The smoke was still rising at nine the next morning. Two semi-pucca structures inside the shrine compound had been reduced to ash. Fifteen to twenty police officers sat on chairs in front of the ruins, watching the embers cool.
Shamim Reza Jahangir -- fifty-five years old, a man who had studied in Dhaka and worked as a teacher before returning to his village to set up a shrine -- was dead. His brother Fazlur Rahman, a retired schoolteacher, stood in a bamboo grove nearby, trying to arrange a funeral while the police watched.
The narrative we have been offered is familiar: An old video resurfaces on social media, a mob forms, a man is killed for "blasphemy."
We are told this is about faith. We are told this is about protecting the honour of the Prophet. And so we mourn, we condemn, we move on.
But somewhere in Daulatpur, in a land registry office that no journalist has visited, there is a file.
It contains a record -- or perhaps the conspicuous absence of one -- of who owned the land beneath the ashes. That file has no comment.
That file does not trend on social media.
And yet, if we want to understand what really happened in Kushtia, and why it keeps happening across Bangladesh, we must begin not with theology but with the question the mob never answers: Who inherits the land now?
The invisible ledger
Most shrines in Bangladesh sit on land whose legal status is ambiguous. Some were endowed centuries ago as waqf -- property permanently dedicated by a Muslim for religious or charitable purposes.
Others were simply occupied by a charismatic mystic who gathered a following, built a structure, and became its de facto custodian without ever securing formal title.
Over generations, these sites generated income -- offerings from devotees, donations during festivals, the quiet economy of faith that sustains the rural poor.
They also accumulated something more tangible: Real estate value.
In a country where land is the primary store of wealth and the primary source of rural conflict, this matters enormously.
The numbers tell a story that the headlines do not. Researchers have found that 122,294 acres of waqf estates in Bangladesh are under illegal occupation, and the government's waqf administration has lost control over 90% of these endowed properties.
More recent estimates put the figure even higher, with some 257,400 acres of waqf land illegally encroached upon. The state acts as a class to organize land grabs, often working in tandem with private interests.
Land grabbing has become all-pervasive, with powerful neighbours in villages routinely grabbing the lands of poorer classes and religious minorities.
The institution meant to protect these endowed lands is weak, understaffed, and utterly incapable of resisting the political power of illegal occupiers.
What does this have to do with a mystic hacked to death in Philipnagar? Everything.
Because a shrine is not just a spiritual site. It is a contested asset. And the accusation of blasphemy is, increasingly, the most efficient way to clear the title.
The mob's two languages
The mob speaks one language in public: Piety. It chants slogans about protecting the honour of the Prophet. It brandishes the Quran as its warrant.
It performs a theatre of righteous fury designed to make any questioning of its motives seem like complicity in heresy. This is the language the cameras capture, the language the state accepts, the language that fills the news cycle until the next atrocity.
But the mob speaks another language in private, or among its leaders: Interest.
Who organized the march to the shrine in Kushtia? Who circulated the old video on that particular Friday? Who provided the machetes? And who stands to gain -- materially, financially, politically -- if the shrine is erased from the landscape?
Analysts and cultural organizers warn that the recent surge of hostility toward shrine-centred observances in Bangladesh is being driven as much by money and local power as by theology.
The objective is not only moral policing but the capture of seasonal village spending, donations, and the local political influence that follows the money.
In some documented cases, attacks on minority religious sites were well-planned, with the aim of grabbing the community's land.
"Whoever monopolizes the stage," one rural organizer observed, "monopolizes the marketplace -- and then the union politics".
The pious slogans are real. The machetes are real. But the ledger -- the ledger is also real, and it is never mentioned in the sermon.
This is not to suggest that every person in the mob is a conscious land grabber. Most are likely true believers, convinced they are doing God's work.
But every mob has organizers. Every mob has financiers. Every mob has beneficiaries who remain invisible precisely because they never touch the machete. They only inherit the emptiness it creates.
The state's quiet approval
And what does the state do? It watches.
A day after Shamim Reza was hacked to death in front of police, no case had been filed. The victim's family, police said, had not yet taken steps to file a case. This is not incompetence. This is architecture.
The state maintains the land registry. The state adjudicates property disputes. The state also maintains a waqf administration that is, by its own admission, helpless against illegal occupiers.
When a shrine is burned and its custodian killed, the state does not swing the machete. But it inherits the order that the machete creates.
A contested parcel of land is suddenly quiet. A dispute that might have taken decades to litigate -- if it could be litigated at all -- is resolved by fire.
The state files no case, because filing a case would require naming the beneficiaries. And the beneficiaries, in many instances, are the very local power brokers with whom the state must negotiate its own fragile authority.
Analyses of the surge in shrine attacks note a disturbing trend: Most attacks are perpetrated by hardline religious mobs invoking monotheistic purity, attempting to legitimize their violence in the name of Islam.
Despite the growing frequency and scale of these events, the government has yet to take substantive action to halt the violence or bring perpetrators to justice.
The state's silence is not neutral. It is a form of adjudication. It decides, by refusing to decide, that the mob's resolution of the property question will stand.
What is lost when the land is ‘cleared’
When we reduce a shrine to a land dispute, we risk losing sight of what made it sacred in the first place.
The shrine in Philipnagar was not just a piece of real estate. It was a place where the troubled came for counsel, where the sick sought cures, where women tied threads and whispered prayers that had no place in the formal architecture of the mosque.
It was a node in the vast, informal network of Bengali spirituality that Richard Eaton described as "a civilization-building ideology associated both with settling and populating the land and with constructing a transcendent reality consonant with that process."
For five hundred years, Islam in the Bengal Delta grew alongside the rice fields, the shifting riverbanks, the monsoon rhythms. It absorbed local practices.
It made room for music, for ecstatic devotion, for the peculiar, beautiful, untidy pluralism of the delta.
The shrine economy -- offerings, festivals, the circulation of goods and blessings -- was never separate from the agricultural economy. It was its spiritual twin.
What is being erased, then, is not merely a man or a building. It is a way of organizing land, community, and the sacred that predates the modern nation-state and its brittle, textual certainties.
Since August 2024, attacks on over 100 Sufi shrines and sacred sites have occurred with chilling regularity across the country. Each burning, each demolition, each hacking death clears the ground -- literally and metaphorically -- for a different kind of Islam and a different kind of economy.
An Islam that is portable, abstract, and unmoored from the soil. An economy where land is not a trust held for the community but a commodity to be bought, sold, and seized.
Cultural historians warn that what is being lost is not just property but centuries of syncretic practice -- Baul humanism, shrine-centred hospitality, the narrative ethics of folk performance -- that once mediated village pluralism. Eaton's Bengal is being subdivided and sold, one shrine at a time.
The unasked question
Shamim Reza Jahangir is dead. His shrine is ash. The video that supposedly triggered his killing still circulates on social media, while the case file remains empty.
The police continue to sit on chairs. And somewhere, in an office we have not visited, a ledger has been updated -- or perhaps it remains conspicuously unchanged, waiting for the smoke to clear.
We know what the mob said it wanted. We know what it destroyed. The question no one asks, the question the state will never investigate, the question that haunts every burned shrine from Madaripur to Kushtia, is this: Who owns the land now?
Until we answer that question, we will continue to mistake a land grab for a religious ritual. And we will continue to mourn the dead while the living quietly inherit the ashes.
Zakir Kibria is a Bangladeshi writer, policy analyst and entrepreneur based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Email: [email protected].
