Avijit Roy and his wife Rafida Ahmed Bonya
Facebook photo (2012)
Three members of an Islamist terror group have been arrested this week in Bangladesh, in connection with the brutal murders of secular bloggers Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy Das in separate incidents earlier this year.
Two other bloggers, also said to have insulted Islam with their atheism, have also been killed in Bangladesh in recent months: Niloy Chatterjee and Washiqur Rahman.
I didn't know any of these writers personally and can't claim to be familiar with their work. I may not even share their politics and values. But, like many others, I feel it's right to protest their deaths, honour their lives, and send condolences to their families and friends - particularly, Roy's wife, Rafida Ahmed Bonya, also a blogger, who was seriously injured in the attack that left her husband lying dead on a street in Dhaka (the city of his birth, and where his father had taught physics at the university).
The couple, who had US citizenship, had returned to Dhaka in February for a brief visit in order to attend the city's annual book fair. They were leaving one of the events when they were ambushed by a group of young men carrying meat cleavers.
Roy was the author of several books in Bengali dealing with subjects guaranteed to enrage religious fundamentalists of all stripes. His two most recent works, translated into English as The Philosophy of Disbelief (2011) and The Virus of Faith (2014), give a good indication of his interests and the Dawkins-Dennett inspired perspective from which he passionately argued the case for secularism (something enshrined as one of the four founding principles of the Bangladeshi state, although this seems to be increasingly forgotten or ignored by the Muslim majority).
I would encourage readers of this blog to read these works as I intend to.
