanages and madrasas, scare them out of their wits with all the stories of retribution of the two worlds, feed them an overdose of ‘gifts’ and ‘pleasures’ awaiting them in heaven, and then to speed up the passage from here to hereafter give the boys training in arms and in the craft of making crude bombs and teach them how to hold in disdain fellow citizens who refuse to agree to your ways. You have successfully brainwashed their juvenile minds with the contemptuous thought that for establishing your brand of Islam you can kill your fellow humans, and that will land you in heaven. The hatred for anyone outside the ‘secret brotherhood’ is instilled so deep into their collective psyche that once baptized no outside influence can ever cause any dent in their faith. The efficacy of jihad for the cause of Islam (your brand of Islam, that is) is being expounded in such forceful language that it intoxicates the young minds and brings them under your total submission. Then they carry out your orders without asking any questions or applying any logic or reasoning of their own. The bombs on Wednesday were made, carried to their destinations and detonated by these young men.
   What followed is still fresh in our minds. The bombs you made so methodically went off just as you had planned. You must be feeling happy now that your preliminary objective has been achieved. And now you must be waiting for the right time to launch the second phase of your mission. But, my humble question is, before you and your fellow missionaries embark upon the more ambitious, and perhaps more gruesome, second phase did you go around the country and talk to the ‘people’ to know for yourself what they thought about the first phase of your mission? I am not sure whether you did that, but I have done so on my own on Wednesday once the smoke cleared and all the commotion subsided.
   I talked with a cross section of people, on the roads, in bus terminals, in launch terminals and in restaurants and the people included teachers, students, housewives, government officials, small traders, rickshawpullers, big businessmen, CNG drivers, bus drivers, shopkeepers and so on. I wanted to know their opinion about the bombing binge and about Islamic rule as you and your groups desire to establish in the country. What they said might not make you very happy but I am sure you will understand their fallibility. One of them said that it takes much more than just blind adherence to a religious faith to seize state power and be able to hold on to it for a substantial period of time before getting annihilated by yet another, stronger group or groups. Religiosity and running the affairs of the state are two diametrically opposite things, and when for the first preoccupation one may not need much use of the gray matter, for the second, greater skill, acumen and endowments to handle the ways of the world were required. It seemed to me the persons I talked to do not have a high opinion about your mental faculties and ability to run state affairs with much credibility. Then another person joined our conversation and said that there is no example that a Muslim country could successfully implement the Islamic Sharia laws in society and bring about outstanding economic, scientific and technological progress. The person went on to cite from history saying that the Islamist groups and sub-groups and even their smaller denominations could never see eye to eye with one another in terms of an interpretation of the Koran, Sunnah, Sharia laws, other Islamic edicts, decrees, statutes, doctrines, canons and so on and so forth. Factional infighting among the Muslim leaders and their followers remained the order of the day since the time of the Prophet of Islam and it reached its discreditable manifestation immediately after his demise. Hazrat Abu Bakar, Hazrat Ali and Hazrat Osman and the close associates of the Prophet had to quell a sectarian sandstorm that gathered ominously over the nascent Islam’s horizon following the demise of the Prophet. It happened on the question of deciding who would be the first Khalifa of Islam. Hazrat Ali’s followers wanted their leader to be given the coveted position first. This was protested by the group of Hazrat Osman. Finally, the responsibility was given to Hazrat Abu Bakar. The existence of 72 sects in Islam, as proclaimed by none other than the Prophet, is evidence enough of the never ending internal feud for hierarchy in the Islamic domain. The person further narrated that thereby it does not come as a surprise that the annals of Islamic history of the last fifteen hundred years are replete with incidents of extremism, intolerance and bloodbath carried out by feuding groups, each claiming itself to be stringent followers of the ‘real Islam’ as decreed and exemplified by the Prophet and his close followers. No group recognised the other group or groups as followers of true Islam. As a result, for the illusive ‘real Islam’, Hazrat Ali and Hazrat Osman, the two Khalifas who were also the trusted companions and close relations of the Prophet, had to die tragically at the hands of some disgruntled Muslims. Then came the 12 Imams, one after another, to carry forth the torch of Islam across the continents. Unfortunately, many of them were also assassinated by their fellow Muslims who either did not agree with their interpretation of Islam or desired to seize state power for their own groups.
   Our conversation steered deeper and deeper into the recesses of Islamic history in a bid to find examples of when and where a country could establish Muslim Sharia laws in their entirety and reap mortal and celestial benefits thereupon. We rather found out that when great Islamic scholars like Al Razi, Ibn Sina, Al Khwarizmi, etc., were beginning to quench people’s thirst for empirical knowledge, orthodox Muslim groups began to call them heretics as they were supposedly tinkering with knowledge they did not approve of and hence issued fatwas to kill them. There ended the golden era of Muslim history.
   Another man joined in and said that conflicting opinions regarding Islamic laws and rule began to emerge openly soon after the demise of the Prophet and deliberations gave rise to groups like the Kharizis, Quadirias and Muttazilas and so on. The diverging opinions and debates also gave birth to many sects like the Shiias, Ismailis and Sufis.
   The centuries of rule and misrule, of seizing power by force, of assassinations, of betrayal, of palace intrigues, of orthodox preaching and practice only confirmed the claim that at no point of time Islamic Sharia laws could be established in any Muslim country. Therefore, the pertinent question that needs to be answered is how you, dear Mastermind, plan to establish that mythical rule in Bangladesh where over ninety per cent of the population has opted to let religion mould their personal life and strengthen their moral foundations while they have unanimously chosen democratic principles to run the state. The people I have talked to believe that ragtag groups like yours will not survive more than a day and a half in power as you will not have the mandate of the general masses. They questioned how you would possibly face the internal and external adversaries who will manipulate world opinion in their favour and go all out to destroy you and your power base? Surely you are watching what is happening to the fundamentalist elements in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan as well as other countries. On the other hand, freedom seeking Palestinians are fighting for over fifty years with a small but powerful state like Israel, which could come into existence only because of the age old enmity, disharmony and disunity of the Arab countries. Are you aware that the world is indeed closing in on the extremist elements in all these countries and it is only a matter of time before they will be captured and annihilated? You are outnumbered and out-resourced. None of the Middle Eastern countries will fund you or give you shelter for long because of the world pressure. How long can one remain on the run in the rugged mountains or rain forests to carry on with one’s messianic missions on earth? Not long enough.
   Dear Mastermind, the common plea of the people I talked to after the Wednesday bombing was that you and the likes of you stop exploiting Islam for your own personal gain—that is seizing state power—stop feeding wrong and dangerous ideas into the heads of our young men and women, who otherwise could become assets of this nation through becoming nuclear scientists, physicists, biologists, economists, social scientists, researchers, engineers, space technologists, medical researchers and so on. A world of opportunity is waiting for them outside the bounds of the orphanage and madrasas and your training centres. Please do not keep them locked in. Free their chain, remove the hatred from their minds for their fellow humans, let them go out, get educated and then compete with the brilliant minds from all over the world and let them prove their worth, that they are no less. By doing so they will not deviate from Islam. Let them be free to pray to their Allah in their privacy. Let prayer not be a regimental drill.
   The people I talked to on Wednesday also said that the whole lot of elderly people going about doing nothing throughout the day but selling religion to become rich, some of them awfully rich indeed, should be restrained socially and politically so that they may not recruit young people so easily from now on. Religion should be made difficult for them, one of them commented.
   I appeal to your conscience, dear Mastermind, to spare our best assets and stop causing any more damage to this nation. In many Suras of the Koran you must have come across the word ‘compassion’. Please preach it all the time to your followers. And one more thing to be remembered, said one person sitting on my right, we do not harbour any hatred in our hearts for those who go the way of religion. Why do you hate us so much?
   The writer is senior assistant editor, New Age

As part of the government’s bold initiative to clean up the country’s film industry, 21 films and 20 theatres across the country have been banned so far in the last 12 months for showing overtly sexual scenes, said a high official on the Censor Board. The drive was initiated last year as part of a strong campaign against obscene films.
   The government–run Film Censor Board reviews local and foreign films, and may censor or ban them on the grounds of state security, law and order, religious sentiment, obscenity, foreign relations, defamation, or plagiarism, said Abu Abdullah, vice chairman of the Bangladesh Film Censor Board.
   The number of banned films has recently been much higher than at any time in the past. The Censor Board certifies whether a film can be shown at more than 1,000 movie theatres. The board has the supreme power to certify a film for screening or can recall any film at any time without any prior notice, said Abdullah.
   Popularly known as Dhaliwood, the Dhaka-based Bengali film industry releases 120 low-budget films a year at an average cost of about 3 to 4 million taka each.
   ‘Since June last year, we have banned 21 films and shut down 20 cinema halls for showing obscene scenes which go against our culture and values’, Abdullah told New Age. ‘The 21 films include 18 Bengali and 3 English films,’ he said.
   Six inspectors, who have been working with the Censor Board, observe films at theatres across the country. They seize films that show bathing scenes, rapes and sexually explicit clips sometimes taken from foreign films, the board points out.
   The trend of making obscene films was introduced in 1997. As the Censor Board stands firm against obscene films, some artistes, directors and producers who used to engage in the illegal trade are now very concerned about not doing any obscene films.
   Last year Information Minister Mohammed Shamsul Islam instructed the board officials to enforce the law on obscenity in films, saying a failure to do so would result in a moral disaster.
   ‘We’re now sending our inspectors to the remotest parts of the country to see whether a theatre is showing any obscene films. The police and local administration are also co-operating with us,’ Abdullah said.
   The Censor Board in a report to the information ministry noted that the screening of these ‘obscene and sexually explicit films have contributed to the deteriorating values among adolescents and youth.’
   ‘The screening of obscene films is one of the main reasons for the deteriorating law and order in society,’ the board said.
   As part of the clean up drive, the board has also been engaged in legal battles in the different courts. The board has instituted 52 cases against 29 movies so far. In 2003, the board filed two cases; in 2004, 23 cases and in May, 2005, the board filed 23 cases.
   Most of the time the films banned by the Censor Board somehow get stay order and can exhibit the films adding overtly explicit scenes. As a result, the administration cannot seize a film as the owner of the hall shows the copy of the stay order to the board authorities or law enforcers.
   Entertainment critics say a growing number of filmmakers in Bangladesh are producing sexually explicit movies because they are less costly to make and find a ready audience among adolescents and young people.
   ‘Only a few filmmakers now care for family films which were once a hallmark of Dhaliwood,’ said a movie critic.
   ‘I saw some of these films which were banned. These are not films but the
   worst type of pornography,’ he said. ‘The government should have banned them before they were allowed to run in the movie theatres.’

Daily Times, Pakistan
   Editorial
   It would have been appropriate to compare the ‘pseudo-Islamic’ upheaval of Bangladesh with the one in Pakistan, especially as both Bangla Bhai and Jangi Bhai had trained in Afghanistan and lived in the seminaries of Karachi.
   If Bangladeshis ‘in denial’ should care to look at Pakistan more closely instead of hating it blindly, they will find that the disease of ‘Islamist terrorism’ was incubated in Karachi and Khost and then passed on to Dhaka. A glace at the looking glass in Dhaka will discover Pakistani-jihadi footsteps all over the place. The Harkatul Mujahideen al-Islami (the one called HUJI in Bangladesh) is the outfit whose leader was a graduate of the Banuri Mosque seminary in Karachi and whose activists tried to kill our prime minister Shaukat Aziz recently.
   HUJI is the international face of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. As for the ‘pseudo-Islamic’ nature of what is happening in Bangladesh, let us accept that that is the way of ‘Islamic revolution’ these days. This is what the Uzbek Islamist Tahir Yuldashev did in Osh before he came down to Afghanistan and then to Pakistan’s Tribal Areas. The Hizb al-Tahrir, which Pakistan banned only after Yuldashev’s discovery, worked in tandem with him in Central Asia and is now clearly working in tandem with HUJI in Bangladesh.
   As in Pakistan, seminaries also flourish in Bangladesh with foreign funding because of poverty and — and this few observers mention — profits to the organising clergy. Had the clergy been devoted to a higher cause they would have used the money to promote local Islam and not the hard line Wahhabi-Saudi one now associated with the Taliban. An increasing number of Bangladesh’s madrassahs are now following the pattern of study of the madrassahs in Pakistan and have become Deobandi in their worldview…The jihad in Afghanistan brought in Al Qaeda money, and the training camps in Bangladesh have since begun to turn out warriors for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
   The phase Bangladesh is passing through can be taken in two parts. An aspect of it belongs to the early 1990s when the ‘Islamist’ outfits in Pakistan did not offend the conservative Muslim League but were seen as a threat by a liberal PPP. These days the ruling BNP in Bangladesh is most reluctant to take action against the Islamists as they continue to attack Awami League cadres and communists; but when phase two opens up, the BNP will be equally threatened. The ‘purifying’ dynamic of the Islamists will demand that the BNP bend to the kind of shariah the warriors favour in light of their training in Afghanistan and their ‘salafi’ contact with Al Qaeda.
   
   Times of India
   Opinion by Indrani Bagchi
   Wednesday’s attacks make several statements — first, the organisation has clearly spread its tentacles throughout the country, and second, the message was clearly one of political mobilisation. As terrorism analyst Ajai Sahni summed up: ‘The intention is to intimidate and mobilise.’
   In fact, the favourite slogan for Bangladesh’s Islamists is, ‘Aamra hobo Taliban, Bangladesh hobe Afghanistan. (We shall become Taliban and Bangladesh will become Afghanistan).’
   It is a zeal that sends shivers in India. The blasts are a vivid reminder that India is faced with the unenviable situation of Islamist extremism thriving in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the west and Bangladesh in the east. Add to this the turmoil in Nepal and Sri Lanka, and the abiding picture is that of an ugly neighbourhood.
   
   International Herald Tribune
   News analysis by Anand Giridharadas
   As the world’s third-largest Muslim-majority nation with a population that is 90 per cent Muslim, Bangladesh casts itself as a moderate Muslim democracy. But it appears to be witnessing the rise and mainstreaming of an Islamist political movement, analysts say. ‘There are warning signs and indicators that things could go in those directions,’ a western diplomat posted in the capital, Dhaka, said in a telephone interview, granted on a condition of anonymity imposed by his government. ‘We’re certainly not at the point where Afghanistan was a couple of years ago. Could we be 10 years from now? It’s certainly possible. There is no one here who would say that’s absurd.’
   The Bush administration has shown growing concern over that possibility. In June, it sent Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, to Dhaka. Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said Burns told him before the Dhaka visit that he planned to send a ‘very tough message’ to Bangladesh’s prime minister, Begum Khaleda Zia, on rising extremism.
   Members of the governing coalition are accused by critics of, at best, tolerating and, at worst, conniving with Islamist extremist groups. But Wednesday’s attacks stood out in two ways. First, they signaled the potency and sophistication of the militant groups. Second, they suggested, in their restraint, a desire to make gains through politics rather than by violence.
   Analysts of South Asian geopolitics contend that Bangladesh may be following a pattern seen in Afghanistan: mounting extremism in domestic politics, amplified by the arrival of foreigners who provide money and inspiration.
   With US military forces hunting extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, pledging to stamp out fundamentalism in his country, Muslim extremists in South Asia are ‘moving, searching for new pastures,’ said AN Ram, a retired 36-year veteran of India’s diplomatic corps. ‘There is pressure on these elements in Afghanistan, pressure in Pakistan. Here is a country where they can operate freely, with little pressure.’
   
   Khaleej Times, UAE
   Editorial
   [Bangladesh is] easily the most peaceful country of the subcontinent. Whoever is behind these acts of terror clearly wants to send the message to the [Bangladesh] government and people that their long years of peace and relative political stability are over. But it would be premature to conclude that global terror networks have finally turned their attention to Bangladesh. These blasts do not bear the characteristic stamp of Al Qaeda or Bin Laden.
   A country like Bangladesh that fights yearly battles with natural forces and severe economic hardship — half of its population lives on less than one dollar a day — can hardly afford yet another battle front against terror.
   
   Arab News, Saudi Arabia
   Editorial
   It is also a puzzling matter as to why an organization such as Jamatul Mujahedeen would mount such a spectacularly big assault with such relatively low deadliness. Could it be that the real targets were not the innocent Bangladeshis caught in the blasts but the higher echelons of Al-Qaeda leadership? Was this in fact an attempt to prove to Osama Bin Laden and his cohorts that Bangladesh now has a homegrown terrorist group worthy of their support and training?
   Yet there is reason to believe that despite the overcrowding and poverty in this country of some 153 million — half the population is reckoned to earn only a dollar a day — Bangladesh may not be ideal operational territory for terrorists. Even though there are often deadly rivalries between the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, Bangladeshis as a whole are united by pride in their country. Unless intimidated or duped, they are unlikely to welcome terrorists and more likely to expose them.
   
   The Daily Telegraph, UK
   Opinion
   Since the ousting in 2001 of the Taliban, the West’s focus has been on Pakistan as a frontline state in the war against terror. Much less attention has been paid to the country that seceded from it in 1971 to become Bangladesh. Yet the 200 or so small bombs set off within a single half-hour yesterday, from Naogaon to Dhaka and Cox’s Bazaar, were a reminder that Bangladesh is a hotbed of Muslim extremism.
   The strengthening of the radical voice has parallels in Pakistan: a military-religious alliance against a secular political challenge; government dependence in parliament on Islamic parties — in Bangladesh’s case, the Jamaat-e-Islami and the Islamic Oikya Jote; the mushrooming of madrassahs; and the persecution of minority groups such as Ahmadis and, in Bangladesh’s case, Hindus.
   These are an overdue warning to Khaleda Zia, the prime minister, that a much tougher line against the Islamists is needed if Bangladesh is to throw off its reputation as a springboard for terrorism, whether in India’s troubled north-eastern states or on a wider stage stretching from Kashmir to South-East Asia.
   The ruling conservative Bangladesh Nationalist Party is particularly sensitive to this charge. Procrastination has merely confirmed suspicions that it lacks the will, or even the ability, to act.