By - Mosharraf Hossain Raju

From a Brahmin household to the front lines of relief: the Bangladeshi aid worker serving Gaza and Sudan

Muhammad Raj was born and raised in a Brahmin family. His decision to embrace Islam brought with it a season of tests, isolation and social pressure. He has since turned that experience into a working life spent alongside the dispossessed, from Bangladesh`s remote hill districts to displacement camps shaped by the wars in Gaza and Sudan.

Raj is the director general of the Hafezzi Charitable Society of Bangladesh (HCSB), a government registered humanitarian organisation, and serves as director of international humanitarian affairs at the SAARC Human Rights Foundation. When he joined HCSB, the organisation was small. Under his leadership its operations have expanded well beyond Bangladesh`s borders into the Middle East, Africa and other parts of South Asia.

"This work began somewhere between struggle and faith," Raj said. "After I accepted Islam, I faced difficult trials, mentally and socially. Those hard years built something in me: empathy, a sense of dignity, and a philosophy of service. I stand beside people because it is a duty. By now, standing beside people has become something I cannot live without."

Under the HCSB banner, Raj has travelled repeatedly to deliver assistance for Palestinians displaced by the war in Gaza, distributing aid by hand to those sheltering in Egypt and coordinating field operations from Dhaka. He has also overseen emergency relief for communities in Sudan caught between armed conflict and famine.

According to the organisation, its field volunteer teams have delivered food, clean drinking water, medical care, winter clothing and cash assistance to thousands of affected families. Raj has made multiple trips to Egypt himself to verify that the aid reaches the households it was intended for.

At home, the work runs along parallel lines. HCSB operates free medical camps in remote hill and marginal areas, supports treatment costs for patients who cannot afford care, installs tube wells, establishes maktabs and schools, distributes winter clothing, and runs Ramadan food markets and Eid gift programmes for low income families. The organisation also arranges employment support for new Muslims and unemployed young people.

That work has drawn recognition at home and abroad. Raj received the International Peace Award 2024 in Bangladesh, accepted an honour in Cairo in 2024 through the Bangladesh mission there, and was given the Nepal Bangladesh International Excellence Award in Kathmandu. His humanitarian activity and his writing have been covered widely in Bangladeshi newspapers and periodicals.

Raj carries out this work under the guidance of the country`s senior Islamic scholars. The regard in which leading clerics hold him has helped give both his projects and his organisation broad public acceptance in Bangladesh, where trust is often the scarcest resource in charitable work.

Those who know him describe a humanitarian worker without pretension. "I accepted Islam for the pleasure of Allah, not for recognition," Raj said. "I seek my reward from Him alone."

As the humanitarian emergencies in Gaza and Sudan deepen, Raj is scaling up HCSB`s field presence and planning new international missions aimed at strengthening the organisation`s capacity to deliver relief directly into the hands of those who need it.