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Last month, as I walked from the stately offices of the International Crimes Tribunal at Dhaka’s Old High Court building to the Shilpakala Academy, I passed a raucous procession cheering a candidate for Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamist party. It was striking: The party, which opposed Bangladesh’s independence decades ago, hopes to make its strongest-ever showing in the country’s elections on Feb. 12.

The fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami has never won more than a small share of the vote. During the 1971 War of Independence, many of its leaders collaborated with Pakistani forces, unleashing terror; at the time, they evaded a reckoning. Jamaat-e-Islami reached its electoral high-water mark—12 percent of the vote—in 1991, but it was severely suppressed during the 15-year rule of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which ended abruptly in 2024.

Last month, as I walked from the stately offices of the International Crimes Tribunal at Dhaka’s Old High Court building to the Shilpakala Academy, I passed a raucous procession cheering a candidate for Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest Islamist party. It was striking: The party, which opposed Bangladesh’s independence decades ago, hopes to make its strongest-ever showing in the country’s elections on Feb. 12.

The fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami has never won more than a small share of the vote. During the 1971 War of Independence, many of its leaders collaborated with Pakistani forces, unleashing terror; at the time, they evaded a reckoning. Jamaat-e-Islami reached its electoral high-water mark—12 percent of the vote—in 1991, but it was severely suppressed during the 15-year rule of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which ended abruptly in 2024.

This time around, Jamaat-e-Islami may see its popularity surge. Bangladesh’s oldest political party, Hasina’s Awami League, is currently banned from political activity, and it’s hard to predict how its votes will get distributed. During the 2010s, Hasina’s government set up international crimes tribunals and prosecuted many Jamaat-e-Islami leaders; the trials were widely viewed as flawed, perhaps leading to some sympathy for the party. Several of the convicted Jamaat-e-Islami leaders were executed.

Now, the Islamist party doesn’t have a clear path to form a government—but if it becomes a formidable force in parliament, it will raise profound questions about the kind of country Bangladesh wants to be: Muslim or Bengali.

With Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan, it chose linguistic plurality and nationalism—including religious pluralism—over an exclusively Islamist identity with Urdu as the national language. Bangladesh’s laws explicitly affirm equal treatment of faiths and equal rights for women. In a striking historical anomaly for a conservative Muslim-majority country, Bangladesh has been governed by two women for 30 of its 54 years: Hasina and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP).

Yet, despite commitments that parties adopted in........

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