Idol Worship or Art? Debate on Idol Worship and Statue Vandalism in Bangladesh

Last updated on October 17th, 2026 at 09:35 pm

Few debates in Bangladesh flare up as quickly, or as predictably, as the one over statues. Every few years a sculpture becomes a battlefield: one side calls it art, memory and heritage, the other calls it an idol that has no place in a Muslim-majority country. Underneath the noise sits a simple question that rarely gets a calm answer. Is idol worship and statue vandalism really a matter of faith, or is something else going on when a crowd sets upon a sculpture?

I first wrote about this in December 2020, days after a half-built sculpture of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was smashed in Kushtia. Much has happened since. Governments have changed, statues of every kind have come down, and the argument has shifted shape without ever really being settled. This is a fresh attempt to separate what religion actually says from what politics finds convenient.

Statue or idol: what is the difference?

The dictionary draws the line where common sense would. Britannica’s dictionary defines an idol as “a picture or object that is worshipped as a god”. The word that matters there is worshipped. A statue is defined by what it depicts. An idol is defined by what people do in front of it.

That distinction is not a modern liberal invention. It sits at the heart of how monotheists have always framed the problem. When the Quran tells the story of Abraham questioning his people, their answer, in Dr Mustafa Khattab’s translation, is “We worship idols, to which we are fully devoted.” The objection that follows is not to stone or bronze as materials. It is to devotion directed at something that can neither hear nor help.

A bronze Lalon, a steel Lady Justice or a marble Socrates asks nobody to bow. The people who walk past them in a city square are not praying. Treating every sculpture as an idol erases a distinction that the scriptures themselves rely on.

Idol Worship and Statue Vandalism: How the statue debate unfolded in Bangladesh

The pattern did not start in 2020, and it did not end there either. Looking at the main episodes in order shows how often the same arguments return, and how often governments of every stripe have chosen to give way.

2008: the Baul sculptures and Balaka

In October 2008, under the military-backed caretaker government, the Roads and Highways Department and the Civil Aviation Authority removed five sculptures of Baul singers, including Lalon Shah, from the airport roundabout in Dhaka after pressure from Islamist groups. Lalon, of all people, the mystic who sang against caste and creed. Weeks later, on the night of 28 November 2008, a crowd reportedly led by an Islamist organisation vandalised the 41-foot Balaka sculpture at Motijheel, which had stood there since 1989.

2017: Lady Justice at the Supreme Court

The Lady Justice sculpture by Mrinal Haque, a sari-clad take on the Greek goddess Themis.

In December 2016 a sculpture of Lady Justice, modelled on the Greek goddess Themis but dressed in a sari, went up in front of the Supreme Court in Dhaka. Hefazat-e-Islam and other groups demanded its removal for months, partly because it was visible from the National Eidgah prayer ground. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose Awami League presented itself as the guardian of secular Bangladesh, told Islamist leaders she disliked it, saying “I don’t like it myself.”

Supreme Court authorities took the statue down in the early hours of 26 May 2017, with its sculptor, Mrinal Haque, overseeing the work. Haque told reporters it felt like clearing away a dead body. After protests by students and secular groups, it was reinstalled in front of the court’s Annex Building, a less visible spot, within days. The compromise satisfied no one, but the statue survived.

It did not survive 2024. After Sheikh Hasina’s fall on 5 August 2024, a group pulled the sculpture down with a rope, and its arms and the hand holding the scales were found damaged the next morning.

2020: the Bangabandhu sculpture row

In November 2020, during the centenary year of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s birth, the dispute moved to sculptures of the country’s founding leader. On 13 November, Hefazat joint secretary general Mamunul Haque publicly opposed a planned Bangabandhu sculpture, and on 27 November Hefazat chief Junaid Babunagari threatened to tear down any sculpture, whichever party put it up.

In the early hours of 5 December, vandals smashed an under-construction Bangabandhu sculpture in Kushtia town with iron rods. Police arrested two students and two teachers of a local Qawmi madrasa, and officials said the students admitted they had been inspired by recent anti-sculpture speeches by Hefazat leaders.

2024–2025: when politics took over completely

The upheaval that ended the Awami League government changed the motive but not the method. The Dhanmondi 32 house of Sheikh Mujib, which served as the Bangabandhu Memorial Museum, was first set ablaze on 5 August 2024 and then demolished in February 2025, as statues and murals linked to the Sheikh family were defaced across the country. That wave was plainly political, aimed at a party and a family rather than at idolatry. Yet apolitical cultural sculptures were attacked too, which shows how quickly the two impulses blur once a crowd has a hammer.

Taken together, the record is uncomfortable for everyone. Islamists pressed, a secular-branded government gave ground in 2017, and a revolutionary moment in 2024 swept away sculptures with no religious content at all. No side owns the moral high ground here.

What the Quran and Hadith actually target

Monotheism forbids worshipping anything besides God. That much is not in dispute. The Hebrew Bible states it directly: “You shall have no other gods before me.” The Quran names the idols of pre-Islamic Arabia, asking whether people have considered Lât, ‘Uzza and Manât, and goes on to call them mere names that people invented. In Surah Al-Muddaththir the instruction to the Prophet, again in Khattab’s rendering, is to “shun idols”. Translators differ on the Arabic word ar-rujz in that verse; Khattab reads it as idols, while some others read it more broadly as impurity.

The strongest textual basis for opposing images comes from the Hadith rather than the Quran. In one narration in Sahih al-Bukhari, Aisha reports that the Prophet tore down a curtain bearing pictures and warned that those who make such images face severe punishment. Classical scholars took this seriously, and many Muslims today follow strict views on depicting living beings. That is a sincere position and deserves respect as a personal practice.

But notice what the texts are concerned with. The Quranic passages target worship, devotion and rivals to God. The hadith addresses image-making as a religious and moral matter for believers. None of them instructs a mob to destroy another community’s property, a public court’s emblem or a museum’s collection. Moving from “I should not make or venerate images” to “I may smash any image I dislike” is a jump the scriptures do not make. People make it.

There is also an obvious inconsistency. If every human likeness were an idol, the faces on banknotes, election posters, billboards, passports and phone screens would all qualify. Almost nobody argues that. The objection gets reserved for certain statues, which suggests the real issue is what those statues stand for, not what they are made of.

Statues across the Muslim world

Bangladesh is not unusual in having a statue debate. It is unusual in how violent and recurring that debate has become. Elsewhere, Muslim-majority societies have long lived with sculpture, sometimes on a monumental scale.

The Garuda Wisnu Kencana monument in Bali, 121 metres tall including its pedestal.

Indonesia. The world’s largest Muslim-majority country is home to the Garuda Wisnu Kencana monument in Bali, a statue of the Hindu god Vishnu riding Garuda. The monument stands 121 metres including its 46-metre pedestal and was inaugurated by President Joko Widodo on 22 September 2018. A Muslim head of state opened it as a national landmark.

Al-Biruni’s statue in Laleh Park, Tehran.

Iran. An Islamic republic run by clerics keeps statues of its great thinkers in public parks. Tehran’s Laleh Park holds statues of Al-Biruni and Omar Khayyam, two giants of medieval Islamic science and letters. Nobody prays to them. People sit beside them and eat lunch.

Turfa, the mare King Abdulaziz gave to King George VI in 1937, cast in bronze in Diriyah.

Saudi Arabia. Even the kingdom that hosts Islam’s holiest sites commissions figurative sculpture. A life-size bronze of Turfa, the Arabian mare King Abdulaziz presented to Britain’s King George VI as a coronation gift in 1937, now stands in the Arabian Horse Museum in Diriyah’s Al-Turaif district. The peninsula’s sculptural history also runs deep: a 2021 study dated the camel reliefs at the Camel Site in Al-Jouf to between 7,000 and 8,000 years old, older than the pyramids of Giza.

Jordan. The Ain Ghazal statues, discovered near Amman in 1983 and roughly 9,000 years old, are among the earliest large-scale human figures ever made. They are national treasures, displayed in Jordanian museums and abroad.

Malaysia. At Batu Caves outside Kuala Lumpur, a 42.7-metre golden statue of Lord Murugan was unveiled in January 2006. It has become one of the country’s best-known landmarks.

None of these countries has stopped being Muslim. If heritage and sculpture can coexist with Islam in Jakarta, Tehran, Riyadh, Amman and Kuala Lumpur, the claim that they cannot coexist in Dhaka needs a better explanation than theology.

Louvre Abu Dhabi: a museum that answers the question

An African figurative sculpture in the galleries of Louvre Abu Dhabi.

The clearest rebuttal to the “every statue is an idol” view may be a museum. Louvre Abu Dhabi opened in November 2017 on Saadiyat Island, a decade after the UAE and France signed the agreement behind it. Its galleries are arranged by theme rather than by country, so that in its rooms on universal religions a visitor moves from a dancing Shiva to a praying Madonna to a standing Buddha.

Placing Hindu, Christian, Buddhist and Islamic objects side by side in a Gulf capital does not turn visitors into polytheists. It teaches them how other people have tried to make sense of the sacred. That is what museums are for, and it is the opposite of idolatry: looking, comparing and understanding instead of kneeling.

When statues fall elsewhere: race, war and protest

It would be dishonest to pretend statue vandalism is a Muslim problem. Statues are attacked everywhere, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with idols.

• In France, a steel sculpture honouring the Algerian resistance leader Emir Abdelkader was vandalised in Amboise in February 2022, hours before its inauguration, during an election campaign heavy with anti-immigrant and anti-Islam rhetoric.
• In New York, a statue of George Floyd in Union Square was splashed with paint on 3 October 2021, four days after it was unveiled. An earlier Floyd statue in Brooklyn had been defaced months before.
• In Amsterdam, the statue of Anne Frank on Merwedeplein was daubed with “Free Gaza” in red paint on 4 August 2024, the 80th anniversary of her arrest, and for the second time that summer.
• In Washington, DC, the Mahatma Gandhi statue outside the Indian Embassy was defaced with graffiti and spray paint on the night of 2–3 June 2020, during protests over Floyd’s killing.

Racism, antisemitism, colonial memory, war and street anger drive these attacks. The common thread is that a statue is a public claim about who and what deserves honour. When people reject that claim, the statue takes the blow. Bangladesh’s own experience fits the pattern more than the theological framing admits.

The cost of zeal: Bamiyan, Mosul and the Maldives

Where the “idol” argument has been pushed to its end point, the results have been catastrophic for human heritage.

In March 2001 the Taliban, on the orders of Mullah Mohammed Omar, dynamited the two monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved into a cliff some 1,400 years earlier. In February 2015 the so-called Islamic State released a video of its fighters smashing ancient Assyrian and Hatrene statues in the Mosul Museum with sledgehammers and drills, describing them as idols from a time before Islam.

Underwater sculpture in the Maldives.

The Maldives showed that a state, not just a militia, can go down this road. Jason deCaires Taylor’s Coralarium, a semi-submerged gallery designed to work as an artificial reef, was condemned by politicians including the outgoing president as un-Islamic. On 21 September 2018, police backed by a court order broke its human figures apart with pickaxes. Nine months of artistic and conservation work was undone in a matter of hours.

These cases share a logic. Once any human or animal form is declared an idol, there is no natural stopping point. Museums, archaeological sites, monuments and eventually the cultural memory of whole communities fall inside the line.

Why this matters for Bangladesh

Bangladesh won its independence in 1971 on a promise of a shared national identity that did not depend on one religion. Hindus, Buddhists, Christians and Indigenous communities are part of that story, and many of them use images and statues in worship. When the majority begins to treat every sculpture as an offence, minorities hear a message about their own place in the country, whether or not anyone intends to send it.

There is a practical risk as well. A society that cannot tell a memorial from an idol will struggle to protect its museums, its archaeological sites, its public art and its universities’ fine-arts faculties. Bangladesh has world-class heritage, from Paharpur to Mahasthangarh. Its protection depends on a public that understands why old stones and carved faces matter.

None of this requires anyone to abandon their religious convictions. A Muslim who will not keep images at home, or who finds a particular statue distasteful, is free to say so, argue for its relocation through lawful means, or simply look away. What a plural society cannot accept is the idea that personal conviction licenses the destruction of shared property.

Conclusion: the statue inside the stone

In The Art of Possibility, Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander retell an idea often attributed to Michelangelo: that a beautiful figure already lives inside every block of marble, and the sculptor’s task is only to remove what hides it. Whether or not Michelangelo said it in those words, the thought is a good one to end on.

The question is what we choose to see in the stone. Some see a rival to God and reach for a hammer. Others see a teacher, a memory, an argument about justice or a record of people who lived thousands of years ago. Faith, read carefully, does not demand the first response. Our history, our minorities and our children deserve the second.

Frequently asked questions

Is a statue the same as an idol in Islam?

No. An idol is something worshipped as a god or alongside God. The Quranic verses on idols address worship and devotion. Many Muslim scholars discourage making images of living beings, but that is a separate question from whether a statue is being worshipped, and many Muslim-majority countries display public statues.

Why was the Lady Justice statue removed from Bangladesh’s Supreme Court?

Islamist groups led by Hefazat-e-Islam called it un-Islamic and objected that it could be seen from the National Eidgah. After the prime minister said she disliked it, court authorities removed it on 26 May 2017 and reinstalled it near the Annex Building days later. It was pulled down and damaged after the government fell in August 2024.

Do Muslim-majority countries have statues?

Yes. Examples include the Garuda Wisnu Kencana monument in Indonesia, statues of Al-Biruni and Omar Khayyam in Tehran, the Turfa sculpture in Diriyah in Saudi Arabia, the Ain Ghazal figures in Jordan, the Murugan statue at Batu Caves in Malaysia, and the collections of Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Is statue vandalism always religiously motivated?

No. Around the world statues are attacked over race, colonial history, war and party politics. In Bangladesh, the 2008 and 2020 incidents were tied to Islamist campaigns, while the wave of destruction after August 2024 was largely political.