No, they have not mentioned the name of the river where they mean the immersion of the writer's flesh to take place. But that is a minor thing, considering that in this country of big and small rivers it could be any place where Haq's remains might be scattered.

You may now be pretty concerned at the entire matter. You do not have to be, for there are people in this country who are beginning to talk a whole lot of horrible nonsense. And most of these people happen to be in the camp of people who tend to think that saving a religion through killing a society, indeed a nation, is truly a God-ordained task.

And what was Hasan Azizul Haq's fault? Well, he had the temerity to defend secularism, to argue that religion could not be permitted to be a factor in national politics. And those of us who know what the Jamaat-e-Islami is all about and what the Islami Chhatra Shibir is all about, remain pretty much aware of the dangers Haq has invited on himself.

After all, didn't people of his kind commit the same blunder back in 1971 and then pay with their lives? Those men and women saw their eyes glaze over with sudden death. And those who led them to their unseemly fields of death have lived on, to cast their long shadows on politics in a country they so fervently wished to nip in the bud.

That is an interesting reality in this country. Those who have upheld the cause of the people have been pushed aside or pushed into silence engendered by mortality. And the bad ones have survived, have lived to inflict more of the old atrocities on us.

Note with how much clarity the fundamentalists have served notice on Muhammad Zafar Iqbal, the academic and writer we all know and respect so avidly. He is a brave man every inch of the way. But even bravery sometimes finds itself in a straitjacket.

Zafar Iqbal has been warned, in no uncertain terms and in manner reminiscent of all those wonderfully scripted murder thrillers produced in Hollywood, that unless he stops spouting secular notions of life, he will have his tongue cut out. What will then happen to that severed tongue has not been spelt out.

So much for democracy, for the right of a person to disagree with another. But whoever said people who have been playing communal politics and have found their niche in organizations like the Jamaat and the Muslim League believe in democratic pluralism?

Way back in 1953, the Jamaat-e-Islami under Abul A'la Maudoodi created mayhem in Lahore, so much so that blood flowed along the streets of the city. And it would not stop until General Azam Khan came along. In those days of Jamaat initiation into the politics of violence, the targets were men of unimpeachable integrity like Sir Zafrullah Khan. No, no one wanted to have his tongue cut out or have his body turned into mincemeat. But he had to be pushed out of Islam because he swore by the Ahmadiyya version of faith.

In the years since then, Maudoodi's followers have come a long way. Some of the best moments of their lives came in 1971 when Golam Azam swiftly made it a point, per courtesy of the Pakistani genocide, to offer assistance to Tikka Khan in the matter of doing away with the miscreants out to destroy Islam and Pakistan in these parts. The miscreants, of course, were seventy-five million Bengalis whose very simple wish was to assert themselves in the politics of their own land.

The Jamaat, and of course all those other organizations quite unable to comprehend life after Pakistan, quickly bought the idea, cooked in the kitchens of the Yahya Khan junta, that forces called al-Badr and al-Shams could speedily "re-convert" Bengalis into good, meaning Pakistan-loving Muslims.

You see, in those gory days of 1971, being a good Muslim meant being a good Pakistani. And those of us who wished to be free Bengalis in a Pakistan-free Bangladesh were infidels, agents of Indian, and therefore Hindu expansionism. The kafirs in us needed to be exorcised. Al-Badr and al-Shams were there to do the job. They thought Allah was on their side. In His name they killed.

There was a certain novelty about the killings. These collaborators, or Razakars as we have since called them (the writer Humayun Ahmed reinforced our sentiments here with the coinage of that "Tui Razakar" epithet), masked themselves and then, in the gathering darkness of the day, went picking their victims. Fearful men and women were thus led, blindfolded, to torture and death by beings themselves afraid of being recognized.

Moulana Mannan would not open the door to save Alim Chowdhury when the al-Badr came looking for the doctor. He was afraid even as he and others like him pretended to be brave in the defence of Islamic Pakistan. There was a pattern, there will always be a pattern, in the way these self-proclaimed defenders of Islam go into the business of propagating their faith. In the name of faith and in the service of Pakistan, they and their friends ended up taking the lives of three million Bengalis.

The Pakistan armed forces cheerfully raped Bengali women and then sought to explain away their animal lust through speaking of a need for a new breed of Pakistanis in the land of the infidel Bengalis. Remember the final days before the rise of Bangladesh? Khan Abdus Sabur Khan (such men always had that extra "Khan" tagged to their names in mindless imitation of their gurus in West Pakistan) let it be known that if East Pakistan became Bangladesh, it would actually be an illegitimate child of India. But he was a clever man. In this "illegitimate" country, he took full advantage of the Zia dictatorship to return to politics and return the Muslim League to politics.

So there really ought to be no surprise when the Shibir thinks Hasan Azizul Haq and Muhammad Zafar Iqbal should be turned into dead meat and fed to the wolves. The generation of young fanatics that preceded the Shibir in the Jamaat really showed it the way once. Which is why, when some people tell you that these young Jamaatis are a different breed because they came of age in free Bangladesh, that therefore they cannot be held to account for the sins of their fathers, you do not have to believe them. If anything, these Shibirites could be a whole lot more dangerous than those who once worked for the Islami Chhatra Sangha with relish.

You can go even further back in time, to the 1940s, when Jinnah and his friends (and among them were some of our very own Bengalis, AK Fazlul Huq for instance) thought the poor Muslims of India needed their own country to breathe freely in.

And what a way they adopted to have that dream translated into reality! Queer, harmless slogans like: "Sar pe topi mun mein paan larhke lenge Pakistan" rent the air. The harmless soon gave way to the murderous when in 1946, Bengal's Muslim League-affiliated Prime Minister Husseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy called a holiday on August 16, 1946 to observe his party's "Direct Action Day." Action against whom or what? In the end, tens of thousands of Muslims and Hindus lay sprawled on the streets of Calcutta, dead and bleeding. A year later, India went, like choice red meat, through the Mountbatten knife.

Twenty-four years later, it was irony that took over our lives. The state that was born in blood-letting collapsed in a lot of blood, Bengali blood. And now these fanatics demand our blood again because they think we have strayed from our faith. Men like Hasan Azizul Haq and Muhammad Zafar Iqbal have the courage in them to speak of all people and all faiths. That does not satisfy these obscurantists now creeping up our alleys and lanes. Today they need severed tongues and pieces of good men's flesh. Tomorrow they might demand the entrails in their bodies. Their wants, wrapped in immorality, are unlimited.

And, pray, what is faith? You find it in the stirring of a leaf, in the ripples of a village pond. It thrives in the quiet prayer of the poor peasant in a hamlet. It comes alive in dreams of a gold-dappled dawn forged in the mind of one who thinks, who understands the lessons of history.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.