Islamist radicals, long considered a fringe group in Bangladesh, managed to stop two women’s football friendly matches in the north of the country in late January, raising fears of increasing Talibanization in what was until recently seen as a moderate Muslim nation anchored on liberal Bengali language-driven syncretic culture.
This comes immediately after three incidents of Islamist mobs preventing leading actresses from inaugurating showrooms and restaurants for business groups.
In late January, a women’s football friendly match in the northwestern town of Joypurhat had to be cancelled following violent protests by students from religious seminaries. The students were joined by Islamist radical activists who ransacked the venue and chased away spectators who had bought tickets to witness the matches.
Another similar match involving two women teams was postponed in the nearby town of Dinajpur a day before following a similar demonstration by angry protesters who had armed themselves with clubs.
Abu Bakkar Siddique, the headmaster of a local religious school in Joypurhat, took part in the protests with his students and teachers and those from several other religious schools.
“Girls football is un-Islamic and it is our religious duty to stop anything that goes against our beliefs,” Siddique told Al Jazeera.
The Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) took a strong stand to defend women’s football, with its media manager Sadman Sakib saying ” football is for everyone, and women have full rights to participate in it.” Other football organizers in Bangladesh pointed to women’s football teams in other Muslim-majority nations, including conservative Saudi Arabia and Turkiye, as well as Morocco, which reached the African Cup final and lost to South Africa.
However, there has been a worrying silence from the interim government on the attacks against women’s football.
Women’s football became very popular in Bangladesh after the country’s women’s team first won the South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) championship in 2022 and then successfully defended it two years later, defeating Nepal in the final last November. The women footballers went on to become instant heroines in a country starved of sporting glory.
Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, the head of Bangladesh’s interim government, also accorded the SAFF-winning Bangladesh women’s football team a formal reception at his office and said the players had given the country “a taste of success it badly needed.” The Nobel laureate asked the women footballers to “write down and share their individual aspirations, struggles, and demands,” promising to fulfil their demands. “If anything can be addressed now, we will do it now,” Yunus promised the players.
Barely two months later, the future of women football in Bangladesh is facing a challenge. Football organizers say that if incidents like the ones at Joypurhat and Dinajpur multiply, girls will start dropping out of the game as family pressures will multiply. Most Bangladesh women footballers come from poor rural families who will be worried over the rising surge of religious conservatism.
Women rights activists in Bangladesh, who saw the victory of the women’s football team as a success for women’s empowerment in Bangladesh, are worried. Leading women journalist and activist Masuda Bhatti called out the “hypocrisy” of the Yunus administration, which was installed after the massive student protests ousted the Sheikh Hasina government from power in August last year. Bhatti wrote in a Facebook post that women joined the protests in large numbers, but “now they are not needed anymore.” She alleged that on the question of women rights, Yunus was “no different from the hardline Islamic fundamentalists.”
Another leading lawyer and women rights activist, Tania Amir, sees in the stopping of women football matches a much more sinister trend – one of authorities surrendering to Islamist radicals who may now be emboldened to push for new laws that may deny women space in education and jobs and seek to limit them to the household space.
These incidents comes hot on the heels of three instances when threats from Islamist groups prevented as many top actresses from inaugurating new showrooms and restaurants. In November, actress Mehazabien Chowdhury had to turn back just before she was to open a new showroom in the port city of Chittagong. She cited a “security issue” as the reason for the scrapped ceremony; local media reports pointed to protests opposing the showroom inauguration on religious grounds.
On January 26, film star Pori Moni was forcibly prevented from opening a new department store in Tangail in northeast Bangladesh due to anger from Hefazat-e-Islam and other groups. Two days later, another actress, Apu Biswas, was stopped from opening a restaurant in Dhaka due to opposition from local religious clerics. The clerics “stated that if Apu Biswas were to inaugurate the restaurant, they would create unrest,” a police official told local media.
Pori Moni took to Facebook to protest against “excesses against women in the name of religion.” Shortly after, an old case of alleged assault was reopened against her, with an arrest warrant put out against the actress. Pori Muni alleged that the legal case was retaliation against her for speaking out: “Why can’t I work safely in my own country? … If speaking out against injustice means I’ll keep going to jail, then so be it.”
Exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, who lives in India, saw in these actions “state sponsorship of Islamist radicalism.” Critics fear that the appeasement of Islamist radicals may be a prelude to far-reaching changes in Bangladesh’s body polity, and one inspired, if not totally driven, by Shariah or Islamic law.
Since taking charge, the Yunus administration has lifted the ban on Jamaat-e-Islami, the nation’s biggest Islamist party, which opposed Bangladesh’s independence and sided with the Pakistan Army in its genocidal campaign during the 1971 Liberation War. Hardline Islamist radicals sentenced for murder and on terrorism charges, like Jasimuddin Rahmani, chief of Ansarullah Bangla Team, have been let off. The Ansarullah terror group, which enjoys close ties with the Al Qaida in Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) had threatened media companies to sack their women employees or face severe consequences.
This is surely several steps backward for Bangladesh, which prided itself on women’s empowerment both at the elite level and at the grassroots with women dominating the workforce of the country’s burgeoning garment industry.
For a country which had two women prime ministers – Sheikh Hasina, who was ousted in the 2024 protests, and Khaleda Zia – serve six full five year terms between themselves and who still lead the two leading political parties of Bangladesh, girls being chased off the football field is extremely disturbing, as are the instances of film actresses being prevented from opening a new store or restaurant due to opposition from Islamic groups. Many believe this is something that goes against the founding ideals of South Asia’s youngest nation.