After August 5, much has been said about the “shared language” (ejmali bhasha) of the July uprising. But have we truly grasped what that shared essence was?

Beneath the chants and collective fury lay a subconscious lexicon that made July possible–an arrangement of images and meanings that allowed ordinary Bangladeshis to stand shoulder to shoulder against Sheikh Hasina’s suffocating authoritarianism.

The deeper question now is whether the new Bangladesh, in its national aspirations, has embraced that inheritance or merely let it slip into nostalgia.

We have to realize that the phrase “Red July” did not emerge from political manifestos or party headquarters but from the spontaneity of the moment. I first wrote it on Facebook after the halls of Dhaka University emptied on July 17.

Days later, poet Abu Taher Tarek christened the month with the same phrase. But it was only on July 30, when thousands of Facebook profile pictures turned red, that the idea transcended words.

The nation’s subconscious was suddenly united and red became the visual heartbeat of defiance.

Looking back, we see that by late July, anxiety grew that the state-sponsored mourning rituals of August would smother the memory of July’s martyrs. The fear was grounded in Bangladesh’s long history of official narratives erasing uncomfortable truths.

So we made an extraordinary vow: August must not be allowed to arrive. We would hold on to July, and refuse the tyranny of the calendar. Against August’s state-imposed “black,” we elevated July’s revolutionary “red.”

But why red? Why did this color seize the collective imagination with such force? The answer lies in both religious memory and revolutionary history.

Hazrat Ali carried a red flag, and after Karbala, red became the color of martyrdom and resistance in Shi’a symbolism. In the 20th century, during the Great Arab Revolt, the Hashemites revived red as a banner of rebellion.

Meanwhile, in 1917, the Bolsheviks made red synonymous with revolution, cementing its place as the color of the oppressed in the global struggle against tyranny.

In the postcolonial Arab world, these strands converged. The Hashemite red fused with the socialist red, appearing on the flags of Arab nationalists, Ba’athists, and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt.

In every instance, red signified defiance, and the possibility of a new order.

That history reverberated in Bangladesh in July, 2024. The red we embraced was insurgent, and uncompromising. It declared that the black of mourning would not define us, that the deaths of July’s martyrs would not be folded into the silence of August.

“Red July” was essentially an oath, and based on that unwritten oath, we all went down onto the street and were ready to sacrifice for greater freedom.

Symbolic gravity

The clash of colors in Bangladesh was civilizational. Red stood against black, rebellion against tyranny, memory against erasure.

To understand why “Red July” struck so deeply into the nation’s subconscious, one must look beyond Bangladesh’s borders, to the intellectual ferment of the 1970s and the Iranian revolutionary thinker Ali Shariati.

Shariati fused two strands of revolutionary symbolism: the “red” of Hazrat Ali and his descendants–the red of Karbala, of martyrdom and defiance–with the “red” of the Bolshevik Revolution, the global emblem of the oppressed rising against oppressors.

Out of this synthesis he forged his theory of liberation theology: Red Shiism versus Black Shiism.

For Shariati, Red Shiism was the faith of rebellion, the Shiism of protest, resistance, and justice. In this reading, Karbala was an eternal summons to rise against tyranny rather than a mournful tragedy.

Black Shiism, by contrast, was a religion drained of its insurgent core, a theater of rituals co-opted by the state, where mourning was transformed into a tool of obedience and legitimization of power.

Shariati’s conclusion was uncompromising: Black Shiism must be overthrown, because only Red Shiism carried the liberating truth of Islam.

That distinction echoed powerfully in Bangladesh in July [2024]. On July 29, I wrote on Facebook:

“Reject the state mourning of murderers. Observe a mass elegy. Tie red cloths over your eyes and mourn, alone or together, by calling out the names of the martyrs. Let mourning for the martyrs rise across the country. Let the state’s staged mourning be washed away by the mass elegy; let our plains of Karbala tremble with incessant wailing.”

It was spontaneous, born of the moment. But the resonance was undeniable. The uprising coincided with Muharram, when Ashura and Karbala already carried profound emotional weight.

At the same time, our streets were stained with the fresh blood of young martyrs. The red of our flag–earned in 1971–seemed to leap back into history, now painted on foreheads and chests. Inevitably, the “black mourning” of August collided with the insurgent “red” of July.

That collision produced a new national language. Red became more than a color–it became the grammar of defiance, the shared symbol that bound together disparate groups in a single refusal of Hasina’s authoritarian order.

History itself seemed to stage Shariati’s drama on our soil: the eternal red of protest and liberation pitched against the black of mourning, repression, and fascism.

At that moment, July was more than just a month. It was a battlefield of symbols, and Bangladesh chose red.

The resistance begins

On July 29, the color red ceased to be an abstraction in Bangladesh. It broke through our doubts, and bound us together in a single line of defiance.

The next day, on July 30, Mahfuz Alam sharpened this meaning, anchoring it in the theory of Iranian thinker Ali Shariati. He explained why Red Shiism was rebellion, protest, and resistance–a faith that turned Karbala into a perpetual summons to rise against tyranny.

Black Shiism, by contrast, was the hollow faith of power: ritual without rebellion, mourning drained of meaning, religion tamed into an instrument of state control.

That dialectic suddenly came alive in Bangladesh. The “red” that animated our uprising was not borrowed–it was discovered in the marrow of our own history and made manifest by the urgency of the moment.

History itself staged the contrast: red against black, protest against repression, justice against tyranny.

On July 30, our uprising acquired its final name: Red July. Overnight, social media turned crimson. Profile pictures glowed in red and on my own red profile, I wrote a simple caption: “Students–Workers–People / Build Unity.”

That red forged an unprecedented symbolic unity across the nation’s consciousness. It became the psychological and linguistic spark behind the Ganer Michhil (March of Songs) at the Press Club on August 1, and the Drohojatra (Rebellion March) the following day.

By embracing red, we embraced a vast inheritance. It was Hazrat Ali’s flag and Hussain’s defiance at Karbala. It was the Bolsheviks’ revolution in 1917 and the blood-stained resistance at Stalingrad.

It was the memory of our own flag, wrested in 1971, and the fresh blood of martyrs in the streets of Dhaka. Jatrabari, the deadliest battleground of our movement, was renamed “July’s Stalingrad” to mark the resonance.

To embrace red was to embrace the eternal struggle of the oppressed against oppression, and the spiritual aspiration for a just, and revolutionary state.

We need to realize that July did not descend on us by accident. It was not a rupture without roots. It was a crucible that unified our fractured consciousness, burning away hesitation and distrust with fire, blood, and grief.

Out of mourning, a common language emerged. Out of division, a shared spirit took shape.

This is why July cannot be reduced to a slogan, nor confined to the politics of credit and legacy. One can turn history into a museum and oneself into a relic, embalmed in the politics of “ownership.”

But the living spirit of Red July–its moral and symbolic unity–cannot be seized. It belongs not to parties or personalities, but to the people’s demand for liberation.

And that, more than anything, is the lesson of the post-July reality.

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Tuhin Khan is a writer and activist