Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani

Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani (1880–1976) was a Bangladeshi peasant leader and politician, founder of the Awami Muslim League in 1949 and of the National Awami Party in 1957, and for decades the most prominent voice of Bengal's rural poor. Followers and press alike called him the Red Maulana, joining his religious standing to his leftist politics. ^{1 2}

Bhashani was born at Dhangara village in Sirajganj District; the followed date is 12 December 1880, though his birth year is disputed between 1880 and 1885, with his biographer Syed Abul Maksud's best estimate at 1885. In 1904 the pir Sayyid Nasir al-Din al-Baghdadi took him as a disciple and taught him Qur'an, Hadith and Fiqh, then sent him to Deoband, where he studied from 1907 to 1909 under Hussain Ahmad Madani among others. In his Assam years he himself gained standing as a pir with disciples. ¹

What the sources attest about his religion is set out in his data record: the discipleship account stands in one article's text, and the scholarly Banglapedia entry on him contains no discipleship or school attestation, so no school is recorded for him. ²

Returning to Bengal, Bhashani threw himself into the Khilafat and Non-cooperation movements and was repeatedly jailed. In Assam he organised Muslim peasants against the Line System that fenced them out of land, settling followers at Bhasan Char, from which his name Bhashani derives. He led Assam's Muslims in the Sylhet referendum campaign of 1947 and, after Partition, briefly sat in the East Bengal assembly. ^{1 3}

In 1949 he founded the Awami Muslim League, the party from which Bangladesh's ruling tradition descends, and was its first president. Breaking away in 1957 after the Kagmari conference, he founded the National Awami Party, the main leftist opposition of the Pakistan years. He backed the war of liberation in 1971 from exile in India, and after independence remained an opposition elder, founding the Hukumat-e-Rabbania Society in 1974 and the Khodai Khidmatgar organisation in 1976. ^{1 2}

Bhashani died at Dhaka on 17 November 1976 and was buried at Santosh, Tangail, beside the Islamic University he had founded there; his shrine at Santosh remains a place of gathering for his followers. ^{1 2}