Dohar (Bangladesh) (AFP)
In Bangladesh, Sufi singer Rita Dewan has captivated crowds for years.
Today, threatened with death by Islamists, she lives in fear that each concert will be her last.
At 38, she is one of the rare women in the country to perform Sufi and popular songs, in the tradition of "baul" minstrels, registered since 2005 by Unesco as an intangible heritage of humanity.
She barely regains the happiness of singing after eight months in hiding, almost two of them in rural huts where she lacked food and dared not go out, even to go to the bathroom.
"YouTube is full of videos of mullahs calling for me to be beheaded," she told AFP in tears.
"I was too scared even to go to the bathroom, usually outside in the country. I was afraid they would find me and behead me on the way to the toilet."
Sufism, a mystical Muslim current illustrated by poets such as Omar Khayyam or Jalal al-Din Rûmi, gives a special place to music and has many followers in rural Bangladesh.
But radical Islamists see him as a heretic and extremists have killed more than 20 Sufis in the country in recent years.
In Bangladesh, which has 168 million predominantly Muslim inhabitants, Islamist influence is growing, with violent protests calling for blasphemy to be punished with death.
In late October and early November, massive marches organized by Islamist parties protested against France and its President Emmanuel Macron's support for freedom of expression after the October 16 assassination of a teacher, Samuel Paty, who had shown caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in civic education.
Islamists pilloried Rita Dewan in February after a dialogue sung in concert between the human being, whom she embodied, and God interpreted by another artist, was broadcast on YouTube.
At least four complaints accused her of defaming Islam and offending religious sentiments.
She faces life imprisonment under the 2018 Digital Security Act.
“Things were interpreted out of context, I was in fact playing a role,” said this practicing Muslim.
"I've already apologized," she said.
Without managing to stop the threats.
"In their sermons, mullahs called me a 'coward prostitute,' asking people to kill me if they could find me."
She appeared on November 15 and decided to meet the public at the beginning of November in a Sufi shrine not far from Dhaka, in front of a thousand people.
Her first concert since February lasted all night but, from the first song, she froze when she saw two men looking like Islamists, "the kind of people who don't like singing and want to ban it" .
"I thought it was mullahs, I was so scared I could hardly sing," she says.
They left after two chants, a form of usual intimidation according to experts.
- Censoring artists -
Saymon Zakaria, a specialist in Sufi music in Bangladesh, told AFP that he feared for this rich musical tradition with increasing pressure from Islamists: "the situation is very critical".
The complaints against Rita Dewan are aimed at "censoring the work of artists", believes human rights activist Rezaur Rahman Lenin, the digital law "has become a powerful instrument to silence" artists and thinkers.
This year, another Sufi singer, Shariat Sarker, 39, was accused of defaming Islam.
He served six months in prison - without trial - then had to go into hiding and, threatened with death, no longer gives concerts.
Rita Dewan, who left school at age nine to learn Sufi singing, says she missed around 60 concerts due to police concerns for her safety.
"Suddenly we became poor," she said, wondering about her future, many shrines being reluctant to welcome her.
"Whatever the power of these mullahs, Sufi music will continue to live in this country," she said.
"The mullahs decreed these + haram + (illicit) chants but it is not written anywhere in the Koran".
"I'm sure this musical tradition will live on forever," she insists, "people adore it. It is pure joy. And the Sufis will continue to live here."
"It was the Sufis who brought Islam here centuries ago, not the extremists. Bangladesh is the land of the Sufis."
© 2020 AFP