An extraordinary truth? The Ādam “suicide” notes from Bangladesh

Abstract

In 2007, nine members of the Ādam family committed suicide in a small town of Bangladesh. They had left suicide notes inside the house. The Ādams believed in an anti-Islamic faith, the Ādam “religion,” founded by the father, Abdul Ādam, who had died seven years ago. Only one of the members of the Ādam family is still alive, a daughter who was not part of the mass suicide. Most newspapers in the country reported the incident, but few journalists explored the story in depth. Based on a close reading of the suicide notes and a brief analysis of the major newspaper reports, the author argues that while the Ādam “religion” was rooted in the Be-shara (against orthodoxy) tradition within Islam, the Ādams were also suffering from a shared delusion. The Ādams probably practiced kufri kalam (underground satanic practice), and they were part of the sub-culture of protest existing in contemporary Bangladesh.

Keywords:

• suicide
• new religion
• Islam
• Ādam
• delusion
• kufri kalam
• Bangladesh

Acknowledgements

I need to express my gratitude to many for their contributions to this paper written as a research student at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) in India during the last few months of the Research Training Program (RTP). This paper won the Dr. Jayoti Gupta Memorial Prize for the best term paper of RTP2007-8. I am grateful to Professor Partha Chatterjee, my supervisor at the Centre for sharing his insightsful comments on the earlier drafts of the paper; Professor Gautam Bhadra (CSSSC) and Professor Amit Dey (Calcutta University) for useful resources from Islamic history; and my colleagues (RTP and PhD students at CSSSC) for their readiness to engage into conversations on the topic, albeit informal, but always extremely helpful. I also thank Dr Shahaduz Zaman and Professor Sjaak van der Geest, anthropologists at the James P Grant School of Public Health (JPGSPH) who shaped my early thinking on the subject. Finally, I am grateful to my companion Debalina for her continual support through the many days and nights I spent on what, for her, was not always a pleasant topic of discussion.