Last weekend, for the first time I joined the millions of Bangladeshis who assemble at the annual Bissho Ijtema, the largest Muslim congregation after the Hajj in Mecca. I only ended up staying only a few hours, but enough to get a taste for the event. It was actually easier to appreciate the scale of the Ijtema from outside (the picture below was taken from the Tongi footbridge); inside it was just an endless series of tents.
I had imagined there would be separate areas for prayer and meetings, but of course the tents cover the entire area. Sleeping, namaaz, meals, and everything else happens in the same place between the long lines of bedrolls. There is no way of counting the crowds who show up, and estimates vary from 25,000 to 5 million. With each person getting no more than 1 square meter of ground, I figure at least 600,000 stayed the night in the 160-acre space. And with even more coming in from Dhaka, I'm sure the total for the final prayer was not far from the 5 million estimate.
