Bangladesh has started monitoring the weekly sermons of the country’s mosques to ensure clerics follow formal guidelines on highlighting the dangers of Islamic militancy, an official said Wednesday.
The government distributed the guidelines to more than 200,000 mosques several months ago, Shamim Mohammed Afzal, head of the government’s Islamic Foundation, told AFP.
“We have set up an anti-militancy cell at the Islamic Foundation. Every week our officials monitor at least 10 mosques in Dhaka to see whether the clerics speak about militancy in their Friday sermons,” he said.
Other government agencies were monitoring sermons in mosques across the rest of the country, he added.
Bangladesh was hit by series of blasts by Islamic militants in 2004-2005, which killed dozens of people and prompted fears that the world’s fourth largest Muslim majority nation was becoming a militancy hotspot.
The government’s elite security agencies responded with a massive crackdown on militant outfits, arresting more than 1,000 people. Six prominent leaders of a banned group were hanged in 2007. Afzal said the guidelines had already had an impact with “fewer processions or meetings” by Islamist outfits in recent months.
“We’ve successfully convinced the clerics and Islamic teachers about the danger of militancy. They now speak against Maududi philosophy, which has harmed Islam in the sub-continent,” he said.
Abul Ala Maududi, who died in 1979, was an Islamic revivalist leader who founded the Jamaat-e-Islami party, whose Bangladesh offshoot is the country’s largest Islamic political grouping.
Months after taking office in 2009, the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina banned a pan-Islamist group, Hizb ut Tahrir, for “destabilising” the country.
Last year it launched a plan to integrate hundreds of Islamic religious schools into the mainstream secular education system in a revamp costing $70 million.