Everyday Secularism in Bangladesh Is a Humanist Lesson

Column. Everyday secularism rarely makes headlines. It happens in sweet shops, barbers’ chairs and university canteens. A new essay argues it may be Bangladesh’s strongest defence against division.

Writing in The Daily Star this week, Dr Anas Ansar of North South University tells small stories. Each one carries a big idea.

What everyday secularism looks like

Last Ramadan in Shibganj, Chapainawabganj, he watched Muslim customers queue for iftar sweets. The shop, Adi Chamcham, was founded in 1858 by Norendra Kumar Sarker, a Hindu. Nobody found it remarkable.

In his home village in Cox’s Bazar, Indigenous neighbours helped Muslim families during Eid-ul-Azha. In Chittagong, the Hindu singer Shimul Sheel became part of the devotional music at a Muslim shrine.

At Dhaka University, generations have shared tea at Modhur Canteen. There, Ansar writes, identity mattered “far less than companionship.”

His point is plain. Coexistence here was never engineered from above. Ordinary people practised it long before intellectuals named it.

A humanist reading

Humanists should recognise this at once. Our ethics start from shared human needs, not shared creeds. Markets, rivers, harvests and storms bind people more tightly than doctrine divides them.

Ansar also names the threat. Across South Asia, food, place names and trade are being turned into markers of religious purity. Social media carries that suspicion across borders fast.

He is careful not to romanticise. Communal tension and discrimination in Bangladesh are real, he writes. But beneath the noise lies a habit of living together.

That habit needs defending. It needs laws that protect minorities and schools that teach shared history. It also needs politicians who refuse to trade on fear.

Secular states matter. So do secular habits. A constitution can promise equality. Only neighbours can make it feel real.

Freedom of conscience is fragile where blasphemy laws still bite. Everyday decency is where it survives in the meantime.

Read Dr Ansar’s essay in The Daily Star.

This is an opinion column. Fact basis: “Everyday secularism and the Bangladesh we rarely talk about” by Dr Anas Ansar, The Daily Star (22 Sept 2026).