Hundreds of people gathered in the streets of Dhaka on October 18th to protest the upsurge in religious violence that has swept across Bangladesh in recent days. This coincides with the ten-day Hindu festival of Durga Puja and a viral social media post on October 15th depicting the Quran — Islam’s most holy book — laid at the feet of a Hindu deity. The image incited a mass protest in the southeastern Noakhali district and attacks against Hindu worshippers, leaving six dead, several injured and Muslim-Hindu communal harmony unmoored. 

The attackers have yet to be identified, and although Asaduzzaman Khan, home minister of Bangladesh, and Mohammed Shahidul Islam, chief of police in Noakhali, asserted that arrests have been made and an investigation is underway, few further details have been revealed. “They (Muslims protesting on October15th) were miscreants, actually, that is all we can say,” Islam said to Reuters. While some Muslims have used the allegedly blasphemous post to justify the violence, many more have vehemently condemned it. Muhammad Yahiya, the chairman of the West Bengal Imams Association, further suggested that the photo was posted to purposely deepen division. “Those who carried out random attacks across Bangladesh, saying the Quran was insulted at one of the Durga Pujas, not only showed disrespect for Islam and the Quran but insulted both. “Nobody has to study rocket science to understand that the alleged act of insult to the Quran was a well-planned conspiracy to create communal tension,” Yahiya said, according to the Hindustan Times.

Yahiya makes a fair point: the social media image was not free of ulterior motives. Perhaps the individual(s) who posted it did not envision that tensions would turn deadly; nonetheless, they expected a reaction to some divisive degree, fully aware of the history of intermittent religious violence that has plagued Bangladesh since its independence in 1971. This most recent wave is the most consuming since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina came to power once again in 2009. Especially since Hasina’s party, the Awami League, is the more secular of two that have dominated the political arena in the last decades, the heightened Muslim-Hindu tensions threaten the relative order that has been established. 

Of course, Hasina also condemned recent events, but she, her administration and Bangladeshi security forces still have work ahead to meet the demands for justice made by those protesting on October 18th and calling for increased accountability and protections for religious and other minorities. The image of Muslim students protesting side by side with Hindu monks from the International Society for Krishna Consciousness must win out and remain at the forefront of popular imagination: both for the hope of future unity and as evidence of the unity that exists now, in the present, bridging religious faiths and revealing common humanity.