In Bangladesh, a young man growing a seemingly ‘sunnati’ beard can still provoke an unwarranted question…whose people has he become? A young woman begins wearing the hijab, and acquaintances start looking for the organization behind it. Religious practice is rarely allowed to remain simply religious. It must signal membership or recruitment.

That reflex says something important about how the country, especially its urban pockets, essentially understands Islam. It has struggled to accommodate Islam as something natural and ordinary rather than a marker of 'political identity.' The beard and hijab often invite an investigation, and suspicion.

For decades, especially under the Sheikh Hasina administration, much of the country's mainstream intellectual and media culture was shaped by secular and left-leaning elites. Islamic organizations, meanwhile, became major providers of religious education outside traditional institutions. Islamic parties and movements ran the study circles, distributed literature and organized dawah. 

Religious learning and organizational recruitment consequently overlapped. Then the internet disrupted that arrangement.

From around 2010, Bangladeshis gained access to an Islamic marketplace of ideas that no political organization could control. Blogs, television and social media put clerics and thinkers from across the world on the same screen. A university student no longer needed a party worker to hand him a book. He could construct his own syllabus.

That shift has produced a generation that Bangladesh's traditional Islamists and secular critics both misunderstand.

Consider how much attention has been devoted to understanding Generation Z. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to Bangladesh's post-2010 generation of self-taught practising Muslims. Their religious worldview is assembled from multiple, sometimes contradictory sources.

This is a device-shaped generation. Geography matters less to it. Its members can read Abul Ala Maududi, listen to a Salafi scholar, attend a sermon by a Bangladeshi preacher and follow debates about Iran or Palestine. They consume discussions of Islamic jurisprudence alongside politics, economics, history and psychology. The important point is that they believe they possess the tools to reach those conclusions themselves.

That makes them difficult to discipline.

Bangladesh's older political and religious institutions were built around gatekeepers. Newspapers, parties and religious organizations decided which ideas reached their audiences. The smartphone weakened every one of those monopolies.

The consequences resemble what happened politically with Gen Z. Sheikh Hasina's government presided over an information environment saturated with official history, political messaging and reverence for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Yet young Bangladeshis eventually proved remarkably resistant to that political pedagogy. They had access to competing narratives, archives, videos and arguments. The state could dominate television without dominating the phone.

The same principle applies to religion. A young practising Muslim can admire a Jamaat leader's political position without becoming Jamaati. He can attend a Tabligh gathering without accepting its entire worldview. He can listen to Mizanur Rahman Azhari and later attend a seminar by someone from a very different theological tendency.

Unfortunately, Bangladesh remains addicted to boxes.

Secular critics often encounter conservative religious expression and reach immediately for familiar labels: Jamaat, Shibir, Salafi, extremist, and even Razakar (!). Some Islamists perform the mirror image. Participate in elections and one can be denounced as compromised by democracy; attend the wrong lecture and one's creed becomes suspect. Both approaches substitute classification for understanding.

This tendency extends beyond religion. Bangladeshi public life is structured around compulsory rivalries. BNP or Jamaat-NCP. Argentina or Brazil. Messi or Ronaldo. Intellectual independence is treated almost as indecision.

Islamist politics has reproduced this pathology with particular intensity. Under Hasina, repression created a degree of common cause among groups that otherwise disagreed profoundly. With that pressure diminished, old divisions have returned. Instead of using greater political space to build institutions, improve education or address social problems, factions often devote extraordinary energy to proving that competing factions are misguided.

The irony is that Bangladesh offers no shortage of work.

Millions remain entangled in exploitative debt. Poor families face crushing costs for marriage, education and health. Schools frequently fail to provide quality education. Drug addiction, pornography and juvenile gangs trouble communities. Unemployment leaves young people without direction. Many poor Muslims possess only rudimentary religious literacy.

Yet factional politics has a seductive simplicity. Solving unemployment is difficult. Building good schools is expensive. Helping indebted families requires institutions. Improving religious education demands patience. Denouncing another preacher requires only a Facebook post.

Bilal Philips once observed that if people understood how much work remained, they would worry less about weekends and vacations. Bangladesh's Islamists might adapt the point. If they understood the scale of the country's social problems, they would have less time for sectarian feuds, competing fatwas and organizational turf wars.

The emerging self-taught Muslim generation offers an opportunity precisely because it is harder to own. Its eclecticism can produce confusion, superficial knowledge and misplaced certainty. Unlimited information is not the same as wisdom. Algorithms can broaden horizons, but they can also reward outrage and extremism.

Still, the answer is not to force these Muslims back into old categories. It is to understand them.

They are products of an era in which authority must increasingly be earned rather than inherited. They will listen across ideological boundaries, compare arguments and discard institutions that demand unquestioning loyalty. Religious organizations can complain about that reality or adapt to it.

Bangladesh's secular establishment faces the same choice. Treat every visibly religious young person as a potential cadre or extremist, and it will continue misreading a substantial part of the country. Islamists who assume every practising Muslim belongs to a faction will make the same mistake.

The beard no longer tells you which party a young man supports. The hijab does not reveal which movement a young woman follows. Sometimes religious practice is exactly what it appears to be…an individual trying to make sense of faith in a world where the entire library is already in their hand.

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Sagor Hasnath is a former government employee turned-entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Ahlan Agro