Author(s)

Mohammad Javed Kaisar Ibne Rahman

Department of Anthropology, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology (SUST), Sylhet, Bangladesh.

Social media can be seen as an emerging frontier where new forms of social relationships create collective consciousness or popularize new/old thoughts and ideas among Internet citizens, especially among the younger generation. Social media undoubtedly plays an important role in the emergence of nationalism in various countries, but has also contributed to religiously motivated communal violence around the world, especially in Bangladesh. These online platforms have also contributed to some powerful political movements, for example: the Arab Spring, Egyptian Revolution, Black Lives Matter (BLM), or the Shahbag movement in Bangladesh. These social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, are often used to share thoughts and perspectives, and often serve as tools to construct “truth.” In Bangladesh, Islam is the religion practiced by most citizens, while there is a strong dispute over the country’s nationalist base. One group of people wants to establish a religion-based nationalism, while the others want to hold on to their historical cultural practices beyond religious identity. Social media has become an important platform for this debate these days. This paper analyzes how social media contributes to religion-based nationalism in Bangladesh and how it tries to (re)shape nationalist ideas in the country. The paper observes a large number of social media sites to understand how social stigmatization of some discourses such as secular (dhormoniropekkho), atheist (nastik), shahbagi, etc. can construct a form of “truth” against them to establish counter-religious thinking in the country. The paper reflects the logic and sentiments of the people who want to establish religious tradition as a common nationalist platform in the country through in-depth interviews. The research used the methods of online observation and offline interviews to explore the connection between online and offline and its impact on thoughts about nationalism in everyday life.

Religious Nationalism, Social Media, Post-Shahbag Movement, Bangladesh

Rahman, M. (2022) Religious Nationalism in Digitalscape: An Analysis of the Post-Shahbag Movement in Bangladesh. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 10, 201-218. doi: 10.4236/jss.2022.105015.