Asif Mohiuddin

Attack and imprisonment Mohiuddin wrote articles criticising male chauvinism, domestic violence and the death penalty for apostasy in Islam, leading to fundamentalists calling for his death. In 2013 Mohiuddin was attacked and stabbed outside his house by four youths, inspired by Al-Qaeda leader Anwar Al-Awlaki. A month later, Bangladeshi bloggers and online activists started the 2013 Shahbag protests, leading to Islamist groups, including Hefazat-e-Islam, assembling over a million people in counter-demonstrations that called for blasphemy laws in the country, and attacks on secularists in Bangladesh. Rewards were offered for anyone who would behead secularist bloggers. He was mentioned in an open letter by Shah Ahmad Shafi, who labeled him an apostate and accused him of being one of the founders of the Shahbag protests. The Bangladesh government imprisoned bloggers, including Mohiuddin, and blocked many websites.

In March 2013 Mohiuddin's blog on the public blogging site somewhereinblog.net, was shut down by the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, a move protested by the 2013 Bengali blog blackout. In April, Mohiuddin was arrested for "blasphemous" posts, along with three other bloggers. The crackdown on independent blogs, and the closure of the newspaper Amar Desh, was strongly criticised by Human Rights Watch and IHEU. Shortly after the bloggers were arrested, Mukto-Mona, an independent site of freethinkers and atheists of mainly Bengali and South Asian descent, issued a statement titled, 'Bangladesh government squishing freedom of speech by arresting and harassing young bloggers inside the country'. Amnesty International also issued a statement titled, 'Bangladesh: writers at risk of torture'. The Center for Inquiry (CFI), requested the US Secretary of State John Kerry "pressure the government of Bangladesh to reverse its policy of arresting atheist bloggers who were critical to religion." They sent a letter to Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Suzan Johnson Cook "to do all they can to raise public awareness of this situation." Other influential organisations such as the Free Society Institute of South Africa, Reporters Without Borders, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Voice Advocacy, and several other bodies also called for the immediate release of the Bangladeshi bloggers and appealed to several foreign authorities to press Bangladesh on the issue. Many writers, activists, and prominent intellectuals around the world including Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Hemant Mehta, Maryam Namazie, PZ Myers, Avijit Roy, Anu Muhammad, Ajoy Roy, Qayyum Chowdhury, Ramendu Majumdar, Muhammad Zafar Iqbal publicly expressed their solidarity with the arrested bloggers. however the court denied bail for Asif Mohiuddin and he was sent to prison on 2 June 2013. He was released after three months but still faces charges. Now he lives in Berlin, Germany.

Flight to Germany and continued activism

Since April 2014, Asif Mohiuddin lives in Germany, initially with a scholarship from the Hamburg-based Stiftung für politisch Verfolgte (Foundation for the Politically Repressed) and later also with the support of Amnesty International.

In an interview with Deutsche Welle in April 2014 he stated that he does not feel completely safe in Germany either. Just a few days before, someone posted on Facebook a call to travel to Germany and kill him. The post received 1200 likes and was shared many times. Even with some Muslims living in Germany or migrants from Muslim-majority countries to Germany, his views have been met with a strong rejection.

Impact

The assassination attempt against Mohiuddin in January 2013, that was widely covered at home and abroad, was in a sense the public launch of a series of murders of bloggers, secularists and critics of Islamism in Bangladesh, which continues to this day, claiming 48 casualties (July 2016) so far. Mohiuddin also attributes the fact that he has survived to why he has attracted a great deal of international attention. In particular, the English-language service of Deutsche Welle reported many times about him.