There are very few genuine win-win situations in Bangladesh. Somebody normally has to lose.

An election produces a loser, a tender produces several, and an hour of load-shedding produces several million. Yet Banglavision appears to have stumbled upon that rarest form of renewable energy…a television story capable of generating benefits for everyone involved.

The protagonist is Abdur Rahman Suhail, a Qawmi madrasa student from Titas in Cumilla, who says he has invented a machine that can generate electricity using gravity without consuming oil or gas. This would be useful anywhere, but particularly in Bangladesh, where electricity has recently developed an unfortunate habit of disappearing precisely when one wishes to use it.

Suhail's proposed machine is beautifully simple, at least until physics gets involved. A heavy object descends and turns a crane or shaft, producing electricity. So far, perfectly respectable. Hydroelectricity has been dining out on gravity for ages. The difficulty arrives with what happens next. 

Suhail says the heavy object, having descended, will somehow become lighter on the other side of the mechanism, allowing the process to repeat indefinitely. The machine will therefore keep rotating and producing electricity without fuel.

Humanity has spent centuries trying to build variations of this contraption, usually under the unfriendly gaze of the laws of thermodynamics. Perpetual-motion machines have one persistent engineering defect…they do not perpetually move.

But Suhail has ambition. He says the idea came to him in 2022 while reciting the Quran and contemplating creation, and that he also studied Hadith in developing it. He spent nearly two years experimenting, built a prototype and says he worked as a day labourer to finance his efforts. 

Eventually, he held a press conference at the National Press Club and took his invention to government departments. Then Banglavision put him on television.

At which point Suhail ceased being an amateur inventor and became content.

Social media immediately discovered an energy source considerably more reliable than gravity: ridicule. Jokes multiplied. Bangladesh's power crisis had apparently been solved in Cumilla. Petrobangla could go home. LNG terminals could be converted into wedding venues. Someone merely needed to inform Newton that his work had received an important software update in Titas.

Then came the politics.

The fact that Suhail said his inspiration came from the Quran was irresistible to Bangladesh's self-described ‘secular’ quarter. Here was excellent cannon fodder. The story allowed them not merely to laugh at a questionable machine but to enjoy that more satisfying sport…presenting religious belief itself as evidence of intellectual backwardness.

This, naturally, activated the other side.

Some Islamists defended Suhail. Why mock a young madrasa student for experimenting? Give him a laboratory. Let scientists examine the machine. At least he is trying to invent something rather than spending his afternoon abusing strangers on Facebook — an argument containing more merit than many of Suhail's critics would care to admit.

Other Islamists were furious with Suhail himself. If you want to violate thermodynamics, they effectively said, kindly leave the Quran out of it. By attaching scripture to an unverified scientific claim, he had handed Islam's habitual mockers precisely the stick with which they wanted to beat believers.

Thus everyone had found his preferred grievance.

There was even a small constituency of optimists. Qawmi madrasas are more frequently in the news because of political controversies, allegations of abuse, including sexual abuse, or arguments over what they teach. Yet here was a madrasa student displaying genuine scientific curiosity. 

His physics may be wrong, but curiosity is not. A young man who worked as a labourer to finance experiments deserves rather more sympathy than a young man who has never tested an idea in his life but possesses a good number of Facebook followers with whom to explain why everyone else is stupid.

Banglavision, meanwhile, received its own tribunal.

Media pundits asked how such a story had passed editorial scrutiny. Why was an extraordinary scientific claim broadcast without asking a physicist whether it was possible? Why wasn't the elementary problem of conservation of energy mentioned? These are reasonable questions. Extraordinary claims require evidence, and journalism is supposed to interrogate them rather than provide studio lighting.

Still, Banglavision had achieved something most television executives understand rather better than thermodynamics: millions of views.

Bangladesh is hardly unique in mixing scripture and science. Christian creationists in the United States have repeatedly searched Genesis for scientific explanations of the Earth's origins, sometimes constructing elaborate 'creation science' institutions around the effort. 

In India, politicians and public figures have periodically claimed that ancient Hindu texts anticipated modern technologies, from aircraft to reproductive science. Muslim societies have their own tradition of finding modern cosmology, embryology and geology anticipated in Quranic verses. 

The temptation is universal: if science is prestigious and scripture is sacred, why not make scripture the original science textbook? The trouble begins when metaphor is marched into a laboratory and ordered to produce testable results.

Yet perhaps that misses the real achievement of the Suhail affair. The machine may not generate perpetual electricity, but the story generated almost perpetual engagement.

Secularists got religion to ridicule. Islamists got secularists to denounce. Other Islamists got bad Islamic apologetics to condemn. Madrasa sympathisers got evidence of scientific curiosity. Media critics got Banglavision to scold. Banglavision got millions of views. Facebook got arguments. Content creators got content.

And ordinary Bangladeshis, sitting through another season of power shortages and load-shedding, got a day to convert their accumulated frustration into jokes, memes, indignation and rage-baiting.

Suhail wanted to build a machine in which a falling weight somehow returned to the top and began the process again. On television and social media, he accidentally succeeded. One joke produced an angry response, which produced a religious defence, which produced another joke, which produced another angry response. No external fuel was apparently required.

The physicists may reject Suhail's perpetual-motion machine. The Bangladeshi internet has already built one.

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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa