The political rise of Islam in Bengal can be traced to 1205, when Ikhtiyaruddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khalji stormed into the region and established a new order. It marked the beginning of a faith’s entrenchment in Bengal’s political and cultural fabric.

Through centuries of turbulence–over thirty rulers came and went during the Sultanate era–Sultan Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah’s “Bangala” still emerged as a beacon of prosperity. The great traveler Ibn Battuta called it “one of the most splendid and prosperous territories on Earth.”

That prosperity carried forward under the Mughals, whose rulers, shaped by Islam’s ethos, often governed with tolerance and generosity. But the arrival of the British East India Company, sanctioned by Emperor Jahangir, introduced a new and insidious dynamic.

Aurangzeb, determined to keep the “firangis” in check, fined them heavily and forced them into a written promise to steer clear of politics. Yet after his death in 1707, the Europeans reinserted themselves into India’s political bloodstream, biding their time until opportunity tilted in their favor.

The opportunity came with Bengal’s unraveling. A weakened Mughal state, riven by factional conflict and bereft of strong leadership, created fertile ground for colonial manipulation.

The Battle of Plassey in 1757 was the beginning of Bengal’s subjugation and the symbolic collapse of Muslim political power. The Marathas rose briefly, but they too fell before the English machine.

The land, once celebrated for its abundance, was reduced to misery under a predatory colonial economy: indigo planters bled peasants dry, landlords squeezed tenants into despair, and Bengal itself burned under layers of exploitation.

Yet resistance endured. The Fakir uprisings, the Indigo Revolt, Titu Mir’s defiance, and Haji Shariatullah’s Faraizi movement–all drew strength from the spirit of Islam. These were not isolated sparks but part of a wider refusal to submit entirely.

Still, the imbalance was overwhelming. Armed with superior weaponry, deft diplomacy, and the intellectual inheritance of the European Renaissance, the English proved nearly impossible to dislodge.

Muslim rule, meanwhile, found itself trapped in its twilight–politically cornered, intellectually stagnant, but unwilling to go quietly. The revolts continued until 1857, when the final great uprising was extinguished.

The colonial state that followed imposed a new logic: Western democracy, recast to serve imperial interests. The battlefield was replaced by the classroom, and political reorganization came cloaked in the language of law and governance.

With the sword no longer viable, Hindu and Muslim leaders alike turned to pen and policy, adopting the frameworks of the British Crown even as they sought to bend them toward their own aspirations.

It was a transition from armed resistance to political negotiation–a transformation imposed, but one that also reshaped the trajectory of India’s future.

The fragmentation of identity

The tremors of the Partition of Bengal, the Khilafat agitation, Gandhi’s satyagraha and Non-Cooperation campaigns, and the global convulsions of two world wars eventually forced Britain to confront its own contradictions: it could not indefinitely project imperial aggression abroad while clinging to an India determined to break free.

By 1947, after nearly two centuries of domination, independence arrived–yet it came more as a surgical wound. Britain departed leaving two nations carved from one body, destined for perpetual conflict.

For the people of East Pakistan, this meant inheriting a crisis of identity: language, culture, and tradition set them apart from West Pakistan as much as geography did.

A new middle class began to articulate its political ambitions, but what emerged was not the Muslim League–the party that had once embodied Muslim hopes from the days of partition–but its decline.

By mid-century, it was reduced to little more than a relic, hollowed of influence. Into that vacuum stepped the secular Awami League, which India eagerly championed as the legitimate heir to Bengal’s politics.

This shift carried costs. Islam, once the animating force of protest and resistance, was slowly stripped of its intellectual and civilizational scope, reduced instead to rituals and legalism, often refracted through an Arabized cultural lens.

The Bengali Muslim was no longer seen as a producer of knowledge, justice, or culture but as a mere identity marker–Muslim as label, not as way of life. Out of this hollowing emerged the three-pronged crisis that would haunt the region for decades: Bangladeshi versus Bengali versus Islam, a conflict of identity with no easy resolution.

Meanwhile, the intellectual and scientific contributions of Muslims–so central to Bengal’s earlier centuries–were gradually erased from mainstream discourse.

A curated, Brahmanical and colonial version of Rabindranath Tagore was canonized as Bengal’s cultural north star, reinforcing subservience to the cultural centers of Kolkata and Delhi.

At the same time, literature and art in some quarters cast religion as a retrograde force, framing Pakistan’s very creation as a historical blunder born of religious majoritarianism.

Thus, even before the bloodshed of 1971, the cultural battlefield was already drawn, with Islam contained and Bengali identity appropriated. That’s how the political struggle was funneled into frameworks inherited from others.

Pakistan’s botched handling of Muslim identity

Pakistan’s slide from fragile democracy into military dictatorship was swift, and with Jinnah’s death soon after partition, the chance for a stable, democratic order evaporated.

What remained was a leadership crisis, riddled with opportunism and arrogance, particularly in West Pakistan. In this vacuum, India’s political aspirations and those of East Pakistan began to converge.

The Awami League, attuned to the everyday pulse of deprivation and exploitation, captured mass support with a clarity of purpose that West Pakistan’s rulers never mustered. Their fatal error was to imagine that a political crisis could be crushed by brute military force.

By 1971, war was no longer avoidable. The people of East Pakistan resisted with their blood, proving that the demand for dignity could not be extinguished by tanks or terror.

Independence, however, brought its own contradictions. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami League, seeking Indian goodwill and internal cohesion, placed secularism at the center of the new republic.

The 1972 Constitution enshrined it, banning religious political parties and presenting the state as pluralistic. But this sidelining of Islam as a political force left many devout citizens feeling excluded from the national project.

The promise of liberation began to fray further under Mujib’s one-party rule, his government mired in corruption and administrative decay. His assassination in 1975 violently rerouted the country’s trajectory.

In the years that followed, Islam returned to the heart of statecraft, but not as a unifying philosophy. Under Ziaur Rahman, Islam was reintroduced into the political framework; under Hussain Muhammad Ershad, it was declared the state religion in 1988.

Yet what could have been a thoughtful reconciliation of faith and governance became instead a political instrument, wielded by parties to shore up legitimacy and divide electorates.

Islam remained central, but its meaning was hollowed out–distorted by opportunism, misinterpretation, and cynical power plays.

Even after Ershad’s downfall in the anti-autocracy movement, the nation never settled the question of Islam’s place in public life. Successive BNP and Awami League governments sidestepped the issue, choosing expediency over resolution.

What resulted was a permanent fracture, splitting the nation into two camps: one claiming the mantle of secularism, the other insisting on Islam. Liberation had promised unity, but in its aftermath, identity itself became the battlefield.

Hasina’s convoluted handling of Islam

The long rule of Sheikh Hasina marked a period of quiet but deliberate estrangement between Islam and public life.

Religion was never formally outlawed, but it was steadily pried away from the hearts and minds of ordinary people through cultural engineering and political maneuver.

Religious sermons and gatherings were placed under surveillance; preachers were harassed or jailed as “controversial”; citizens who wore beards, caps, or other religious symbols were often viewed with suspicion.

Education policy chipped away at Islamic influence in curricula, while mosques and madrasas were subjected to intrusive oversight in the name of fighting militancy.

Secularism, invoked selectively, became less a principle than a weapon–applied almost exclusively against Islam, while left conveniently dormant at election time, when religious imagery could be cynically repurposed to secure votes.

More damaging than policy was the assault on language and consciousness itself. “Islamist” became a slur in the lexicon of state and media, while a chorus of self-anointed progressives ridiculed traditions, history, and symbols of faith as if mockery were modernity.

The intent was clear: to neutralize Islam not through confrontation, but through marginalization–turning a civilizational anchor into a suspect identity.

That strategy collapsed in the summer of 2024, when a student-led mass uprising finally swept away Hasina’s entrenched rule, exposing the fragility of a politics built on repression masked as secularism.

But the deeper dilemma remains unresolved. Islam continues to hold singular significance for the people of Bangladesh–culturally and politically. The enduring question is whether this bond will remain confined to private observance or whether it will expand into a fuller conception of public life.

Equally unresolved is whether secularism will define the state’s political, economic, and cultural order, or whether Islam will. These are not abstract debates. They have haunted Bangladesh since 1947, resurfaced in 1971, and returned with force in 2024.

Left unanswered, they threaten to carry the nation to yet another historical crossroads, one whose direction may once again be decided in blood.

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Arefin Al Imran is a music director, producer and sound designer