Lady Justice Statute Removed From Bangladeshs Supreme Court

[progressoid]

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Under pressure from Islamic hard-liners, the Bangladeshi authorities in the predawn hours on Friday swiftly and quietly removed a sculpture of a woman personifying justice from outside the country’s Supreme Court building.

The statue had been the target of angry, swelling protests by Hefazat-e-Islam, a vast Islamic organization based in Chittagong, which argued that art depicting living beings was proscribed by Islam.

The decision is a substantial victory for Hefazat, and within hours of the statue’s removal its leaders issued a broader call for statues all over the country to be destroyed or removed from public view. The joint secretary of Hefazat’s Dhaka city unit, Mujibur Rahman Hamidi, said new statues should not be built or displayed, except within the confines of Hindu temples. “No sculpture can be on the roadside or outside the temple,” he said, in a telephone interview. “If anyone wants to build any statue outside a temple in the future, the Muslims of Bangladesh will prevent it.”

...snip...

As workmen dismantled the statue on Friday, scores of left-wing, secular activists gathered outside the court’s gates, protesting its removal. As dawn approached, the protesters tried to break through the Supreme Court’s gates to prevent the statue’s removal. Police officers were deployed to repel the crowd with tear gas and water cannons, and the sculpture was placed on a truck and driven away.

The left-leaning Workers’ Party, a coalition partner with the governing Awami League, issued a statement calling the decision “a shameless surrender to fundamentalists.”


...https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/world/asia/bangladesh-statue-justice-supreme-court-islam.html

[Lordquinton]

1. They'll come for the ones inside the temples next

Forcing the removal of Justice carries a heavy symbolic meaning.