Bangladesh

Islam came to Bengal mainly through teachers rather than armies, and the shrines of the men credited with it, Shah Jalal at Sylhet above all, remain places of pilgrimage rather than merely of memory. The result is a Bengali Islam with a strong devotional and Sufi character, most visible in the Bauls, wandering singers who reject caste and orthodoxy alike and draw on Sufi, Vaishnava and tantric material; their tradition was inscribed by UNESCO and its best known figure, Lalon Shah, is a national one.

Bengal was partitioned in 1947 on religious lines into East Pakistan, and then in 1971 the eastern wing fought a war of independence against West Pakistan in which the decisive issue was language and Bengali identity rather than religion, since both sides were overwhelmingly Muslim. That war is the reason the founding constitution of 1972 named secularism as one of four state principles. It is also why the trials conducted from 2010 by the International Crimes Tribunal, directed largely at leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami for collaboration in 1971, were simultaneously a reckoning with war crimes and a confrontation with political Islam. Buddhism preceded both: the Pala emperors ruled Bengal as the last great Buddhist dynasty of the subcontinent until the twelfth century, and the ruins of their monastery at Somapura in Paharpur are a World Heritage site.

Bangladesh is the rare country whose constitution declares both secularism and a state religion, and it arrived there by successive amendment rather than by design. Secularism was one of the four founding principles in 1972. It was removed after the 1975 coup, when Ziaur Rahman replaced it with a declaration of absolute trust in Almighty Allah, and in 1988 Hussain Muhammad Ershad added the eighth amendment making Islam the state religion. In 2011 the fifteenth amendment restored secularism as a principle while leaving the state religion clause in place, and in 2016 the High Court dismissed a long pending challenge to that clause, so both now stand together. What this means in practice is contested rather than settled.

Personal status law is administered separately for Muslims, Hindus and Christians, so marriage, divorce and inheritance depend on the community a person belongs to, and Hindu women in particular have far weaker inheritance and divorce rights than Muslim women. The Vested Property Act, which allowed the state to seize property of those declared enemies after 1965 and was used overwhelmingly against Hindus, was repealed in 2001 but restitution remains substantially incomplete. Attacks on Hindu temples and homes, often triggered by allegations of blasphemous social media posts, have recurred with enough regularity to become a pattern rather than a series of incidents.