of certain Hindu religious festivals. In the early 19th century, a large number of more fundamentalist and Wahabi-influenced preachers would return to abolish these customs from Muslim religious life. Some of these preachers included Titmur, Haji Shariatullah, as well as several disciples of Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi such as Muhammad Ali and Wilayat Ali. They forbade customs such as offering of sweets to tombs of dead ancestors, worship of pirs, as well as the playing of music at weddings, viewing them all as corrupting influences of Hinduism. Many of these movements also unified and empowered Muslim peasantry with their preaching of equality of all Muslims, to the extent that many of these movements also led the peasants against the Zamindars and the British. The influence of conservative Sunni Islam 'revivalism' has been noted by some. On 5 May 2013 a demonstration organized by the Deobandi organization known as the Hefazat-e-Islam movement paralyzed the city of Dhaka when half a million people demanded the institution of a conservative religious program, to include a ban on mixing of men and women in public places, the removal of sculptures and demands for the retention of "absolute trust and faith in Almighty Allah" in the preamble of the constitution of Bangladesh. In 2017 author K. Anis Ahmed complained that attacks on and killings of liberal bloggers, academics and religious minorities, had been brought about by "a significant shift ... in the past few decades" up to 2017 in attitudes towards religion in Bangladesh. During my school years in the 1980s, religion was a matter of personal choice. No one batted an eyelid if you chose not to fast during Ramadan. Today, eat in public during the holiday and you may be chided by strangers. Thanks to shows on cable TV, social media and group meetings, Islamists have succeeded to an alarming degree in painting secularism as a threat to Islam. Ahmed and others also attacked the deletion of non-Muslim writers in the new 2017 primary school textbooks, alleging they were dropped "per the demand" of Hefajat-e Islam and the Awami Olema League who had demanded "the exclusion of some of the poems written by `Hindus and atheists`". These changes, as well as such errors as spelling mistakes and the incorrect arrangement of paragraphs, triggered newspaper headlines and protests on social media. According to Prof. Akhtaruzzaman, head of the textbook committee, the omissions happened "mainly because