Sufi Muslim leader is hacked to death in Bangladesh



A Sufi Muslim leader has been hacked to death in Bangladesh in what may be another attack by Islamist militants there.

The remains of Mohammad Shahidullah, 65, were found in a pool of blood in a mango grove in the same northwestern district of Rajshahi, where ISIL said it killed a professor last month.

Also last month, a group affiliated to al Qaeda claimed responsibility for killing a Bangladeshi gay rights campaigner and his friend in the capital Dhaka.

The Bangladeshi government denies that so-called Islamic State or al Qaeda have a presence in the country. Police say home-grown militants are behind the attacks.

Islamist extremists in Bangladesh have targeted atheist bloggers, academics, religious minorities and foreign aid workers in a series of killings that dates back to February 2015 and has claimed at least 20 lives.

-- (c) Copyright Euronews 2016-05-08

Soon to be renamed Bangla - Daesh

Its amazing that the totality and global nature of these acts are always divorced from their larger whole. Presented in isolation, it is easy for many to presume there is no epidemic. There is an epidemic and it is infecting the whole world.

On a particular note regarding Sufism, it has long been teased from their practices that Sufi believe God can be intimately communed with. Otherwise, greater Islam is a very dualist theology with the "slave" (tenet) of God can approach no nearer then the prescriptions of their prophet (Sunnah, ahadith, Koran) and his companions (Sahabah). This may seem a minor difference but its pivotal. Man cannot subsume into godhead and rapture and mysticism and its musical and artistic correlates are anathema to most islam, charges frequently leveled at Sufi.

Allow me an example this dualist relationship with the God in practice:

While in Yemen I was stunned by the amount of dead and mangled bodies we saw each day just driving through Saana. One day while traveling I was looking at a woman in head to toe burka, and a brass face plate, she stepped out into traffic and was run down. She never looked left or right. I recoiled because it was so close. Shocked, I asked our translator/Yemen intel partner "What the hell is going on?"

Laughing in acknowledgement and a bit of embarrassment he explained. "Here people do not look before they cross the road. Looking challenges the will of the God. To look is to attempt to thwart God. If it is God's will, insha Al lah, that you not be hit, you will not be. If it is God's will, insha Al Lah, that you be hit, so be it. Looking is sacrilege."

I find this example really captures the separation of the "submitted" (Islam=Submission) to their deity. The two can never meet. Sufi significantly vary from this tenet and while variously celebrated through the ages following great spiritual attainment, they often exist at their own peril.

Its a shame too because from the outside looking in, more intimate communion with the heartbeat of God could benefit the world greatly. If I would seek to reform... it would be upon this fulcrum that I would leverage change. This and only this permits the sunnah, hadith, and koran continued legitimacy.

It is indeed a global Jihaddist insurgency. To look always for some projected local grievance that western liberals can relate to is to willfully dissemble in order to conceal the global nature of the threat and the common ideology it holds.