Was It Religion, or Was Her Husband Mentally Ill? The Rumana Monzur Case

What happened to Rumana Monzur?

On June 5, 2011, Rumana Monzur — a Dhaka University assistant professor, Fulbright scholar, and graduate student in political science at the University of British Columbia — was brutally attacked by her husband, Hasan Sayeed Sumon, during a visit to her native Bangladesh. She was blinded. She returned to Vancouver in July 2011 for treatment, but surgeries on both eyes were unsuccessful. He was arrested on charges of attempted murder.

Her husband's public justification: he accused her of infidelity while she was studying in Canada. Students and faculty at UBC who had lived alongside her strongly rejected the accusation. In December 2011, he was found dead in his prison cell, his death reported as a suicide.

Was it religion, or was he mentally ill?

In the weeks after the attack, two explanations competed in Bangladeshi and international commentary. Some framed it as a crime of religious and patriarchal culture — the honor-driven rage of a husband in a society where a family's honor is widely seen as residing in a woman's chastity. Others reached for a simpler individual explanation: the man must be mentally ill; no sane person does this.

A Bengali blogger, answering those who insisted "surely the woman must have done something," cut through both framings with uncomfortable directness: if your first reaction is to ask what she did to provoke it, he wrote, perhaps the sickness is in the question. The attack was neither a theological event nor a medical mystery. It was a brutal act of domestic violence, enabled by a culture of silence around such violence — and by the reflexive victim-blaming that followed.

Why did this case break through?

Rumana's story caught worldwide media attention for reasons that are worth examining honestly. Her education — Dhaka University, Fulbright, UBC — made her legible to international audiences in a way most victims of domestic violence are not. Hundreds rallied in Vancouver. An online petition demanded speedy justice. She later earned a law degree from UBC in 2017 and became a lawyer and human rights advocate in Canada; Denise Chong's 2024 biography, Out of Darkness, tells her full story.

The uncomfortable truth is that Rumana's case became famous because she was exceptional. According to Ain O Salish Kendra, an average of more than 200 women a year are murdered by their husbands in Bangladesh — the vast majority without rallies, petitions, or biographies. The question in the headline turns out to be the wrong one. The right one: why do we need a Fulbright scholar's blinding to pay attention to what happens every week, in ordinary homes, to women whose names we will never know?