[5] Studying religion at the mosque after school, he said "I learned many ridiculous things – that I would get virgins in heaven, or that I would suffer the ultimate punishment in hell for eternity.

[5] Mohiuddin began to read about science, and from age 16 (2000) started to challenge allegedly unscientific claims made by Islamists by writing opinion pieces in Dhaka newspapers.

[12][13] A month later, Bangladeshi bloggers and online activists started the 2013 Shahbag protests, leading to Islamist groups, including Hefazat-e-Islam, assembling over a million people in counter-demonstrations that called for blasphemy laws in the country, and attacks on secularists in Bangladesh.

[14] He was mentioned in an open letter by Shah Ahmad Shafi, who labeled him an apostate and accused him of being one of the founders of the Shahbag protests.

[21] The crackdown on independent blogs, and the closure of the newspaper Amar Desh, was strongly criticised by Human Rights Watch[22] and IHEU.

[26] The Center for Inquiry (CFI), requested the US Secretary of State John Kerry "pressure the government of Bangladesh to reverse its policy of arresting atheist bloggers who were critical to religion."

They sent a letter to Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Suzan Johnson Cook "to do all they can to raise public awareness of this situation."

Other influential organisations such as the Free Society Institute of South Africa, Reporters Without Borders, Committee to Protect Journalists, Global Voice Advocacy, and several other bodies also called for the immediate release of the Bangladeshi bloggers and appealed to several foreign authorities to press Bangladesh on the issue.

[27] Many writers, activists, and prominent intellectuals around the world including Salman Rushdie, Taslima Nasrin, Hemant Mehta, Maryam Namazie, PZ Myers, Avijit Roy, Anu Muhammad, Ajoy Roy, Qayyum Chowdhury, Ramendu Majumdar, Muhammad Zafar Iqbal publicly expressed their solidarity with the arrested bloggers.

[30][31] Since April 2014, Asif Mohiuddin lives in Germany, initially with a scholarship from the Hamburg-based Stiftung für politisch Verfolgte (Foundation for the Politically Repressed)[7] and later also with the support of Amnesty International.

[33][34] The assassination attempt against Mohiuddin in January 2013, that was widely covered at home and abroad, was in a sense the public launch of a series of murders of bloggers, secularists and critics of Islamism in Bangladesh,[35] which continues to this day, claiming 48 casualties (July 2016) so far.