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n August 14, millions of people in Bangladesh watched in shock and disbelief as news broke of the death of Allama Sayeedi. Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, a popular scholar, preacher, and Islamist politician had been imprisoned by Sheikh Hasina’s government since 2010 and died of a heart attack at the age of 83. According to local sources, he suffered a heart attack on August13, but was transferred to a specialist hospital by the authorities a day later. At the hospital, his condition deteriorated rapidly and he was reported to have died at 8:40 p.m. local time.
Experts have pointed to inconsistencies in statements from the medical team, which just hours earlier had said his condition was stable, leading many to suspect that poor medical care was the reason for his death. News of his deteriorating health and subsequent death spread like wildfire on social media, and thousands of his supporters surrounded the BSMMU hospital premises in Shahbag, in the heart of Dhaka, anxiously awaiting news. When news of his death broke, the crowd swelled to thousands, demanding that his funeral prayers be held the next day at Dhaka’s central Baitul Mukarram Mosque.
The Bangladeshi government refused to accept to the request, insisting that the body be buried in his hometown, far from the capital, and that only a limited number of people be allowed to attend his funeral. While Allama Sayeedi’s supporters remained outside the hospital until late into the night, a brutal police force finally dispersed the protesters and his coffin was taken away. The next day, 50,000 people attended his funeral prayers in his home town of Pirojpur.
Sheikh Hasina’s government had every right to be afraid of the gathering masses in Dhaka on the night of the scholar’s death—the last time people took to the streets in Allama Sayeedi’s name was to protest the 2013 verdict in the case investigating his alleged involvement in war crimes during Bangladesh’s 1971 War of Independence. The same Hasina government ordered security forces to take a hard-line stance and more than 100 innocent protesters were slaughtered when police and army used live ammunition to disperse mass protests in major cities across Bangladesh.
But who was Allama Sayeedi who so terrified the Hasina government both in life and in death? A man of humble scholarly origins, Delwar Hossain Sayeedi was born in 1940 in Pirojpur, Barisal district of Bangladesh, into a family with a madrassa background. He dominated the Islamic lecture circuit in Bangladesh for the past 50 years, clearly delivering the message of Islam and the Koran in vaaz mehfils (open-air/open-air mass meetings) attended by hundreds of thousands of people. His oratorical style, both eloquent and melodious, made him popular with people from all walks of life.
It is very common to hear his lectures still being played loudly in vehicles, restaurants, mobile phones, and people’s homes in Bangladesh, despite a government ban on mentioning his name in public. But that is not all: Allama Sayeedi was also a two-time member of parliament for the Pirojpur-1 constituency in the Barisal Division in southern Bangladesh, representing a Hindu-majority constituency, from July 1996 to October 2006. Fluent in Bangla, Arabic, and Urdu, the author of 75 books, he was also very active in humanitarian causes and was instrumental in raising funds for Muslim communities in the West, such as Europe and the U.S.
Sayeedi’s illustrious and transformative legacy spoke of an identity-building project that was close to the hearts and minds of the Muslims of this region, and that was emerging as an alternative to the secular Bengali nationalist project promoted by Sheikh Hasina’s Awami League and its secular allies. In effect, this meant that Sayeedi, as exemplified in his life and work, was an existential threat to the secular and leftist elements of the Bengali state and society who sought to destroy and dismantle his politics and Islamism—not just him.
Few people in Bangladesh’s recent history have faced such all-out state-sponsored attempts at vilification and character assassination as Allama Sayeedi whether through cartoonish caricature, stereotypical abuse and portrayal, or fictional demonization, the most obvious being the attempt to link him to war crimes in the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. The so-called International War Crimes Tribunal (ICT), set up by the Hasina government to try alleged crimes against humanity in 1971, leveled serious allegations against Sayeedi for his role in the 1971 war, including crimes against humanity, rape, arson, and murder.
In what can only be described as a show trial, the prosecution was allowed to call more than 28 witnesses over an extended period of time, while the defense was limited to reading out witness statements in a matter of days. The prosecution’s case was based on the allegation that Allama Sayeedi was the notorious local collaborator Delu Shikder who had committed various crimes during the 1971 war, while the defense stressed that it was a case of mistaken identity and false accusations. Leaked tapes from within the ICT at the time, reported by the Economist and the now defunct newspaper Amardesh, showed that judges at the tribunal had colluded with senior government officials to deliver verdicts that the government needed.
At one point in the trial, Sukhranjan Bali, a prosecution witness who was testifying as a defense witness instead, was abducted from the courthouse steps and forcibly disappeared as he was about to testify that Allama Sayeedi had not murdered his brother. Bali was found many months later in an Indian prison, but by then it was too late: Sayeedi had been found guilty by the ICT and sentenced to death. However, Sayeedi’s immense popularity was a factor the government had not taken into account. In the afternoon of the day of the first verdict on February 28, 2013, police and army forces were ordered to crack down on demonstrators, firing on them. An estimated 100 protesters died across the country in the days of political violence that followed.
Following the state-sponsored violence and the exposure of the trial as a farcical, politically motivated witch hunt, the senior judges were forced to resign and Sayeedi’s death sentence was inexplicably commuted to life imprisonment in September 2014, presumably to maintain a veneer of impartiality and, more importantly, to prevent popular protests that could potentially topple the government from getting out of hand.
The trial of Allama Sayeedi at the ICT, along with a number of other trials of well-known opposition and Islamist politicians such as Abdul Quader Mollah, Kamaruzzaman, Golam Azam, Motiur Rahman Nizami, Ali Ahsan Mujahid, Mir Quasem Ali, and Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, were touted by the Hasina government and its allies as necessary to bring closure and justice to the victims of the 1971 war. Instead, the farcical and biased nature of these political trials exposed deep-rooted plans to decimate the opposition to the Hasina regime through judicially sanctioned killings of key opposition figures and to strengthen the incumbent regime’s grip on power, effectively establishing dynastic rule for decades to come.
Hasina and her allies appear to have succeeded so far, ruling Bangladesh with an iron fist since 2009. But the cost has been enormous. Throughout this long period of Hasina’s misrule, the biggest victims have been the Bangladeshi people. Large-scale corruption, security, and governance failures, high inflation, high unemployment, rising poverty and a general lack of basic services are just some of the everyday problems that are getting worse for ordinary Bangladeshi citizens. Public dissatisfaction with the government is high; serious allegations of widespread vote rigging, ballot stuffing, and voter intimidation by the authorities in the last two general elections in 2014 and 2019 have severely undermined public confidence in the current regime and regularly trigger periods of mass unrest and political agitation.
Whatever relief Hasina and her supporters imagined they would get from Sayeedi’s death, it does not seem to have materialized. Far from diminishing his legacy, the circumstances of Sayeedi’s death and the injustice done to him in life have made him a shaheed (martyr) in the eyes of ordinary Bangladeshis. Many members of Hasina’s political party have criticized her on social media, saying “Islam comes first” when they were expelled for supporting Allama Sayeedi as a victim of Hasina’s injustice.
Tens of hundreds of funeral prayers were held for the revered scholar both locally and internationally. Unable to stop the national and international outpouring of support for Allama Sayeedi and his family, the government has resorted to tactics of surveillance, widespread raids, arrests, and imprisonment of opponents.
If anything, Sayeedi’s death is a Pyrrhic victory and has done more to diminish Hasina government’s legitimacy in the eyes of Bangladeshi citizens than to glorify it. His death has exposed a horrible side of the Hasina government and made it clear for all to see how Islamophobic, incompetent, and authoritarian this government really is. The authoritarian government of Sheikh Hasina may still be in power, but it is long dead in terms of political legitimacy and the right to represent the people of Bangladesh. You can kill many people, but you cannot kill an idea.
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