The News Minute | March 1, 2015 | 12.40 pm IST
Attacked in full public view, Avijit Roy, a well-known American blogger of Bangladeshi origin Avijit Roy was hacked to death by machete-wielding attackers on the streets of Dhaka.
On a bicylce rickshaw returning home from a book fair, Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed were dragged out and attacked , injuring him fatefully and her grieviously.
A prominent atheist thinker and a scientist from Atlanta, Dr Avijit Roy was also the founder of Mukto-Mona (Free mind) blog ,that spoke on secular thoughts in the Muslim -dominated country.
A picture that has been shared widely showed a blood covered Rafida Ahmed seeking help as her husband lay on the road.
The writer had prepared a series of writing to to be published in April, but has now been released early after his death, reported Daily Mail.
In his article for Centre for Inquiry titled 'Virus of Faith', referring to the Charlie Hebdo attack in which twelve people including two police officers were killed and the Peshawar army at school attack , he said “such religious extremism is like a highly contagious virus. My own recent experiences in this regard verify the horrific reality that such religious extremism is a “virus of faith.”
Explaining how a book of his , ‘Biswasher Virus’ released in Bangladesh had hit the nerve of Islamic fundamentalists, he said that “death threats started flowing to my e-mail inbox on a regular basis. I suddenly found myself a target of militant Islamists and terrorists.”
From the September 2011 Twin Towers attack, to the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack, he attributed the cause behind them to ‘faith-based terrorism’.
“Faith-based terrorisms are nothing but viruses—if allowed to spread, they will wreak havoc on society in epidemic proportions.
Not just restricting himself to these attacks, he also mentioned Rev Michael Bray, an American minister who had been convicted of using biblical verses to defend his acts of terrorism - series of attacks on abortion clinic attacks in the 1980s.
He also mentioned the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 conducted by ‘ Hindu fanatics’ and ‘based on a religious myth called “Ram Janmabhoomi”
Accusing the American president Barack Obama of avoiding criticising religion “particularly Islam, he went on to state in his article that hundred of verses in the holy book of Islam is not peaceful but “inhuman, parochial and dangerously viral.
"Whatever the motivation behind President Obama’s statements—whether it is simple strategy or so-called political correctness—there is very little doubt that ISIS speaks exactly for Islam." he wrote
Casual mention of death threats in his article
Roy goes on to explain how Rahman, issued him ‘ironic death threats’ for his writing the book Biswasher Virus. Alleging that Rahman was linked to a radical Islamist party, he also said that he had threatened to kill a Muslim cleric .
"A well-known extremist by the name of Farabi Shafiur Rahman openly issued death threats to me through his numerous Facebook statuses," he wrote.
"Rahman, the known cyber-terrorist of Bangladesh, issued laughably ironic death threats for my writing of Biswasher Virus," he wrote.
Earlier according to Bangladesh New 24, Shafiur Rahman Farabi had written a Facebook post “Avijit Roy lives in America and so it is not possible to kill him right now. He will be murdered when he comes back.”
An excerpt from one his blogs 'Super scientific religious scriptures' in response to an article explained his thoughts on educated Bangladeshi Muslims "unrelenting in finding science in a specific ancient religious scripture ".
When his obdurate, obstinate and bigoted approach pushed me to my limit, I was compelled to write this essay. My contention was quite simple: if we read carefully, we surely note that those ancient religious scriptures were composed at a time when the humanity had a very limited understanding of scientific knowledge. One cannot legitimately expect to find the complex theories of ‘Big-Bang’, ‘Super String’, ‘Relativity’ etc. in the pages of those dated Holy Books. In reality, the contents of those primitive books reflected the sheer backwardness prevalent in the contemporary society; their thoughts, belief, hopes and despair; nothing more than that and nothing less. Let me illustrate with an example: when the holy Qur’an was composed (a better word is compiled, I should emphasize), the eminent scientists like Galileo, Bruno, Copernicus, et.al were not even born. How could the people of that primeval period even think of an earth, revolving around our sun? Nay, they could never comprehend this, as they were familiar only with the sun rising in the east and then setting in the west; the rising of the moon at the onset of night. These are the phenomena they have observed since their birth. God controls these heavenly objects, they thought. That certain laws of physics govern the progress of these celestial bodies, they could never comprehend. This is what is accurately reflected in many verses of the Qur’an, Hadis, Vedas and the Bible.