Inclusive Spaces: The Transgender Mosque in Bangladesh

Dhaka, Apr 5 (EFE).- A Muslim charity has helped transgender people in Bangladesh build their first-ever mosque and set up an exclusive graveyard for them in a north divisional city in an attempt to improve the social status of the marginalized minority community in the Muslim-majority country.

The opening of the mosque in early March has allowed members of the community to pray without the fear of being driven away from the regular mosque by transphobic Muslims.

“We are not allowed to go to a regular mosque here. The devotees there said it would not be fair to offer prayer alongside Hijras,” community leader Joyita Tonu told EFE.

According to the latest population census, Bangladesh has 12,629 transgender people who are locally known as Hijra.

Tonu leads a group of some 220 transgender people who live in a government housing project on the bank of the Brahmaputra river in the divisional city of Mymensingh, 113 kilometers (70 miles) north of the capital, Dhaka.

“When we were driven away from the local mosque, we wondered if we could make one for ourselves. We appealed to the divisional commissioner, who accepted our plea and allotted a piece of land and some money for us,” Tonu said.

She said that the founder of an organization called Dawatul Quran, which runs an Islamic school for third-gender people in Mymensingh like many other towns across Bangladesh, then helped set up the mosque – a single-room tin-shed structure.

The remaining part of the 33 decimals (1,335 square meters) of land will be used as a graveyard for the local trans people, she said, adding that the mosque, known as Dakshin Char Kalibari Masjid for the Third Gender, was inaugurated three days before the start of Ramadan this year.

“This mosque is open to all. We don’t mind if other people join us in prayer,” Tonu said.

Akashi Hijra, a transwoman, whose real name is Jui Sheikh, said the opening of the mosque gave her “peace of mind.”

“I was driven away twice from our local mosque earlier. But I can now offer prayer here without any hesitation,” she said.

Dawatul Quran founder Abdur Rahman Azad told EFE that setting up the mosque for Hijra people was not an easy task, despite government cooperation.

“Last month we undertook a similar endeavor in the northern Panchagarh district but failed,” he said.

Azad established the country’s first-ever Islamic school for transgender people in Kamrangirchar, near Dhaka, in 2020.

He said that in the past four years, his organization has launched similar schools in about 50 districts of the country.

“We don’t need a separate space or too much money for establishing Quranic schools, as we can run them in places where Hijras live. But, for setting up mosques, we need land and other assistance, which is not available in every place,” he said.

Bangladesh officially recognized transgender people as the third gender in 2014. In 2020, it granted them the right to vote under a separate category.

But the group faces much discrimination, which often forces them into begging to make a living.

In 2021, Bangladesh declared a tax rebate for companies if 10 percent of their total workforce, or more than 100 workers, were from the marginalized group.

Despite the efforts of the government and the country’s liberal Muslims, discrimination against transgender people has not ended.

In January this year, Bangladesh’s hardline Islamist group Hefazat-e-Islami urged the government to refrain from enacting a proposed law protecting transgender persons’ rights, saying it went against Islam.

Hefazat slammed the theory of transgender as “cursed” and a “mental distortion.”

Earlier in the same month, a leading private university in the country sacked a teacher for opposing transgender rights while speaking at a seminar in Dhaka.

A video circulated on social media showed BRAC University teacher Asif Mahtab tearing two pages of a seventh-grade book that carried the story of a transgender woman while attending a program in Dhaka. EFE