WorldViews: Why an American blogger was hacked to death in Bangladesh

On Thursday night, Avijit Roy, a well-known Bangladeshi American writer and religious skeptic, was surrounded by unidentified assailants armed with cleavers and hacked to death on a street in Dhaka. His wife, Rafida Ahmed, sustained serious woundsand is fighting for her life. On social media, you can find awfulimages of the immediate aftermath of the incident, with Ahmed, drenched in blood, standing stunned by the fallen body of her husband.

A previously unknown Islamist militant group named Ansar Bangla 7 claimed responsibility for the attack, according to the Associated Press, saying on Twitter that Roy wastargeted "because of his crimes against Islam."

Roy, who was based in the United States, had just arrived in Bangladesh a week prior to attend a book festival. An engineer by training, he had launched a popular, secularist blog and gained a reputation as a prominent advocate of humanism and tolerance. His Hindu background was less relevant than his scientific atheism. Friends claimed he had received numerous death threats from fundamentalists irked by his outspoken commentary on religion.

"I have profound interest in freethinking, skepticism, philosophy, scientific thoughts and human rights of people," Roy wrote on his Facebook page, by way ofbiographical description.In apost on his Mukto-Mona blog, Roy, 42, questioned the credibility of the Koran, challenging the contention of some Islamic scholars that there's any "scientific" merit to the text.

Following the hideous terror attacks on a school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar and on the Paris offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo last month, Roylikened religion to a virus in a tweet.

Such sentiments proved too dangerous in Bangladesh's complicated milieu. The country has one of the largest populations of Muslims in the world, and Islam is enshrined as a state religion. In 2013, another secular blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was killed by extremists, sparking similar free speech protests as Roy's death prompted this week.

But Bangladesh also has a deeptradition of secularism the country broke away from Pakistan following a bloody war in 1971. Bengali nationalism, harbored also by the country's religious minorities, trumped the pan-Islamism that defined the Pakistani state. Bangladesh does not have blasphemy laws on its books, nor are there any officialshariah courts.

The current government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has embarked on a controversial, criticized crackdown of Islamists in the country, which included prominent politicians who had sided against the country's independence four decades ago. This effort was cheered by mass pro-democracy,anti-fundamentalist protests in 2013.

But Hasina hasnot helped the cause of liberal thinkers like Roy and is accused of instituting a creeping authoritarianismwhere dissent and free speech is curtailed. Her opponents, including the country's main Islamist party, have been frozen out of parliament. As they fume alongthe margins, there are fears ofincreasing militancy and radicalization.

Bangladesh's toxic culture of zero-sum politics has led to a long, twisted history of extrajudicial violence, assassinations and street protests paralyzing the country's political life. Roy's killersmay have hated him for his views on Islam, but they operated in a far larger, fraught context.