Thursday | 16 January 2025 | Reg No- 06
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Thursday | 16 January 2025 | Epaper

Atheists there ... and atheists here

Published : Monday, 20 June, 2022 at 12:00 AM  Count : 1226
Shahriar Feroze
My dear old friend Leonardo Pereira (Not real name) passed away last Thursday. He was a retired university teacher of history at a Spanish university. However, surrounded by thousands of books, audio & video CDs, paintings to posters, the 80 year old chronic loner breathed his last in a crammed, but a spacious apartment in Barcelona.

I came to know Leonardo purely by a stroke of luck. We met for the first time at Domodedovo International Airport near Moscow in the December of 2014. I was scheduled to return back to Dhaka via a connecting flight from Doha and he to Barcelona through a separate connecting flight from the same airport.

However, we both were inside the airport's book shop, looking for whatever latest releases were displayed under separate genres. While a few passengers merely browsed through the shelves passing lazy time, we were the only ones to have come out of the shop buying books.

He bought 7 and I bought 4 books on several subjects. Coincidentally, 2 of the books turned out to be common in our choice of selection.

I still remember, first one was a political autobiography, and the second was on the history of the silk route. He was the first to have stared at me with a queer mixture of awe and curiosity as we queued to pay our bills. The rest is history.

Throughout rest of the journey, spanning from boarding the flight until our separation at Doha, we allowed none to interrupt our seemingly endless conversation, arguments and counter-arguments. At one point of time the attractive cabin crew in the flight thought we were fighting, but that was not the case.

Perhaps, a friendship is often struck under simple circumstances but in the most odd of places.

Since he is no more, I badly miss those heated but fascinating hours. Following our shared flight, we met three more times, twice in Germany and once in Greece.  Despite our repeated mutual promises, I never went to Barcelona and he never came to Dhaka.

The last time we talked, was over the Whatsapp in late March of this year. But the intellectual hermit, as I often branded him was not in good health.

Meeting and then befriending Leonardo was one of the absorbing chapters in my life. Senior by some 35 years, the retired professor could speak on almost any subject and make me look like a fool, but except one - atheism.

For Leonardo, he was a confirmed, convinced and also a knowledgeable atheist who would keep explaining his non-belief for hours on end, the exact opposite to this writer.

Today I realise that our camaraderie was actually based on we agreed to disagree, at least on the topic of theism and atheism and what come may.  

However, what made him so exceptional to me is that he would emphatically quote and support his atheist viewpoint by linking all Abrahamic Scriptures ranging from the Torah , Hebrew bible, old and new testaments to the Quran.

Until the age of 60 he was a practicing roman catholic, if not devout. It took him a mammoth 13 years of painstaking research, extensive reading and soul -searching to convince him that there was no god, religion, divine power and whatever is associated to divinity.

The amount of academic efforts, time and energy he had spent on his path to become an atheist seemed quite remarkable.

Apart from Leonardo I also have a binge of atheist friends living in North America and Europe occupied in different professions, if not like Leonardo but no less armed with theological knowledge and information.

What all of them has in common is that they are tolerant, chose to become non-believers as according to their personal choice. And what I admire even more is that they share a similar view point on all major religions and cautiously refrains from attacking religious sentiments.

Now when I frequently come across the whimsical and puzzling character of our local so-called atheists in today's Dhaka, I don't feel like attacking but running away from them.

Just the other day I came across a veteran communist leader of the now defunct Marxist-Leninist fraction. He still believes in the 'resurrection' of Karl Marx, only he knows in what form and when.

He was explaining atheism in the light of complex dialectical equations. He then diverted his explanation to a more complex lecture by incorporating physics, chemistry, mathematics and calculus - Even Karl Marx never appeared so murky and mysterious to this writer. And the very next point seemed obvious, he launched an all-out verbal attack against our Ulema, Madrasas, local clerics and religious scholars.

On a different occasion I came across a renowned painter.

Purely out of curiosity I asked him what he thought of atheism, soon after Leonardo passed away. His answer was simple and blunt, he then cherry-picked a couple of verses from the Holy Quran to define the nature of atheism while Islam was the biggest enemy to free-thinking and mankind.

I also wanted to know his personal opinion and differences between monotheism and polytheism. He simply had no clue what to say.

When I asked him why only the Quran, why not also blame rest of the Abrahamic scriptures. His answer was equally simple and blunt; I have to 'grow up' to comprehend the 'True meaning of atheism'.

None beats the simple but somewhat honest description of atheism explained by a neo-atheist in today's Dhaka. I came across this glamorous fashion model at a diplomatic reception party a little over a week ago.

Donning a swanky black party gown and stilettos, she was busy explaining a group of junior foreign diplomats why she was an atheist - it is because she cannot see god and talk to him.

Now let me elaborate on atheists belonging to my profession. They are probably more intellectual than the supposedly leftist atheists, and also the most dangerous breed of disbelievers. A number of writers also fall under this category.

However, the ones I came across defined and defended atheism as a beacon of light to promote secularism, progressive thinking, open-mindedness and sexual liberty - read hypocritical atheism at its best.

That's not all - there is even a more self-seeking group of atheists in Dhaka today. They pretend to be atheists, but they are neither theists nor atheists. They are constantly busy to hook up with a foreigner guy or a woman working for an embassy or NGO in Dhaka, so to book a safe passage to USA or Europe. Numbers of these pretentious atheists are growing by the hour. Moreover, upon reaching their dream destinations, many of them indulge in posting anti-Hasina and anti-Islamic video posts in the YouTube. They are also the ostensible vanguards of our democracy and secular fabric.

Often it feels, unlike in the West, atheists here choose the path to non-belief with a hidden agenda. And quite often this hidden agenda is founded on strong anti-Islamic sentiments. Most of them are devoid of even the minimal knowledge on any religion including Islam. They call themselves 'secular' and 'progressive' minded people, but at the same time never shies away from attacking religious, and especially Islamic religious sentiments.

Whereas my foreign atheist friends hardly relied on Marxist and communist doctrines to become a non-believer, and depended more on free and independent thinking - our ones glorify Marx to have inspired them to choose and also to capitalise on atheism.

In the end, having made all the comparisons between the atheists there and here, at least the god knew better where to send the iconic late communist leader Castro. He sent him to Cuba.

Had he been born here among the local garbage of trash atheists, I am sure his name would have been Infidel Castro.
The writer is assistant editor,
The Daily Observer







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