National

Statue of woman removed from Bangladesh’s Supreme Court

May 27, 2017

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DHAKA: Under pressure from Islamic hard-liners, the Bangladeshi authorities in the predawn hours on Friday swiftly and quietly removed a sculpture of a woman personifying justice from outside the country’s Supreme Court building.

The statue had been the target of angry, swelling protests by Hefazat-e-Islam, a vast Islamic organisation based in Chittagong, which argued that art depicting living beings was proscribed by Islam.

The decision is a substantial victory for Hefazat, and within hours of the statue’s removal, its leaders issued a broader call for statues all over the country to be destroyed or removed from public view. The joint secretary of Hefazat’s Dhaka city unit, Mujibur Rahman Hamidi, said new statues should not be built or displayed, except within the confines of Hindu temples.

“No sculpture can be on the roadside or outside the temple,” he said, in a telephone interview. “If anyone wants to build any statue outside a temple in the future, the Muslims of Bangladesh will prevent it.”

Hefazat burst into the public consciousness in 2013, staging mass marches and sit-ins that paralysed Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital. The group has demanded that Bangladesh be brought into line with strict Islamic doctrine. Its leaders have called for a “ban on foreign culture, including free mixing of men and women,” and for the separation of boys and girls in public schools and the death penalty for those found guilty of blaspheming Islam or Muhammad.

Mrinal Haque, a Bangladeshi sculptor, said the Supreme Court had ordered him to dismantle the two-and-a-half-ton stainless-steel sculpture, which was commissioned by the court and erected, at a cost of about $22,000, only five months ago.

He said the government had capitulated to the demands of Hefazat.

“This is an alarming signal for our country,” he said. He called it a “defeat for the freedom-loving, secular people of the country,” and he warned that it would lead to a broader campaign to purge representational art from the country.