Less than two weeks before a Sufi pir’s body was pulled out of its grave and burnt in public at Goalanda in Bangladesh’s Rajbari district on September 5, some local Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) and BNP leaders had formed a secretive society that took the initiative in inciting a mob to desecrate the grave and commit the subsequent grisly act.
The Goalanda police, which lodged a criminal case against 3,500 “unknown people” who were part of a mob that took part in the barbaric act, has not acted to arrest the Jamaat and BNP leaders. Goalanda is about 140 km west of Dhaka.
Sources in Bangladesh’s National Security Intelligence (NSI) revealed that the main culprit behind the desecration of Nurul Huque’s grave and defiling of his body was Maulana Jalal, the secretary of the Goalanda Imam Committee and the local JeI general secretary.
The immediate provocation behind the “orchestrated” mob violence was the issue of Nurul Huque alias Nurul Pagla’s grave, that was built at a higher level than other graves in the locality. Nurul Huque passed away recently. Designed and painted to represent the Ka’aba, Islam’s holiest shrine.
This was considered an affront to practicing Muslims of Goalanda. As a consequence of the public anger over the upraised grave structure and the paint, Nurul Huque’s relatives deferred to the demands and subsequently brought it to ground level.
“Ten to 15 days before the incident, Maulana Jalal, two Goalanda-based BNP leaders, Abul Qashem and Ayub Ali Khan, convened a meeting of the Imam Akita Rakkhya Committee where it was decided that Nurul Huque’s grave would be destroyed if no action was taken to lower its level by September 4,” local police sources said.
However, on September 5, an irate mob comprising mainly ‘tawhidi janata’ (monotheistic people) descended on the grave, dug up Nurul Huque’s body before setting it on fire with kerosene and petrol as fuel. Hundreds of people gathered in a circle, egging on the perpetrators as the macabre sight unfolded to shock much of Bangladesh.
Neither Maulana Jalal nor Abul Qashem and Ayub Ali Khan have so far been arrested for their role in the conspiracy leading up to the desecration of the grave and the burning of the body, which is considered un-Islamic as it is a form of mutilation. It is, therefore, an act of disrespect and dishonour.
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Nurul Huque, police sources said, adhered to secular and humanistic principles espoused by Sufi pirs of the past. Even as the main culprits remain scot-free, Goalanda municipal sources suspect that the khanka sharif could be the next target of the mob.
