By Passion – Avijit Roy

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 16^th February.

The Ekushey Book Fair – a month long event in Dhaka.

Thursday 26^th - 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.

View image | gettyimages.com

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.

A quick Google offers what that’s sandwiched between:  

“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).

View image | gettyimages.com

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.

Syria: One Man's Freedom Fighter is Another Man's Son is Another Man's Terrorist

“What draws these young men — and, to a lesser extent, women — to fight are what they regard as the indiscriminate killings of Muslim children, women and men in Syria. The use by President Bashar al-Assad’s regime of industrial-scale torture, barrel bombs and chemical attacks evokes a strong desire to defend fellow Muslims.”

Chams Eddine Zaougui and Pieter Van Ostaeyen,
‘Overblown Fears of Foreign Fighters,’ New York Times, 29^th July 2014

ISIS is the acronym you get if you don’t translate it as ‘Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’ and instead put Syria or al-Sham on the end. The name only emerged out of al-Qaeda and other groups last year.

The UK Government outlawed Isis on 16^th June, making it illegal to associate with the group or give it financial backing. The US had already designated it a terrorist organization.

On 29^th June Isis became ‘The Islamic State’ in name after declaring its captured territories in Syria and Iraq to be a new… Islamic state.

Isis/The Islamic State is all contradictions – a smaller version of the mess of conflicting ideas, pros, cons and dilemmas facing anyone who tries to pick a particular group of combatants to ‘like’ in Syria. It’s never as simple as knowing their stance on Assad. Isis is fighting the brutal Assad regime. But Isis itself is being brutal to its opponents. Isis administers aid, food and healthcare to Syrians. But Isis is threatening Christians who don’t leave Iraq. Isis blows up rival’s mosques and shrines.

And as professor Sam Hardy said: “If we didn’t intervene when they were killing people, it would be kind of grotesque to intervene over a building.”

Isis crops up in the news in two ways: its activities in Iraq and Syria …and the profiles of young Muslims from the UK and the West who come to join the fight.

Call of Duty

In November 2013 23-year-old Ifthekar Jaman from Southsea appeared on Newsnight: “I am ISIS. This is the group I am with. We are trying to establish the law of God, the law of Allah.” Footage of him from a year earlier showed a member of the Portsmouth Dawah Team – a community organization spreading the word about Islam (all leaflets and friendly chats over a little table in the high street). His smartly turned out younger brother displayed a quiet pride in his brother’s subsequent journey to Syria.

There were lots of tremors from MI5 at the time. The number of Britons in Syria was in the low hundreds. They were being greeted by al-Qaeda out there: “they meet British citizens who are willing to engage in terrorism and they task them to do so back at home, where they have higher impact, in this country. We've seen that played out in previous plots here, including 7/7.” In December Jaman’s family reported that he had been killed. He’d already said not to worry about his threat to the UK – he wasn’t coming back.

‘Canadian jihadist’ Andre Poulin made the news in January – he’d been killed in August 2013, during an attack on the government-controlled Mennegh airport in northern Syria. Reports described his life prior to leaving Timmins, Ontario: soon after converting to Islam he’d moved in with a Muslim man, attacked said man for living an un-Islamic lifestyle, had an affair with said man’s spouse, and threatened said man’s life and pulled a knife on him (sucks to be said man; he even wanted to give Poulin – as a young, fragile convert – another chance).

The Islamic State has since released a devastatingly slick video in tribute to Poulin. We don’t seem to like dusty Middle East militants having HD cameras and an eye for editing – it seems to unsettle us more than their killing proficiency (Isis produce bombing infographics, too).

“British brothers fighting for Isis in Syria were groomed by extremists using Call of Duty, claims their father.”

The Daily Mail’s recycling of a New Yorker article there. The NY even got hold of a games and media entertainment expert, who noted that our passive office work and lack of having to fight bears in the food gathering process left us with a hole to fill in our lives – the only thing that hits the spot being rapid decision-making pumped full of adrenaline by a combat situation. They’re not connecting this observation to fighting in terrorist designated organizations for real, no - just putting it right alongside there.

And there have been French and German and American and Finnish and Danish and Australian and… all leaving their homelands to join team Isis. A 19-year-old woman fell in love with an Isis fighter online and decided to quit America (Denver, if that doesn’t downplay the decision) to be with him, providing medical aid to his camp and a little combat. Poor love got arrested at Denver International.

Not all the Western fighters go to Isis, though. In April 18-year-old Abdullah Deghayes from Brighton made the news when he was killed in Syria. Vice filmed with his brother, 20-year-old Amer, also in Syria: “I came to Syria to answer the call of duty, and that is to give victory to the religion of Allah. And the way to do that is to help the oppressed Syrians here.”

His 16-year-old brother Jaffar is there, too. Their father Abubakr wanted, and still wants, them to collect aid (medicine, food, clothing) – helping Syria from the UK. He didn’t know his sons were planning to go to Syria (well, he thought he’d convinced Amer to stick to doing aid work in the country).

“In the situation that we’re in today, parents go to a level of selfishness where they would see the situation in Syria as to do with Syrian people. They’re not willing to allow their sons to go there and do what they have to do. So really parents are the last people you would tell.”

(Amer)

At the time of Abdullah’s death William Hague was all: “I want anybody who is contemplating going to Syria for any reason to hear that advice very clearly from the British Government: do not travel to Syria.” Elaborating, his advice nicely offset “the dangers [in Syria] are extreme” with the observation that people returning from the conflict were an “increasing threat to our own national security.” It was almost presidential in its good and bad cop PR schizophrenia.

The government’s haphazardly-policed stance is that Britons returning to the UK from Syria will be treated as terrorists. There have been deprivation of citizenship orders – 20 new ex-Britons in 2013. There were 16 arrests and warnings of more in January. The Met took a gendered approach in April – asking Muslim mums to have a word with their boys or (in confidence) the police: “This is not about criminalising people. It is about preventing tragedies.”

Meanwhile President Obama wants $500 million to train ‘vetted’ Syrian rebels - helping Syrians defend themselves against the regime’s attacks, as well as stopping the unrest from spreading to Iraq and upsetting the region.

The semantic battle between freedom fighter and terrorist has run on and on regarding Western combatants in Syria. On 30^th July Radio 4’s The Long View examined them alongside Britons who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s (the Guardian actually beat them to it regarding that comparison).

Some view the whole Britons in Syria thing as a frightening radicalization that warrants passport revocation; others see a perfectly impassioned desire to help an oppressed people – no more radical than being human. As ever, it’s a bit of both, and not very representatively depicted in the news reports taking either angle.

Of course there are posturing kids (“One day the flag of tawheed will fly over 10 Downing Street and the White House”). Of course there are lovely, do-gooder types just trying to make a difference, and of course there will be some of Norman Tebbit’s ‘poor little creatures,’ who are all too easily manipulated into doing or attempting other peoples’ bloody deeds in Britain and elsewhere.

And then there are those who fall into the manipulator’s ‘opposition’ category, who don’t receive the PR, and who get brutally forced into their emotions:

“Muhammad Ahmad [23] is motivated by more than nationalistic feeling. His father has been detained by Isis and his uncle was killed by its fighters – beheaded for answering back to an Isis soldier who reprimanded his female companions for not being properly dressed.”

It’s terrifying. Call of Duty? No matter how powerful, in charge or strong you make a person, it’s always just a petty, insecure demand for respect sitting on top of the might.