“Mob means an opportunistic group that nurtures vengeful, directionless, revolutionary pretensions.”
— Mahfuz Alam, Special Adviser to the Chief Adviser
Let us begin with Mahfuz Alam’s own postscript — a sentence that reads like it’s been pulled from a thesaurus and passed off as philosophy. It is intended, one assumes, as a capstone to his moral framing of Bangladesh’s so-called “July revolution.” But this single line — vague, self-congratulatory, and strategically abstract — is far more revealing than its author might have intended. It does not define the mob; it betrays the mob of meaning.
In Alam’s universe, a mob is not defined by who they are or what they do — but by who they threaten. And so begins the rhetorical sleight-of-hand: a redefinition of history, morality, and memory, with the aim of shielding the Interim Government’s foundational moment from scrutiny. But in trying to separate July’s student uprising from mobocracy, Mahfuz performs a quiet substitution: he lifts the moral crimes of the present and lays them upon the past.
The Mob Is Always the Other
Who does Mahfuz include in his invented taxonomy of mobs? It’s instructive:
• The 1971 violence against Biharis.
• The early repression of anti-Mujib student voices.
• Fifty-three years of attacks on religious minorities — but with no attribution.
• The People’s Courts.
• The ‘96 People’s Stage.
• October 28
• Shahbagh.
This is not analysis. It is a political Rorschach test — what shows up as “mob” in Mahfuz’s inkblot are the struggles that confront the forces he is now aligned with. Especially chilling is his treatment of Shahbagh — the spontaneous secular uprising that demanded justice for war criminals. In Mahfuz’s telling, it becomes “mob justice,” no different from communal riots. A movement rooted in the memory of the 1971 genocide is flattened into a faceless frenzy, and those who chanted for accountability are smeared as enemies of law and order.
The target here is not violence. The target is secular justice. It is Shahbagh, not Jamaat, that must be vilified. The People’s Stage, not Hefazat. Those who chanted “ফাঁসি চাই,” not those who denied the genocide ever happened. The past is rewritten not by changing its facts, but by changing the terms through which we speak of them.
Mahfuz’s Performance of Philosophy
To be fair — and we must be fair — Mahfuz is not writing as a firebrand. He is performing reason. His tone is measured, his vocabulary full of abstractions: “social fascism,” “rule of law,” “cross-ideological dialogue,” “effective democracy.” But beneath the surface, these are not coherent arguments — they are rhetorical prosthetics, meant to give ideological gravity to what is, in fact, a deeply contradictory posture.
Let us take his central assertion: that July’s student uprising — led by Students Against Discrimination (SAD) [2] — is a morally distinct event, separate from all “mob” activity before or after it. But what did SAD represent? At its core, a meritocratic backlash against affirmative action for marginalized groups. It emerged from elite anxiety, not structural empathy. Consider SAD-aligned mob actions involving storming a police station when authorities refused to arrest a young man without formal charges — an act Mahfuz publicly endorsed. And yet later the same Mahfuz would caution the public against such vigilante behavior, now pleading for “rule of law.”
Which Mahfuz speaks truth? The one who condones extra-legal force when it aligns with his group, or the one who denounces it when it suits the image of the state? This is not dialectics. It is contradiction in its most cynical form — what Wittgenstein might call senseless disguised as profundity.
The Power of Omission
But perhaps Mahfuz’s silences are more telling than his words. Not once in this lengthy post does he mention:
• The return of Jamaat-e-Islami figures to public legitimacy post-July.
• The attacks on book fairs, shrines, and women since the IG came to power.
• The re-Islamization of the cultural-political space.
• The role of elite transnational forces — including Yunus himself — in engineering the transition.
What is left unsaid tells us everything about what is being protected. The enemy, in Mahfuz’s framing, is always behind us — in the shadow of Mujib — and never beside us, wearing new faces, muttering old prayers, and entering the halls of power.
Karbala, Reversed
In perhaps the most manipulative move of all, Mahfuz invokes Karbala — the ultimate symbol of sacrifice, betrayal, and pious resistance in Islamic memory. “We have not crossed our Karbala yet,” he writes. But who is Yazid in this tale? Who is Hussain? What is this revolution that aligns itself with martyrdom while holding power?
Karbala was not a struggle to enter power through back channels, nor to forge cross-ideological alliances with tyrants. It was a refusal. A refusal to bow to empire, to coercion, to compromise. Mahfuz’s Karbala is not the real Karbala. It is theatrical mourning for a revolution that never had its own ethics. [3]
The Mob of Meaning
In the end, what Mahfuz offers is not a defence of justice — but a pseudointellectual firewall for a political order that dare not speak its name. His post is dense with terms, but hollow in coherence. “Social fascism,” “Mujibism,” “mobocracy,” “rule of law,” “cross-ideology” — they whirl past like carnival mirrors, each one bending the truth a little more. But the real danger is not just the contradictions. It is the replacement of moral clarity with aesthetic confusion. He does not want us to see clearly — he wants us to marvel at the haze.
And so, we must respond not merely by opposing his definitions, but by naming his method: the rhetorical laundering of reactionary politics through the language of revolution. To reject this is not to cling to the past. It is to defend the very possibility of a future where language once again aligns with justice.
Notes:
[1] Written in response to a Facebook status of Mahfuz Alam (Thursday July 3, 2025, 8:10 PM), Dr. Yunus’s special adviser
[2] Their definition of “discrimination” is shaped by a neoliberal, meritocratic worldview. Erasure of structural inequity (ethnic, regional, gendered, class-based) is baked into their narrative. What appears as “progressive student protest” was seeded in reactionary anxieties. This regressive core infects how they later align with “rule of law” and “accountability.” Their critique of Hasina was not from the left, but often from the center-right or culturally conservative periphery.
[3] Mahfuz = Islamist Conduit | Yunus = Neoliberal Enabler; This division is philosophically and operationally useful. Mahfuz serves as a bridge between elite technocratic governance (Yunus) and street-level Islamist sympathy. His use of “Karbala,” “social fascism,” and targeted omission of Jamaat is not accidental — it signals careful alliance-crafting. My framing helps me watch Mahfuz not merely as a confused youth voice or a political poet, but a node in a triangulated ideological project: Islamism ↔ Neoliberalism ↔ Youth Nationalism, all converging in the IG’s legitimacy play.
I am Iconus Clustus—justice activist, truth-seeker, and writer. My work is rooted in the unfinished struggle for recognition of the 1971 Bangladesh Genocide. Guided by philosophy, I write to provoke thought, stir conscience, and insist on justice as a shared responsibility.