In recent years, Begum Rokeya has become a target of deliberate distortion, accused of being “anti-Muslim,” dismissed by religious extremists, and dragged into manufactured culture wars. This vilification is not new; powerful groups have always feared women who think, speak, and refuse to accept the limits imposed on them. What we are witnessing today is not a debate about religion, it is an attack on women’s intellectual history and a calculated attempt to erase one of Bangladesh’s most radical feminist voices.
Begum Rokeya never opposed faith; she opposed the systems that weaponized it to confine women. She challenged ignorance, not religion. She confronted patriarchy, not any community. Her writings called for girls’ education, women’s mobility, and freedom of thought, ideas that still threaten those who rely on controlling women to maintain power.
Her legacy is revolutionary precisely because she insisted that women’s liberation is essential to a just society. Sultana’s Dream imagined a world where women lead with science, creativity, and compassion, a world still more progressive than what many women live today. She founded schools for Muslim girls when such work was considered dangerous. She used her voice when silence was expected. She built futures that she herself never got to inhabit.
The smear campaigns against Rokeya reveal more about the insecurity of her detractors than about her. Attacking her is a way to attack the very idea of women’s freedom. Erasing her is a way to rewrite history into something more obedient and less inconvenient.
But Rokeya’s work endures because it belongs to the people, especially to women who refuse to shrink their possibilities. Every time a girl goes to school, every time a woman writes her own story, every time someone questions the structures that limit them, Rokeya’s dream lives on.
Begum Rokeya does not need defending. What she needs is remembering, accurately, politically, unapologetically. Her courage was for all of us. And the fears she provokes today only prove how necessary her voice still is.
Bangladesh Feminist Archives 