Ekushey and Islam

Meanwhile, we have also read a letter in a journal dealing with the same subject. The writer angrily asserted that it was an attempt to Islamise the Bengali culture. Culture is not a static phenomenon. To us, Bengali culture is an admixture of the rites, rituals, customs, festivities etc of our past with that of Islamic ones. Islam appeared in this part of the world about a thousand years ago and it accepted those traits of the culture of our past that did not contradict the fundamental beliefs of Islam with the spirit that "Learn... from all the world, and take whatsoever we can make into our own."

The way we pay our respect today to the martyrs of Ekushey by placing wreaths at the altar of the Shaheed Minar is not indigenous either, it is borrowed from Christianity, and has now become a part of our current hybrid culture, and nobody has any objection to it. Nobody to our knowledge ever objected to Tagore songs or Nazrul songs or Jibanananda's poems and Bengali folk songs which are particularly popular among the masses. Culture is not to be taken in a narrow sense.