Mainul Haque Mahi

FROM MY DIARY | 19 DEC 2025

Channeling anger through vandalism may seem like the easiest thing to do.
But if you really want to understand and deliver justice for Osman Hadi bhai, you have to understand the Bengali Muslim identity that was vilified over the last 17 years.

These scumbag institutions framed this Bengali Muslim identity as extremism and a “terrorist culture.” But if you read the history of this land before colonialism, you’ll see something else: this land has always embraced pluralism, people coexisted for centuries, regardless of identity. Shared markets, shared language, shared soil. From the Bengal Sultanate to Mughal Bengal, mosques and mazars rose beside older trading towns and temple economies, because Bengal never ran on “pure” identities. It ran on coexistence.

The Mughals came with Persian culture, but we molded it and Bengalized it. Look at Dhakai muslin, so fine it was basically woven air, worn in royal courts and shipped across oceans. Look at our brick-and-terracotta mosques that feel deeply Bengal, not imported. Look at how Persian sat in the court and administration, but Bangla stayed the heartbeat and poets like Alaol took Persian romance and turned it into Bangla literature people could actually feel. We were the epitome of luxury back then not just in goods, but in the richness of our literature too. And this region sat inside an economy that, in that era, produced around a quarter of the world’s output. Bengal was one of the crown jewels.

But that glory was lost over time. After British colonialism ended, we thought we could revive our long-lost Bengali Muslim identity. But the Pakistani regime didn’t understand our culture, so we fought again for this identity.
India understood this identity very well. They knew that if they wanted to establish hegemony, they had to crush it and vilify Muslim identity. And we hit our lowest point over the last 17 years, as that hegemony used organizations built over 50 years to tighten control.

Hadi knew exactly what war he needed to wage. With that vision, he spent his time building the Inqilab Cultural Center. He wanted to revive the long-lost identity of Bengali Muslims, an identity wounded after British colonialism and strangled under the Hasina regime.

I don’t think this is a coincidence: the killing of Hadi, and then vandalism in the name of Hadi. It’s another move, another strategy to suppress our unique Bengali Muslim identity.

Hadi showed us the way. Now it’s our turn to finish what he started culturally, intellectually, publicly.

You may kill a man, but you can’t kill his ideas!

End