Bangladesh: mosquée des "hijras" et le droit de prier

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Les "hijras", une communauté transgenre interdite de participer aux prières dans les mosquées du Bangladesh, ont finalement construit leur propre lieu de culte, le premier dédié au troisième genre dans ce pays à majorité musulmane. - L'info en continu  https://buzzplus.fr/ Infos, news & actualités - L'information internationale en direct.

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00:00 The Iyya, a transgender community forbidden to participate in prayer in the mosques of Bangladesh,

00:05 have finally built their own place of worship, the first dedicated to the third generation in this country with a Muslim majority.

00:10 This modest building, in a full-fledged tower, offers hope to the Iyya, a minority present throughout South Asia,

00:17 whose number is estimated at about 1.5 million in this country of more than 170 million inhabitants.

00:22 "Now, no one can forbid the third-generation Iyya to come and pray in our mosque," says the head of a Iyya congregation in the Bond and Joyita building in Tonu.

00:32 "No one can make fun of us," says the 28-year-old, visibly emaciated under her white scarf.

00:39 The Akshin Char Kalibari mosque was built near Mimansingh, 100 km north of the capital Dhaka, on the banks of the Brahmaputra River,

00:47 on a land given to the Iyya by the government after their expulsion from a local mosque.

00:51 "I no longer hoped to be able to pray in a mosque during my life," says Sonia, 42, on the brink of tears.

00:58 Forbidden to inhumate

01:00 As a child, Sonia loved reciting the Qur'an, the sacred writing of Islam that she studied at the seminary.

01:06 But by becoming an Iyya as a teenager, access to the mosque was forbidden to her.

01:11 "People told us, 'What are you doing, the Iyya, in the mosques? Pray at home.

01:18 Don't come to mosques anymore,' "she says, "it was so humiliating for us that we didn't go there anymore.

01:24 We have ours now. No one can oppose it," she adds.

01:29 Dozens of Iyya have contributed in time and financially to the construction of the mosque inaugurated in early March.

01:35 A cemetery has also been adopted, after the ban on the inhumation of a young Iyya in a cemetery around last year, explains Tonu.

01:43 It is the first mosque in the country dedicated to the Iyya, the third generation, congratulates the mufti Abdur Rahman Azad,

01:50 whose charitable association Dawatul Koran manages many Qur'anic seminars for Iyya.

01:54 According to him, Iyya from a northern border district had attempted to build a mosque in February, but local Muslims stopped them.

02:02 The LGBTQ community remains the subject of massive discrimination in the country,

02:07 on the part of Bangladesh society and in the eyes of the law that penalizes homosexuality, which has been subject to life imprisonment since the colonial era.

02:15 But the Iyya benefit from growing legal recognition in Bangladesh.

02:20 Since 2013, they have the right to vote as such, officially registered under the status of the third gender.

02:27 Some have entered politics at the national level, and in 2021 one of them was elected mayor of a rural city, for the first time in the country.

02:35 A bill also proposes to allow Iyya to inherit, and the government has given housing to hundreds of them,

02:41 as part of a campaign to repair the injustices suffered.

02:44 But radical Islamists stigmatize, in national school manuals, this beginning of recognition.

02:51 Thousands of people protested against these works in January, calling on the authorities to demand their revision.

02:57 All human beings.

02:59 The imam of a mosque, Abdou Motaleb, 65, condemns those who defame the Iyya.

03:05 They are like all beings created by Allah, white-bearded religious eagle.

03:10 We are all human beings.

03:12 Some are men, others are women, but all are human beings.

03:17 Allah revealed the Holy Qur'an to all, so everyone has the right to pray, no one can be banned.

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