Dhaka,<\/p>\n
Bangladesh opened its first Islamic school for transgender Muslims on Friday with clerics calling it a first step towards integrating the discriminated minority into society.<\/p>\n
The madrasa is one of a series of recent moves in Bangladesh to make life easier for the Muslim-majority nation\u2019s up to 1.5 million transgender people. The LGBT community faces widespread discrimination in the South Asian country, with a colonial-era law still in place that punishes gay sex by prison terms, though enforcement is rare.<\/p>\n
But about 50 transgender students read verses from the Quran to mark the opening of the Dawatul Islam Tritio Linger Madrasa, or Islamic Third Gender School, on the outskirts of the capital Friday. \u201cI am ecstatic,\u201d Shakila Akhter, a 33-year-old student, told news agency. \u201cWe are grateful to the clerics for this beautiful move.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akhter was born a girl and had always wanted to become a doctor or lawyer, but those ambitions were thwarted when she left home while still a child to join a transgender commune.<\/p>\n
A group of clerics led by Abdur Rahman Azad transformed the top floor of a three-storey building into the school with funding from a local charity. Azad\u2019s team already offers Quran lessons to seven transgender groups in Dhaka and said the madrasa grew out of the need for a permanent base for the community.<\/p>\n
Up to 150 students nearly all adults will get lessons similar to those in a traditional madrasa, where the Quran is taught along with Islamic philosophy, Bengali, English, maths and social sciences. Azad said transgender people, known as Hijras in Bangladesh, have suffered too much. \u201cFor too long they have been living a miserable life. We want to end this discrimination. Allah does not discriminate between people. Islam treats everyone as a human being. Hijras should enjoy all rights like any other human being.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steps forward have been made for the community. Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina\u2019s government has since 2013 allowed trans to be identified as a separate gender. Last year they were allowed to register to vote as a third gender, and their numbers will be counted in a census to be carried out next year across the country of 168 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dhaka, Bangladesh opened its first Islamic school for transgender Muslims on Friday with clerics calling it a first step towards integrating the discriminated minority into society. The madrasa is one of a series of recent moves in Bangladesh to make life easier for the Muslim-majority nation\u2019s up to 1.5 million transgender people. The LGBT community […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":14004,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bangladesh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17649"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17649\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17650,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17649\/revisions\/17650"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vosa.tv\/eng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}