Avijit Roy
Born in Bangladesh. 42. US citizen living in Atlanta (Alpharetta). Married. Teenage daughter. It’s all on Facebook – he dug Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins and Big Bang Theory and Glee and Up and Basic Instinct…
“[IT] Engineer by profession and a writer by passion :) Apart from professional activities, I have profound interest in freethinking, skepticism, philosophy, scientific thoughts and human rights of people. I write in the Internet blogs (mainly in Mukto-mona) and occasionally in some newspapers covering my interests. I have written couple of books on popular science and few taboo topics in Bangla.”
Taboo means setting science on religion. It means marking International Blasphemy Day. It means: “Bangladesh is a county where basic rights are ignored, let alone the LGBT rights. But it's nice that some are trying.”
The Mukto-Mona blog Roy set up had several contributors alongside him: academics, names, noticeable, read.
In 2013 atheist bloggers in Bangladesh caused such a popular stink demanding the death penalty when Islamist party leader Abdul Quader Mollah was jailed for war crimes – as well as in reaction to the resultant murder of one of their number – that Islamists counter-protested and called for ‘blasphemy laws.’ The government didn’t agree, but did arrest four bloggers for hurting religious sentiment. Roy helped coordinate some of the US-based protests that called for their release. His ongoing battle against ideology and dogma, championing of secularism, and just maybe his book The Virus of Faith got noticed by Muslim extremists:
I suddenly found myself to be a target of militant Islamists and terrorists. A well-known extremist by the name of Farabi Shafiur Rahman […] openly issued death threats to me through his numerous Facebook statuses. In one of his widely-circulated statuses Farabi wrote, “Avijit Roy lives in America and so, it is not possible to kill him right now. But he will be murdered when he comes back [to Bangladesh].”
Roy’s most recent books were published at Bangladesh’s National book fair this year. The Virus of Faith had appeared at 2014’s event. Roy travelled to Dhaka on 16th February.
The Ekushey Book Fair – a month long event in Dhaka.
Thursday 26th - 9:30pm.
So he does his thing with the books and then he and his wife go off in a rickshaw. Except when they’re passing Dhaka University’s teacher-student centre two men stop the thing and drag Roy and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonya out onto the pavement. Kazi Nazrul Islam Ave., right by the Coca Cola-branded tea stalls where the students discuss politics and current affairs.
Hacked to death. There’s that gulp.
Two meat cleavers. One goes right into the back of Avijit Roy’s head. Deep. His wife tries to stop them and she gets it too – her finger is sliced off. Gash to the head, leg. The photo taken of them just after (evidence a millisecond before aid) shows her rapidly turning red all over.
There’s some colour left in her blouse and jeans at this point, but she’s marbled with her own blood, head to toe. Roy’s face-down on the ground with his head in a lake of blood. He’s dead on arrival at the hospital. Bonya’s clothes have no colour on the stretcher – totally saturated with blood now. Looks black and crimson: her tan blouse. Blue jeans are black. She has since been taken back to the US for treatment.
Both were writers. They typed thoughts on blogs read by handfuls. In seconds they had X-rated war crime injuries, because they TYPED shit. But that’s exactly what war crime injuries are like: attackers torture porn the bodies of people who are living incommensurable and asymmetrical lives from themselves – non-combatants, civilians, children…
Roy was targeted because of his ‘crime against Islam’ – of course the extremists had a Twitter account. Ansar Bangla 7. Though that’s the only place the group’s name comes from. It doesn’t seem to have had much of an existence prior to the attack.
Farabi Shafiur Rahman, who’d threatened Roy last year, has been arrested in connection with the attack – based on his social media reactions, it seems. It’s all speak your brains stuff: “It's a holy duty of Bangalee Muslims to kill Avijit."
And this is how we came to hear of Avijit Roy – his Google presence is pretty slim prior to his murder. But after…
Avijit Roy was an American citizen of Bangladeshi origin who was an engineer by profession and the author of several books on topics including science, atheism and free expression. He founded the Mukto-Mona (“free mind”) blog which supported and nurtured a community of free-thinkers, secularists, atheists and humanists in Bangladesh. Avijit wanted “to build a society which will not be bound by the dictates of arbitrary authority, comfortable superstition, stifling tradition, or suffocating orthodoxy but would rather be based on reason, compassion, humanity, equality and science.”
Well, yes, and he also seemed to be rehashing Dawkinisms and was more of a ‘content curator’ – all guest posts and networking. If you sit there and write incessantly about your subject long enough and noisily enough you’re bound to get noticed and quoted and collaborated with – become a ‘thought leader.’
I don’t claim to have come up with any new or novel concept in [The Virus of Faith]. The concept was already there. Those who are familiar with Richard Dawkins’ revolutionary idea of Meme (a concept introduced in his 1976 magnum opus The Selfish Gene) are acquainted with the viral metaphor of religious meme.
Similarly, it’s because extremists trawl social media for references to their niche, do their own content curation and scan the internet for mentions and the core words from their world, that they found Roy’s work and threatened him. The Twitter account associated with Roy’s killing here:
#ParisAttack > #kopenhagenAttack > #DhakaAttack MashAllah..Lovers of Prophet (PBUH) is increasing.... #Dhaka #Bangladesh
Radical Islamists responding to coverage – like a dark version of a business or company dealing with any namedropping complaints on Twitter, taking ownership. Searching keywords and targeting anyone saying the wrong thing. Outrage by Search Engine Optimisation – militants hit Google to find something/someone to get annoyed about.
And Avijit Roy wasn’t subtle. If I showed you an image of a woman in a burqa jammed up against a photo of a child in a Halloween ghost costume you’d imagine that came from a right-wing bellend’s Facebook page, somewhere amongst all the SHARE IF YOU THINK THIS IS A DISGRACE guff about benefit claimants and all the free stuff offered to immigrants.
But that image was actually one of Roy’s. His take was condemning the burqa as oppressing women, obscuring patriarchy/sexism/misogyny with a …veil of tradition.
Islam is a violent religion. That’s another of Roy’s opinions that can cut across both liberal and right-wing readings, depending on the emphasis.
“Of course I know that most Muslims are not terrorists; they are peaceful. The reason is that they do not follow the Qur’an literally. […] Moderate Muslims are, however, quite happy with descriptions such as “religion of peace”; they are similar to rhetoric from seasoned politicians. Osama Bin Laden, Anwar al‑Awlaki, the Kouachis and Coulibaly, Nidal Hasan, al-Qaeda, and ISIS—all of whom follow the scripture literally—are deemed responsible for mass destruction while their cherished dogma remains unquestioned. Those who wish to be factually correct rather than politically correct may be outcast or even physically threatened.”
He quotes the Koran (2:191) “kill the disbelievers wherever we find them” standalone. So do a lot of people.
“Fight in the way of Allah against those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth not aggressors (190). And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter (191).”
It’s still not pretty, but it’s less ugly (other translations have ‘begin not hostilities’ as don’t aggress/transgress/exceed the limits).
But Roy was doing it for a cause, and with a good context – perhaps a better context than his heroes and inspirations. Bill Maher, Richard Dawkins… He channelled and retweeted their one-liners and critiques and applied them to a country where fanatics are bending reality around their ideology to convert, recruit and scare. Where the main political movers vie for power in an ugly, destructive way and the extremists milk the resentment. Where burkas are a deadly issue as well as a choice. So Roy’s curating is a heroic thing – gathering ideas and thinkers and articulate voices to offer another voice.
And the extremists decide to take these people out. They weren’t aiming high: the bloggers. The free speech-ers aren’t doing anything that great (and that’s what makes them the greatest people in the world), but the militants take them down with the rage and the ‘fuck yeah’ self-righteousness because they want and need to elevate their small role into something important, connected and meaningful.
Putting a meat cleaver through a two-bit blogger’s skull is nothing. It’s a terrible, inhumane crime, but nothing more than that. In the reactions it gets utterly transformed, and by all parties. (Something that actually isn’t) Islam takes down (someone who actually isn’t) a high profile enemy of the religion. In the aftermath it’s all Je suis Charlie valorising of the deceased, giving them a Hollywood level of biographical importance to both condemn the killing and deal with the sadness.
It’s tiny, tiny tiny people trying to make themselves mean something in the most abhorrent and inhuman way possible. There’s probably cheap, Big I Am adrenaline thrills involved, too – not being too scared to kill someone. Not being too scared to take on your opponent’s argument: that’s brave. Anyone can kill people; fucking toddlers do it with their parents’ guns in the States.
Yes, your ideology is so strong, so convincing that you… need to devastate the fuck out of people to get them to agree with it. Well done. But then these actions are more about the perpetrators’ terrible mutation of teenage kicks, anyway – a self-absorbed search for adrenaline highs that’s indifferent to anything/one that gets trampled in the process. Only here it’s taken to the extreme: hurting others isn’t the by-product of a tunnel-visioned search for kicks; it is the kick.
It’s so utterly irreligious and centre-of-the-universe selfish that I can’t see how they can keep a straight face when citing any sort of wider cause to be slaughtering people for. It’s just loving yourself so fucking much that you will actually kill others to feel a thrilling variety in your biochemistry.
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