Bangladesh's Sufi groups celebrate birth anniversary of Prophet amid tight security

Dhaka, Sep 16 (PTI) Bangladesh's Sufi groups on Monday celebrated the birth anniversary of Prophet Muhammad amid tightened security in the wake of recent attacks on Sufi shrines, with right-wing groups calling them hubs of un-Islamic practices.
    Military and paramilitary forces guarded the streets in Dhaka, with police keeping extra vigils on rallies and street marches of the Sufi groups in the capital and other major cities.
    The Sufi groups urged the far-right Islamic organisations to pay respect to the Muslim saints, recalling their role in preaching Islam with love and promoting interfaith harmony.
    "We call upon you who have carried out attacks on sufi shrines or torched those sites to refrain from such heinous activities,” Islamic spiritual hub Maizbhandar Darbar’s leader Syed Saifuddin Ahmed told a rally here ahead of an Eid-e-Miladunnabi march.
    "Don’t force the peace-loving followers and admires of Sufism to take to the street,” he said and urged the interim government to ensure the security of the shrines and reconstruct the damaged ones.
    Saifuddin said that the Prophet preached inclusiveness, precisely discarding extremism, while the extremists were now out to destroy social peace and harmony.
    The Sufi groups celebrate the Miladunnabi amid festivity, while the far-right Islamic groups discourage such practices.
    "Following the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina-led government through a mass uprising of students and the public, a wave of attacks on shrines occurred across the country, with police remaining uncertain about the motives behind these attacks,” read a commentary in the Daily Sun published on Sunday.
    The attack on famous saint Shah Paran in northeastern Sylhet last week drew massive criticism among civil society figures, rights watchdogs and Sufi groups.
    Many people on social media posted comments like “the (student-led) movement aimed to break discrimination, but now the shrines, culture and civilisations are being broken”.
    The incidents prompted the chief adviser's office to issue a warning against hate speeches and attacks on Sufi shrines alongside any religious and cultural sites and ordered law enforcement agencies to take punitive actions against the perpetrators.
    "It has come to our notice that a group of miscreants have been attacking Sufi shrines and mazars in the country over the past few days. The Interim Government condemns in the strongest terms any hate speech and attack on the religious and cultural sites and the Sufi shrines,” it read.
    It said the government was acting to bring the “unscrupulous forces involved in the attacks to books and initiate stringent legal actions” against them.
    Bangladesh is a country of “communal harmony and peaceful coexistence of all beliefs for thousands of years,” it said.
    "We are stating in unambiguous terms that we will remain a country of harmony and any attempts to disturb religious or cultural tolerance and harmony will be strongly dealt with without discrimination,” the statement added.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)