The Islami Chhatra Shibir, founded in 1977 as the student wing of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, has a stated objective that its own organisational documentation makes explicit: to struggle for changing the existing system of education based on Islamic values, to inspire students to acquire Islamic knowledge, and to prepare them to take part in the struggle for the establishment of an Islamic state. That objective is not merely rhetorical. It is the institutional charter of an organisation that researchers tracking extremism in South Asia have documented as having been implicated in violent and at times terrorist activity, and that Human Rights Watch identified in 2014 as having been involved in significant violence over many years.
The pipeline from Jamaat’s educational network to Shibir’s political activism runs through an institutional infrastructure that academic research has described as a network spanning madrassas, hospitals, universities and orphanage centres, alongside coaching centres that help students prepare for competitive examinations. The welfare logic is deliberate: by becoming the provider of services that the Bangladeshi state has not consistently delivered in rural and peri-urban areas, Jamaat builds political loyalty and accesses constituencies that government institutions do not consistently reach.
The madrassa component of that infrastructure has particular significance for radicalisation dynamics. Jamaat’s founding intellectual framework, derived from Maulana Maududi’s political Islamism, holds that Islamic law should govern the state and that political action is the vehicle for achieving that transformation. Jamaat explicitly departed from traditional madrassa scholasticism — Maududi felt that interpretation and enforcement of Islamic law should not be left to traditional religious scholars alone. Instead, the party cultivated a cadre of politically active students who moved from educational institutions into Shibir, and from Shibir into the party’s broader organisational structure.
The consequences of that educational and political pathway were visible during Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War. The predecessor of the Islami Chhatra Shibir, the Islami Chhatra Sangha, collaborated with the Pakistan Army and helped establish Al-Badr, the militia accused of killing hundreds of Bengali intellectuals in the final days before independence. Multiple senior Jamaat leaders were subsequently convicted by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal for war crimes committed during that period, including Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, Motiur Rahman Nizami and Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mujahid.
In the post-independence period, Shibir’s record of campus violence has accumulated across decades. On 12 July 2000, Shibir activists fired on a microbus carrying Bangladesh Chhatra League activists in Chittagong; the attack and its aftermath left eight people dead, including six Chhatra League members, a microbus driver and an auto-rickshaw driver, in what became known as the 2000 Chittagong massacre. From 2013 to 2014, following the war crimes verdicts against senior Jamaat leaders, Bangladeshi authorities arrested thousands of Jamaat members and Shibir students. Despite those arrests and its documented history of campus violence, Shibir has never been banned on a lasting basis.
Bangladeshi and international reporting indicates that Shibir made significant inroads at Dhaka University in the period following the July 2024 uprising that ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, operating there while obscuring its organisational identity in some contexts. Organisations affiliated with Jamaat have held conferences and events at the university that drew international attendees, some of whom were reportedly unaware of the organisers’ affiliation.
The coaching centre network extends Jamaat’s educational reach beyond formal madrassa education. Students who pass through those institutions and enter competitive examinations are drawn toward Shibir at the university level, and from there into the broader Jamaat apparatus. The pathway is not guaranteed, but it is institutionally structured. The welfare provision at the bottom and the political organisation at the top are connected by an educational middle layer that shapes how students understand the relationship between religion and political authority.
What the documented record shows is an infrastructure that functions in part because it delivers real services — credit, education, healthcare, welfare — to communities that need them. The political dimension of those services, expressed through ideological loyalty and the institutional pathway into an organisation with a documented history of campus violence, is not always visible to the families benefiting from a Jamaat-run coaching centre or madrassa scholarship.
