Kasem bin Abubakar was told nobody would buy his chaste romance novels about devout young Muslims finding love within the strict moral confines of Bangladeshi society.
And yet his tales of lovers whispering sweet nothings sold millions in the 1980s and proved a huge hit among young girls from Bangladesh’s rural, conservative heartland.
Now his work is undergoing something of a renaissance as Bangladesh slides from the moderate Islam worshipped for generations to a more conservative interpretation of the scriptures.
“Girls write me love letters with ink dipped in their own blood. Some were desperate to marry me,” Abubakar told the agencies, recounting his surprise at young women making a traditional gesture of intense devotion to a graying author.
His debut novel Futonto Golap (Blossomed Rose), written more than three decades ago, has spawned an entire genre of fiction tinged with Islamic values.
Abubakar was inspired to take up the pen in the late 1970s, when as a bookseller he lamented that most novels obsessed with the cosmopolitan lifestyles of modern, elite Bangladeshis.
These secular tales were a world removed from the largely rural and pious village existence lived by the majority of Bangladesh’s 160 million people, and Abubakar sensed a gap in the market ripe for his fiction.
“He tapped into a new readership that nobody thought existed before,” said Bangladeshi journalist Qadaruddin Shishir.
“In rural villages, Abubakar’s novels are the best gift a young lover can give to his fiancee.”
Abubakar wrote The Blossomed Rose — a story about two mismatched young Muslims seeking consent for marriage from their families — by hand in 1978, but it took almost a decade for a publisher to even look at it.
“They told me ‘mullah novels’ don’t sell,” he said.