Ria Gope and the plane that flies over Pakistan

Growing up in Bangladesh in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was difficult to avoid the influence of Professor Muhammad Zafar Iqbal. For many of us, he was the person who explained what kind of country Bangladesh should become and what kind of people we ought to be.

No other individual shaped my generation's imagination quite the way he did.

His influence on my own life was almost embarrassingly complete. I was terrible at mathematics, yet I attended Mathematics Olympiads because he encouraged children to see mathematics as an adventure rather than a punishment. 

I memorized 150 digits of pi, not because I understood why anyone should, but because it felt like participating in the world he had built. The children in his novels carried magnifying glasses, tiny bottles of homeopathic medicine and improvised scientific gadgets in their school bags. I copied them. 

When he spoke about science, I wanted to become an engineer. When he wrote about the Liberation War, I came to believe that preserving its memory was among the highest forms of public service.

For a boy searching for certainty, Professor Zafar Iqbal offered a moral universe that seemed internally consistent. Science demanded evidence. The Liberation War demanded remembrance. These ideas fused together into a single worldview.

I accepted it almost without question.

His personal story reinforced that conviction. His father, Fayzur Rahman Ahmed, was murdered during Bangladesh's Liberation War. The account of how the family searched for his body, how he was eventually identified, and how the burden of that loss shaped the family's life became one of the defining stories of my adolescence. 

I had relatives who had fought in the war. I grew up hearing stories about the Language Movement and 1971. Yet none of those stories affected me as deeply as his.

He often spoke about Pakistan with bitterness. He said he refused to board flights that crossed Pakistani airspace. He avoided Pakistani products. His novels carried the same emotional force. As a teenager, I absorbed those ideas without reservation. 

Once, while still in seventh grade, I argued with a vendor at the Dhaka International Trade Fair for selling Pakistani clothing. Looking back, it seems absurd that a child would pick a fight over textiles. At the time, it felt like an act of moral responsibility.

That was the power he exercised over readers like me.

For more than a decade, I followed the path he had illuminated. The Liberation War became the center of my intellectual life. I spent years collecting documents, interviewing freedom fighters, recording testimony from survivors and verifying historical claims. 

Much of my youth disappeared into archives and forgotten newspapers. I devoted time to this work that, in retrospect, perhaps should have belonged to my family. As the only son in a middle-class household, there were responsibilities I neglected because history seemed more urgent.

The work gradually took me beyond books.

I traveled through villages, sat with families of martyrs, listened to stories that had never appeared in official histories and discovered that memory was often more complicated than the narratives I had inherited. Local experiences sometimes contradicted celebrated academic accounts. 

Families who had paid the highest price for the country's independence did not always recognize themselves in the polished versions of history produced in cities.

At the same time, another realization unsettled me. I encountered respected researchers whose work relied on plagiarism, selective evidence or methods that fell far short of the ethical standards they publicly championed. The gap between public reputation and private practice was wider than I had imagined.

Those discoveries did not make me abandon the ideals Professor Zafar Iqbal had taught. If anything, they convinced me that those ideals—honesty, evidence and intellectual integrity—should be applied more rigorously, not less.

The first real crack appeared in an unexpected place: an old newspaper.

While researching the years immediately after Bangladesh's independence, I found reports describing how members of Professor Zafar Iqbal's family had allegedly been forced from their home by the Jatiya Rakkhi Bahini. 

The following day's edition reported that the writer Ahmad Sofa had threatened to set himself on fire in protest against the incident. According to the reports, his intervention helped the family regain possession of the house.

The discovery surprised me because I had never heard the episode discussed publicly.

I photographed the articles and sent them to Professor Zafar Iqbal. Along with the images, I wrote what now feels like an overly earnest letter from an admirer who still believed history could correct itself if only enough people cared. 

I suggested identifying the officials named in the reports and finding out what had become of them. If we believed in accountability for historical wrongs, I argued, then this too deserved attention.

His reply was brief.

This was not the right time, he said, “to embarrass the government.” The response lingered with me longer than I expected.

Until then, I had assumed that moral principles remained constant regardless of who happened to hold power. Accountability was either worthwhile or it was not. Historical truth either mattered or it did not. For the first time, I found myself wondering whether those principles had become conditional.

I dismissed the thought almost as quickly as it arose. Heroes, I told myself, deserved the benefit of the doubt. Besides, admiration accumulated over years does not disappear because of a single email.

It fades much more slowly than that. Admiration has a way of absorbing contradictions.

For years, I explained away moments that should have unsettled me. I assumed I lacked context. I told myself that public figures often knew things their admirers did not. When someone has helped shape your moral vocabulary, it is difficult to imagine that the inconsistency lies with them rather than with your own understanding.

Then came 2018.

At Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Professor Zafar Iqbal joined fellow faculty members in demanding the resignation of the vice-chancellor. The protest was peaceful. Yet teachers were assaulted by activists affiliated with the Bangladesh Chhatra League. 

Banners were snatched away. Faculty members were pushed, beaten and publicly humiliated. Among those injured were Professor Zafar Iqbal himself and Professor Yasmin Haque.

The images from that afternoon were painful to watch. Rain fell over the university's Shaheed Minar as teachers sat stranded after the attack. One photograph of Professor Zafar Iqbal, soaked and silent, spread across the country. For many of us who had grown up reading him, it felt deeply personal. 

We were not simply watching a professor being attacked. We were watching someone who had spent decades asking young people to believe in reason and civility become the target of organized intimidation.

The episode seemed impossible to misunderstand. Yet what followed proved even more bewildering.

Not long afterward, Professor Zafar Iqbal publicly reconciled with the same student activists after they described the assault as a "misunderstanding." This reconciliation felt different. The violence had been visible and the humiliation had unfolded before cameras. To reduce it to a misunderstanding seemed to require ignoring the evidence everyone had already seen.

I found myself asking a question I had never asked before: What kinds of actions were capable of provoking his moral outrage, and what kinds were not?

The question returned later that year during the quota reform movement.

The Awami government’s minister Matia Chowdhury described protesting students as "Razakars," invoking one of the most emotionally charged words in Bangladesh's political vocabulary.

For generations, the term has referred to those who collaborated with the Pakistani military during the Liberation War. Applied indiscriminately to a new generation of students, it carried both historical weight and political purpose.

Professor Zafar Iqbal did not publicly object.

Soon afterward, one protesting student appeared wearing a T-shirt bearing the words, "I am a Razakar"—an attempt to reclaim the insult through provocation and civil disobedience. This time, Professor Zafar Iqbal reacted immediately. He wrote that seeing the image filled him with a rage unlike anything he had previously experienced.

I read his words several times. The contrast troubled me more than the statement itself.

When power had weaponized the label against students, there had been silence. When students appropriated the same label to expose what they saw as the absurdity of that accusation, it became intolerable. The difference seemed less about the word than about who was speaking it.

That realization altered the way I began reading everything else. Patterns that had once escaped my attention became difficult to ignore.

Professor Zafar Iqbal frequently wrote about the student organization Islami Chhatra Shibir, often highlighting episodes that illustrated what he regarded as its hypocrisy or extremism. Some of those criticisms were entirely legitimate. But they appeared with remarkable consistency.

Other forms of violence appeared much less frequently. The gang rape at MC College in Sylhet, in which members of the Bangladesh Chhatra League were implicated, horrified the country. It was not simply another crime. It was an event that exposed the culture of impunity surrounding those connected to power. 

Yet I searched in vain for the same sustained moral urgency that characterized his writing on other subjects. He occasionally criticized the Chhatra League. But the criticism rarely carried the emotional force reserved for its ideological opponents. 

Over the decades since Bangladesh's independence, virtually every major student organization has been accused of violence at one time or another. No one familiar with the country's politics would deny that. 

But by the late 2010s, the scale and frequency of allegations involving the Chhatra League had become impossible to dismiss. Assaults on campuses, attacks on dissenters, allegations of torture and repeated reports of political intimidation had become part of the country's public conversation.

Yet the hierarchy of outrage often appeared inverted.

Increasingly, I found myself thinking back to the lessons that had first drawn me toward Professor Zafar Iqbal. Science begins with evidence. Justice cannot depend on the identity of the accused.

Those principles had once seemed inseparable from the man who taught them. Now they appeared to drift apart.

None of this still erased my admiration.

Disillusionment rarely arrives as a single revelation. More often, it accumulates quietly, each contradiction settling atop the last until the weight becomes impossible to ignore. Even then, affection persists. I still reread his books. 

I still remembered the teenager who had boarded overnight buses simply for the chance to hear him speak. If someone had asked me then whether he remained one of the most important figures in my intellectual life, I would have answered yes without hesitation.

The disappointment was real. So was the affection.

What I did not yet understand was that both were about to encounter a test neither could survive. In the summer of 2024, Bangladesh entered one of the darkest chapters of its recent history.

The questions that had lingered unresolved for years suddenly became impossible to avoid. The violence unfolded faster than language could keep pace with it.

It began as student protests but escalated into a nationwide confrontation. Videos circulated by the hour. Funeral processions replaced rallies. Hospitals filled with the injured. Parents searched for missing children. Each day brought another name, another photograph, another account that seemed impossible until the next one arrived.

Amid the confusion, I found myself waiting for one voice.

Professor Muhammad Zafar Iqbal had spent decades insisting that history imposed moral obligations on those who witnessed injustice. His writings had taught generations of readers that silence, too, was a political act. If anyone had prepared us to recognize the early signs of collective violence, it was he.

His response came quickly.

Writing about Dhaka University, he said he no longer wished to return because, whenever he looked at the students, he would think of "Razakars." He wrote that he did not want to spend the remainder of his life looking at Razakars.

I understood where the word came from.

His father had been murdered during the Liberation War. The trauma of that loss was neither abstract nor inherited. It shaped the emotional architecture of his life. No one has the right to prescribe how another person should carry grief across half a century.

But grief does not suspend the demands of the present.

By the time those words were published, students were already being shot in the streets.

That same day, Abu Sayeed was killed by police in Rangpur. Soon afterward, government officials sought to discredit him, reducing his death to allegations about his character rather than confronting the fact of his killing. It was a familiar strategy: if the victim could be diminished, perhaps the violence itself would become easier to ignore.

I searched for Professor Zafar Iqbal's response. I could not find one. As the days passed, the numbers grew. One death became ten. Ten became one hundred.

Then the reports became almost unbearable to read. Children were among the dead. People watching from balconies were struck by bullets. Rickshaw pullers, bystanders and workers with no obvious connection to politics appeared in casualty lists alongside students.

The statistics mattered. The individual stories mattered more.

Four-year-old Riya Gop had gone to the rooftop after lunch to play. Hearing unrest on the street below, her father hurried upstairs to bring her inside. As he picked her up, a bullet struck her in the head. She died in his arms before he could carry her downstairs.

Another child, Asad, was shot through the eye. Bleeding, he ran to his father before collapsing. His father did not immediately understand what had happened. Only when he saw blood running down the child's face did the reality become clear.

There were countless others. Sumaiya, a young mother, was killed on her own balcony. Rickshaw pullers who had never attended a political rally died on roads where they happened to be working.

Families buried children who had left home expecting to return by evening. The death toll continued to rise.

Whether history ultimately records those events as a massacre, crimes against humanity or by another legal definition will be determined by investigators, historians and courts. What cannot be disputed is that the country witnessed extraordinary bloodshed.

And what haunted me was not simply the scale of the violence. It was the silence.

For years, Professor Zafar Iqbal had taught us that history demanded moral clarity. Yet as the death toll mounted, I waited in vain to hear him say the simplest words imaginable: Stop the killing.

Those words never came. Instead, the country's political vocabulary remained trapped in arguments over who deserved to be called a Razakar. At some point, I realized that the distance between us was no longer political.

It was moral.

As a child, the story that transformed my understanding of injustice was the story of Fayzur Rahman Ahmed. I remember reading about the search for his body with tears in my eyes. I remember imagining the unbearable task of telling a family that a father would never return. 

That story taught me that every life extinguished by political violence leaves behind a wound that survives long after governments fall. Years later, another child's story demanded the same response from me.

If the death of Fayzur Rahman Ahmed could shape my conscience despite our having never met, then the death of Riya Gop had to matter with equal force. If I could grieve one innocent life because history asked me to, I could not ignore another because politics made it inconvenient.

Conscience cannot be selective without ceasing to be conscious.

Looking back now, I think my greatest mistake was believing that history itself guarantees moral consistency. It does not.

People who have suffered profound injustice can still fail to recognize injustice when it appears in a different form. Intellectual brilliance does not immunize anyone against political loyalty. Nor does personal tragedy ensure universal compassion.

I still believe Professor Muhammad Zafar Iqbal changed Bangladesh.

He inspired thousands of young people to embrace science over superstition. He encouraged children to ask questions. He made the Liberation War feel immediate to generations born decades after it ended. Those achievements deserve recognition and will endure regardless of what anyone writes about him today.

They also make my disappointment harder to reconcile.

The man who taught me to value evidence above ideology seemed, in the defining crisis of my lifetime, unable to free himself from ideology long enough to confront the evidence before him.

Perhaps he would reject that judgment entirely. Perhaps he would say I misunderstood him. Perhaps he would argue that history will eventually vindicate his position. I cannot know.

What I do know is this.

As a teenager, I would have traveled across the country for the chance to spend a few minutes in his company. If he had asked me to help preserve the memory of 1971, I would have gone without hesitation. Much of the person I became was shaped by books he wrote and principles he taught.

That is precisely why writing these words has been difficult. This is not the story of discovering that a hero was imperfect. All heroes are.

It is the story of realizing that the values one learns from a teacher may ultimately require disagreeing with the teacher himself. The Professor who formed my conscience taught me that history should be judged through the lives of ordinary people caught in extraordinary violence.

In the end, it was ordinary people—Abu Sayeed, Riya Gop, Asad, Sumaiya, and countless others—who compelled me to apply that lesson even when it led me away from the man who first taught it.

—

Arif Rahman is a writer and researcher