A high school friend from Dhaka called to ask me to vote for the Jamaat-e-Islami in the upcoming Bangladesh elections. The country’s largest ‘religious party’, the Jamaat had in 1971 actively opposed the independence of then East Pakistan and collaborated with the West Pakistan establishment. Even after Bangladesh’s liberation, then Jamaat leader Ghulam Azam set up an East Pakistan Restoration Committee office in London and campaigned against the newly formed nation.

My friend, like many ordinary citizens in Bangladesh, is exhausted by the country’s two dominant parties, the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. 
Despite ideological differences, their record in power often looks strikingly similar, marked by cycles of corruption, failure, and hyper-politicised rule.

The key difference is intensity: the Awami League has governed more aggressively and with fewer restraints, dominated politics before and after 1971. The BNP emerged in 1978, founded by then president and military chief Ziaur Rahman who seized power after the assassination of Bangladesh’s founding father Mujibur Rehman in 1975.

The latest episode in Bangladesh’s history of political violence claimed more than 120 lives between August 2024 and June 2025, according to Transparency International Bangladesh, with more than 5,000 injured, mostly BNP members. These killings have spread fear and deep public frustration -- despite the fall of the authoritarian regime, the political culture remains the same.

Uncomfortable Questions Jamaat Raises

With the Awami League blown over by the July revolutionary wind in 2024, reports surfaced about BNP activists moving in to claim the extortion networks long dominated by Awami leaders. This racket runs across sectors, from street vendors to big industry. Members of the newly formed National Citizen Party, born out of the student-led revolt and now in alliance with Jamaat, have also allegedly been drawn into these turf wars.

With general elections on 12 February 2026, many fear a return to the old order. 
This raises the uncomfortable question: If that’s the outcome, what was the point of the July Revolution?

Bangladeshis are religious in general, but not radical. So why are people like my friend supporting a party like the Jamaat with a stated goal to establish an ‘Islamic’ state? What other options are there, asks my friend, going for what he sees as the lesser evil.

The Jamaat’s student wing, Islami Chhatra Shibir, recently made headlines following a series of long-awaited student council elections at several public universities. Shibir-backed candidates won by wide margins -- an outcome many analysts see as a wake-up call and a clear indicator of shifting youth sentiment.

The influential religious scholar Abul A’la Maududi, who founded the Jamaat in pre-Partition India in 1941, argued that religion is the ultimate source of morality. The Bangladesh Jamaat upholds his perspective that Western-style secular states are inherently unethical and un-Islamic. His teachings enjoin Muslims to "strive to change the wrong basis of government" in whichever country they may live, "and seize all powers to rule and make laws from those who do not fear God” (Let Us Be Muslims, 1985, an English translation of a collection of his Urdu speeches published in 1938).

The Jamaat upholds gender-segregated education, particularly at the higher levels, and believes that "a woman’s primary role is motherhood and assigning them duties traditionally meant for men... is a grave insult to womanhood” -- "the family system can function smoothly only when a husband earns and provides his income to a capable wife to manage the household" (Bangladesh and Jamaat-e-Islami, in 1979, author's translation). Sheikh Hasina’s government imposed sweeping restrictions on the Jamaat and its student wing, banning both in 2024.

A striking feature of Shibir activists is their intense organisational loyalty. Unlike mainstream student wings, defections are rare. This discipline is rooted in rigorous ideological training and mandatory study of Maududi’s core texts. While Jamaat-e-Islami remains deeply controversial for its history and worldview, even critics acknowledge its internal discipline and comparatively structured, democratic organisation.

To understand Jamaat-e-Islami, one must understand its founder. During the military rule of Ayub Khan in Pakistan, Jamaat fiercely opposed reforms like the 1961 Muslim Family Laws Ordinance which aimed to strengthen women’s rights. Maududi denounced the ordinance as un-Islamic. “Maududism” became a term of fear and condemnation in that era, writes historian Ayesha Jalal in her book ‘The Struggle for Pakistan: A Muslim Homeland and Global Politics’ (Sang-e-Meel, 2014).

While Maududi denounced female leadership as being “absolutely against the spirit and precepts of Islam" (Islamic Law and Constitution, 1960), supported the presidential bid of Fatima Jinnah, the sister of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, against incumbent President Ayub Khan, contradicting his own doctrinal positions and revealing a willingness to bend ideology for political expediency.

A prolific writer, Maududi remained largely silent on the systemic exploitation and discrimination East Pakistanis faced under West Pakistani rule. He dismissed Bengali nationalism as a project of “communists” and “Hindus,” refusing to recognise either the legitimacy of Bengali grievances or their victory in the 1970 elections. For them, ideology came first; religion over justice; Islam over humanity.

Ideological Shift Or Political Expediency?

Ahead of the 2026 general election, the Jamaat has shifted its approach to appeal to a broader spectrum of voters. It has formed non-Muslim committees in several districts, with many local Hindus joining the party. In early December 2025, the Jamaat nominated Krishna Nandi, a member of the Hindu community, as its parliamentary candidate for Khulna-1, a constituency in Khulna, the third largest city in Bangladesh.

A member of the Hindu community who works at a hotel in Dhaka shared his concerns about the Jamaat’s growth and its prospects of gaining power. 
“They want to show that they are liberal,” he told me, requesting anonymity. No other party would have given Nandi a chance to run, he added.

Jamaat chief Shafiqur Rahman's declaration last September, addressing a gathering in New York, that Jamaat would reduce working hours for working mothers to five a day sparked mixed reactions. He later clarified that they would still be paid for a full eight hours; they could choose to work the full shift, and that women who prefer to stay at home would be honouored.

Rights activists have denounced it as a tactic to confine women further. Some like Neela Israfil, a former NCP leader, have called to ensure safety on the streets, within the family, and in workplaces, rather than treating women differently in the workplace.

The party’s ultimate aim, as stated in the 2008 manifesto -- the last election the party contested -- is to establish an “Islamic welfare state". The policies it outlines include: Muslim men and women shall be educated in the basic teachings of the Islamic belief system, Islamic rules and regulations and moral teachings.
Blasphemy law shall be promulgated to prevent and prosecute anti-religious propaganda and to ban blasphemous remarks in books and in print and electronic media.

Islamic teachings shall be disseminated through radio, television, newspapers, and other popular media. The party has consistently prioritised the expansion of madrasas (religious seminaries), mosques, and religious institutions, leading a larger base of ideologically-aligned voters.

One of Bangladesh’s four founding principles in its first constitution, adopted in 1972, was secularism, which led to religion-based political parties being banned. Then President Ziaur Rahman lifted the ban in 1979.

Interestingly, most other Islamist parties in Bangladesh are critical of the Jamaat’s creed and ideology; several have refused to form an electoral alliance with it. The ultra-conservative Hefazat-e-Islam leader Mahibullah Babunagari sees the Jamaat as "hypocritical" and believes that "practicing Maududi’s Islam puts one’s faith at risk,” said in an August 2025 speech at Nazirhat in Fatikchhari upazila of Chattogram.

Interestingly Maududi’s son Farooq Maududi in Pakistan has long been an outspoken critic of his father’s ideology and politics. Maududi, he said, never allowed his children to read his writings or follow his political philosophy. Visiting Bangladesh in 2013 when the War Crimes Tribunal was trying senior Jamaat leaders, Farooq Maududi condemned the Jamaat’s role in the 1971 War: “Jamaat does not have any right to do politics in Bangladesh, particularly when they opposed the birth of it. They neither have the right, nor should they be allowed to do politics here,” he said. “...Jamaat here is not at all ashamed of what they have done in 1971. Rather, they feel proud of that. They think what they did was right for Islam.”

By 2019, however, the party’s refusal to apologise for its role in 1971 led to its assistant general secretary Abdur Razzaq resigning in protest. More recently, in a bid to distance the Jamaat from this past, Bangladesh’s Jamaat chief Shafiqur Rahman offered an unconditional apology for all of his party’s past mistakes “from 1947 until today,” as he said on the New-York based Thikana talk show in June 2025.

The strategically crafted statement ostensibly includes Jamaat’s involvement in war crimes in 1971 but many dismiss the gesture as insincere, carrying little weight compared to a formal written apology.

Filling A Political Vacuum 

Then there is the mindset that defines much of Bangladesh’s political class, exemplified in this statement by former two-time Jamaat MP Shahjahan Chowdhury, one of the party's nominated candidates in the upcoming polls.

“Elections cannot be held only with the people… We must bring everyone in the administration in our respective constituencies under our control. They must rise and sit at our command, make arrests at our command, and file cases at our command,” he was quoted as saying. (The Daily Star, 23 November 2025)

Regardless of who holds power, the goal is to capture the state and bend it to party ideology.

If Jamaat comes to power it will likely begin with populist moves such as anti-corruption drives, predicts Ahmedur Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi writer and editor who has been living in Norway since surviving a 2015 attack. He says he fears  mobilisation of religious groups to push for declaring Bangladesh an Islamic republic and enforce Sharia law. The result would be shrinking freedoms for women, curbs on cultural life, and serious threats to freedom of expression, religious minorities, and secular political and cultural spaces.

The Jamaat’s politics, said Maududi's son Farooq, ultimately leads to one thing, "whether in Bangladesh, Pakistan or India,... They successfully make Islam controversial.”

Holding that a state should not have any religion, he had also asserted that if a state is formed on the basis of a religion, “then the Taliban have every single right to take over.” Less than a decade later, the Taliban did indeed take over Afghanistan again. A model of an ‘Islamic state’ is before us.

Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, banning the Awami League has led to a vacuum filled by the Jamaat-e-Islami, now the second largest party and arguably stronger and more hopeful than ever about transforming Bangladesh into an Islamic state. Whether or not they will succeed, even if they win the upcoming elections, remains to be seen.

(The writer is a Bangladeshi American writer teaching at Georgia State University. His debut novel, Bengal Hound (2023), won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction.  By special arrangement with Sapan)