[BenarNews] Three men have been arrested on suspicion of forcibly cutting the long hair of a 16-year-old singer in northern Bangladesh, police said Wednesday, in the latest case of hardline Moslems harassing performers of a traditional Bengali folk genre.
A group of five Bangladeshis assaulted and shaved the head of the teenage Baul folk musician Mehedi Hassan on Saturday in the Shibganj sub-district in Bogura district, about 128 miles northwest of Dhaka, police said.
Singing Baul songs is not an offense, said Sirajul Islam, chief of the Shibganj sub-district police. But Islamic hardliners in Moslem-majority Bangladesh see these wandering Baul minstrels — influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism and Sufi Islam — as apostates and heretics. |