Motiur Rahman Nizami – on the Path of Martyrdom

Motiur Rahman Nizami is an economist, parliamentarian, politician, Secretary of Jamaat-e-Islami (the Islamic Group) in Bangladesh, and Minister of Industry between 2001 and 2006 in the Bangladesh government of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party.

It is not appropriate to challenge the integrity of judges, even those of the Bangladeshi court hand-picked by the Hasina government to issue unjust judgments against political opponents, and even if these judgments are announced by government ministers before the Court began its work… and those are specifically death sentences issued against political opponents, especially Islamists, and of course such sentences cannot be appealed or challenged.

In August 2014, Sheikh Abdul Quader Molla (Deputy Secretary-General of the Islamic Group) was executed. In October 2014, it was the Secretary-General’s turn. Dr. Mutiur Rahman Nizami (born in 1943) was sentenced to death by a special court that found him guilty of eight charges, including genocide, murder, torture, rape and sabotage during the war in which East Pakistan (Bangladesh) gained independence from West Pakistan in 1971, ie forty-three years after allegedly committing the crimes, if the charges were real.

This trial comes also twenty-four years after the establishment of a state for Muslims independent of India (1947) with two sides –East Pakistan and West Pakistan.

One of the most farcical elements of the sham trial of this Islamic national icon is that a charge against him – according to Sheikh Hasina authorities – relates to the 2004 smuggling of weapons by a group of United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) men to carry out armed operations in the east of India. According to investigating authorities, the name of Dr. Mutiur Rahman Nizami, who does not belong to ULFA, was not among the accused.

However, three years later, in 2007, and in the context of political conflict in Bangladesh, ​​the public prosecutor requested a new investigation into the case. This lasted four more years. Ending in 2011, it adding the name of the great Sheikh Dr. Mutiur Rahman Nizami, the Islamic group’s Secretary General, to the list of the accused.

In October 2014, a court found this national symbol of patriotism guilty of the eight charges, some of which date back to the historic separation from West Pakistan in 1971, the War of Independence, the war that divided the state. Thus this man came to face the same fate as the previous two other great Islamist symbols Secretary-General founder Professor Ghulam Azam and Sheikh Abdul Quader Molla.

The tragedy of the people of Bangladesh (the seventh most populous country in the world, the fourth in the Muslim World), with more than a hundred and sixty million people, more than ninety percent Muslims, and which is one of the poorest in the world, is that their suffering is not limited to the problem of poverty only.

Their tragedy is not limited to the problem of justice either, although this is regularly criticized by international human rights organizations including Human Rights Watch, which said of the court trying political symbols of the opposition: "its legal processes are not up to international standards".

The tragedy, in fact, is the disease of despotism which uses the army and security forces to impose control and falsify the will of the people, to change national identity, for which the Bangladeshi people has long struggled and sacrificed.

But the real tragedy which opened the door to all the disasters that the people have experienced is that the political rivalry between two leaders, which led to foreign intervention, was based on blind revenge bound by no religion or law.

One of the two rivals is Sheikh Hasina (born 1948), the daughter of Mujibur Rahman, the founder and first President of the State of Bangladesh, who was assassinated by a group of junior officers along with his entire family in 1971. Hasina and her sister Rehana survived only because they were abroad. Since her return, she – with the Awami League shed heads – has been seeking to avenge her family.

The other rival is Khaleda Zia Rahman (born 1945), widow of General Ziaur Rahman and leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. She ruled the country about ten years, and was the first woman to rule in this country. Forbes magazine described her as one of the four most powerful women in the world.

Even as they work through national initiatives and projects, applying the laws of their country, as in the case of the Islamic Group in Bangladesh, Islamists – or those who work for Islam – are targeted for execution by various political regimes.

However, those corrupt ruling regimes do not carry the guilt alone. They share it with all the world and international institutions that spring into action if an event similar or less atrocious than that happens in a non-Islamic country. This guilt is also shared (in the case of Bangladesh in particular) by regimes and governments of the Muslim World, whose rich are busy building ever more luxurious palaces and funding other repressive regimes to continue to suppress their own people who aspire to freedom and a decent life, while overlooking the payment of obligatory zakat (10%) which, if given to the nation’s deserving poor, would certainly protect many Muslim peoples from subjugation to their enemies.

For the historic record, and so people would not forget, the reason for the attack on the Islamic Group in Bangladesh was its rejection of the dividing of the state which was established under the banner of Islam and divided for fanaticism over language – "which would be the official state language, Urdu or Bengali"?

The weapon of the Islamic Group was educating the people, reminding them of the nation’s bonds, ties, principles and constants, with speeches and writings, which were considered by the coup commanders, collaborators and those behind them at home and abroad, as more powerful weapons than their guns and cannons.

Whatever the fate of the leader Mutiur Rahman Nizami, it is as God Almighty has written, and it suffices that he is on the path of martyrdom.