Beef is an excellent thing. Properly cooked, it can make an otherwise unremarkable lunch or dinner worth remembering. Bangladeshi beef curry, with its slow-cooked onions, generous spices, potato cubes and rich gravy, does considerable justice to the animal.
Add rice or a decent paratha and there is little reason to complain about life.
I have nothing against a beef feast. Organise one, invite your friends, cook generously and enjoy yourself. Bangladesh has no general prohibition on eating beef, nor does it require citizens to obtain religious clearance before deciding what to have for dinner.
But there is a difference between eating beef and making a public spectacle of eating beef outside a Hindu temple. Apparently, that difference has proved too intellectually demanding for some students at Jagannath University.
The controversy began when students from the Department of Islamic History and Culture cooked beef khichuri near the university's Hindu temple on October 12. Hindu students objected to the location. They also alleged that bricks belonging to the temple had been used to construct a makeshift cooking stove.
The organisers said they had not known the bricks belonged to the temple. They reportedly moved their cooking arrangements and apologised. That should have been the end of it.
Instead, a disagreement over cooking arrangements became a demonstration of religious entitlement. The university administration subsequently prohibited animal slaughter on campus, citing sanitation and other concerns. Some students objected and decided to stage a beef feast in protest.
On Friday (October 16) students slaughtered a cow on campus, reportedly near the vice-chancellor's building. They had already paraded an animal through the university grounds in preparation for the event.
This happened as Bangladesh's Hindu community was beginning Durga Puja, its largest religious festival.
What exactly was being defended here? The right to eat beef? Nobody had taken it away. The right to cook? Nobody had abolished that either. The right to slaughter cattle wherever one pleases, regardless of university regulations or the sensitivities of fellow students?
That is not religious freedom for sure. It is adolescent idiotic defiance dressed up as principle.
Beef is food. For Muslims, its consumption is permissible, subject to religious dietary rules. But permissibility does not create an obligation to eat it in the most provocative location available.
One may reasonably question whether the university administration's prohibition was too broad. But if students believe a directive is unreasonable, there are rather more intelligent ways to challenge it than purchasing a cow and turning the campus into an improvised slaughterhouse before Durga Puja.
The original complaint also deserves attention. Hindu students were not, according to accounts of the dispute, demanding that beef disappear from the university menu. Their objection concerned cooking beef immediately beside their place of worship.
That is a perfectly understandable distinction.
The allegation about temple bricks, if established, makes the original episode worse. Even if their use was inadvertent, the appropriate response was to apologise and correct the mistake, not to turn the complaint into a referendum on Muslim rights.
Indeed, the organisers initially appeared to understand this. They reportedly apologised and moved their cooking arrangements. Then came the familiar escalation…a small dispute, a larger grievance, a public demonstration and finally a spectacle designed to establish who could do what in whose presence.
The timing was particularly thoughtless.
Durga Puja is a major occasion for Bangladesh's Hindus. Temples prepare elaborate arrangements and communities gather for worship. It should be a period when fellow Muslim citizens make a little extra effort to ensure that worshippers feel welcome and secure.
Instead, some students decided that the appropriate contribution to the festivities was a public cow slaughter.
It takes a remarkable failure of judgment to mistake this for a victory.
Consider a hypothetical situation in India.
Suppose a group of Hindu students decided to slaughter pigs and organise a pork feast immediately beside a mosque during Ramadan. Muslim worshippers complained. The organisers apologised, but their supporters then staged a larger public pork feast to protest restrictions on slaughter.
Would we regard this as an admirable assertion of religious liberty? Of course not.
We would recognise the deliberate provocation, question the organisers' motives and demand that the religious sensitivities of Muslim worshippers be respected. The same standard should apply in Bangladesh.
This comparison does not suggest that Hindus and Muslims face identical circumstances in the two countries. They do not. Muslims in India have faced serious discrimination, communal violence and even restrictions surrounding religious practices, including controversies over beef consumption and cattle slaughter.
Bangladesh's Hindu minority faces its own vulnerabilities, including periodic attacks on temples, homes and businesses, political intimidation and anxieties about security.
A majority community has a particular responsibility to ensure that its freedom does not become an instrument of humiliation for a minority. That responsibility does not require Muslims to stop eating beef. It requires them to recognise that context matters.
A beef curry served at home is dinner. A beef feast organised specifically to defy objections arising from a temple-side cooking incident is something else. And intention matters enormously when people insist they are defending a religious principle.
Bangladeshis frequently criticise majoritarian politics in India, often with good reason. We object when Muslims are harassed over food, when their religious practices are treated with suspicion, or when public displays of Hindu identity are used to remind minorities of their subordinate position.
Those objections carry moral weight only if we are prepared to recognise comparable behaviour in our own country.
Otherwise, we are not defending minority rights. We are merely defending our preferred minority.
The Jagannath University incident is especially disappointing because universities are supposed to produce citizens capable of navigating disagreements without converting every difference into a communal confrontation.
The right to eat beef is worth defending. So is the right of Hindu students to worship without unnecessary provocation. These rights are not mutually exclusive. They become difficult to reconcile only when people deliberately make them so.
There is no shortage of places in Dhaka to enjoy an excellent beef curry. There is also no shortage of genuine problems at public universities…inadequate facilities, poor accommodation, academic delays, limited research funding and uncertain employment prospects.
One might have hoped that students would devote their organisational talents to some of these concerns.
Instead, we have a cow, a procession, a slaughter and a feast that achieved little beyond aggravating an avoidable dispute.
Eat beef. Enjoy it. Invite your friends. Cook enough for seconds. But do not confuse the ability to offend your neighbours with the courage to defend your faith.
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Faisal Mahmud is the Managing Editor of Daily Waadaa