Dhaka, March 14 The most unexpected outcome of Bangladesh's August 2024 'Gen-Z' revolution has been an Islamist resurgence, with a few in the country expecting that radical Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami would make history by emerging as the country’s main opposition after securing a third of the votes in the February 12 elections, a report detailed.
The student-led uprising had ousted former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, under whose government Jammat had been banned.
Emphasising that Jamaat staged its comeback by focusing on issues beyond its traditional Islamist platform, a report in The Economist said, “Under its current leader, Shafiqur Rahman, it plays down its religious roots and presents itself as the anti-establishment. Jamaat also has history to atone for. In Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971, it fought against independence from Pakistan. And, though it is more than 90 per cent Muslim, Bangladesh has a proud tradition of moderate Islam and secular politics.”
According to the report, Jamaat's calculated move was in campus politics, where its student wing won all the big student-union elections in 2025.
Rather than delivering religious discourses, the party's campus activists ran study sessions, organised welfare groups, fixed broken fans in the dorms, and, in one recent example, staged a ‘hijab rally’ at Dhaka University, which drew many women with no Islamist sympathies. "The Islamic headscarf has become a cool, countercultural expression of identity,” the report noted.
It further said, “Jamaat forged an electoral pact with the Gen-Z revolutionaries’ new, amateurish party, prompting an exodus of its star candidates. At the election, only six students won seats in parliament. But Jamaat achieved a political facelift, placing itself on the winning side of a popular uprising."
One challenge for Jamaat, it said, is split between moderates and hardliners, compounded by the unpredictability of its party chief, Rahman.
“Wandering off-script, Rahman can provoke Bangladeshi women to take to the streets, as when he explained that biological imperatives like breastfeeding made it hard for women to become political leaders (a surprise in a country that has had female Prime Ministers for decades)," the report noted.
Highlighting the vagueness of the party’s agenda, it further said, “Jamaat dreams of winning the next election. Asked what it would do then, Rahman answers in boilerplate centre-right dogma: help businesses; tailor education to labour-market needs; and put the screws on corrupt or partisan bureaucrats. Rahman insists that Sharia, to which Jamaat is in theory committed, is simply about 'justice, welfare and restraint of power'. Such vague principles are hard to argue with — which may be the point. What kind of Bangladesh Jamaat would really build, perhaps God only knows.”
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