Things we don't write: K Anis Ahmed on the murdered writers of Bangladesh

For Bangladeshi authors and bloggers, religious fanaticism is putting their security and freedom of speech at stake, in a level of repression only comparable to dictatorial regimes of the past. K Anis Ahmed explains what it means to be a writer in Bangladesh’s harrowing “new normal”

By K Anis Ahmed for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

Things we don’t write about: The Prophet. The Quran. The mosque. The hijab. Indeed, anything to do with Islam that might offend anyone willing to kill. The problem is that we can never be certain what will offend them. The killing types are no longer visible, wizened old men who regularly announce where the red line lays. The mantle has passed onto teenagers wielding machetes, belonging to secret cliques, guided by international ideologies with vicious local consequences.

In a bewildering new trend, it is young rationalist bloggers in Bangladesh who have emerged as the primary target of Islamic extremists. How peculiar indeed, that killers espousing a retrograde vision of the world should be so obsessed with the most twenty-first century of media: the blog. Four bloggers have been hacked to death since the beginning of this year, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim.

Four bloggers have been hacked to death this year, and dozens more live in fear of becoming the next victim

The space for freedom is rapidly reaching a level of constriction not seen since the days of the harshest military rule

As the bodies pile up, and society reacts with no sympathy, we are reminded that freedom is not something we inherit

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