Peter J. Bertocci

A sufi movement in Bangladesh : The Maijbhandari tariqa and its followers

This article introduces the Maijbhandari Sufi brotherhood, perhaps one of the most important spiritual groupings in todays Bangladesh. Maijbhandari origins, leadership and shrines are briefly described, and the rootedness of the movement in the countrys agrarian history is suggested. The roles of oral and musical performance, as well as buffalo sacrifice, as major ritual forms and practices are discussed and analysed in some depth. The article underlines the centrality of pir veneration and its associated Sufi ideation in Bangladeshi culture as well as in the countrys religious politics.

Bangladesh in the Early 1980s: Praetorian Politics in an Intermediate Regime

On March 24, 1982, on the eve of the eleventh celebration of its 1971 proclamation of independence, Bangladesh began its second encounter with martial law and military rule. The first such experience for Bangladesh began with a sequence of military coups and counter-coups in late 1975, which eventually brought to power Major General, later President, Ziaur Rahman (Zia). Zia was assassinated on May 30, 1981, and the institutions of liberal democracy that he had cautiously brought back into operation were to remain functioning for less than a year after his death. During its first decade, Bangladesh seesawed back and forth between what might be roughly tallied as five and a half years of parlia-