The publisher and retailer descriptions frame it as a story-driven response to disbelief, using dialogue, religion, and science to answer sceptical questions, and the author page says both volumes became bestsellers, with the first even translated into English and Assamese.

At the same time, the book has sparked multiple controversies across the board. Paradoxical Sajid-2 was also widely discussed as one of the fair’s big sellers, but it drew criticism almost as soon as it appeared.

The book was intended to be a public argument, but it soon created discrepancies in its lifetime. As more people wanted to read the content, they understood how trivial the material really is.

Although it does have some devoted followers, some of the sceptics even argued about whether they should refer to this book at all. Some believed that the strawman problem is introduced here, as the opponent’s position is simplified or caricatured. The person defending the religious perspective was able to “defeat” the opponent like a cakewalk. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the straw man fallacy exactly this way.

To see how this plays out in practice, consider a familiar type of exchange: a sceptic raises a complex philosophical argument, let’s say the philosophical grounding of morality or the problematic nature of scientific theories.

 The reply reduces that issue to a much simpler claim, that is, “without God, everything is allowed” or “science keeps changing, so it cannot be trusted”. These replies are not only trivial but also question the overall depth of the understanding that has been put behind this piece.

The most pointed criticism concerns the evolution model, especially in Paradoxical Sajid-2, that one detailed critic argues that the book’s Darwinism chapter relies on misleading claims and false comparisons, including the suggestion that Darwinism led to figures like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini. 

This idea alone is enough to set back even a believer such as myself, because of how much of a nuisance it sounds. The same critic also says the chapter misuses evolutionary vocabulary and treats a serious scientific theory as if it were a convenient punching bag.

Here, the broader issue becomes clearer when we step outside the book and look into the content from a perspective that actually makes sense. The Theory of Evolution is not a single claim like “humans came from monkeys”, but a framework that is also intricately worked on even to this day, and is supported by biology, archaeology, and history. Criticising evolution by focusing on a simplified version of it is like criticising a child for wanting ice cream or being scared of the Cookie Monster, even though you and I both know it does not exist.

Karl Popper’s view of science stresses falsifiability, meaning that a genuine scientific theory must be open to disconfirming evidence, whereas systems that keep stretching themselves to escape every objection drift towards pseudoscience. If a theory is rejected not because of evidence but because it conflicts with prior belief, then that debate has moved away from science to ideology.

Furthermore, the cosmology argument in the book adds another layer of discomfort for its readers, as well as for me when I am writing this piece. Imagine your younger sibling went to your mum and complained that the thigh piece that your mother cooked last evening has been missing, and you ate it because you were awake last night, so you must have eaten it. Would you be very annoyed, as it does not make any sense, right? Similarly, this book reasons that “the universe had a beginning, therefore, God exists”. I will let you be the judge of this conclusion.

A similar problem emerges when the book leans on scientific miracles or claims that scripture anticipated modern traditions. For example, some religious gurus would claim that some of the ancient texts are predicting cosmology, archaeology, and much of modern science. The difficulty is that these interpretations are often made after the discoveries, not before.

David Hume’s scepticism about miracles becomes quite relevant here; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Likewise, Bertrand Russell’s famous “teapot” analogy shows that a claim does not gain credibility simply because it cannot be easily disproven. If a text can be interpreted in many ways, selecting the one that matches modern science tells us more about the interpreter than the text itself.

The morality argument is where the book becomes most “philosophical” and also most vulnerable. If the claim is that morality needs God, then the primitive dilemma posed by Socrates in Plato’s Euthyphro immediately comes to mind: “Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it is good?”

Let us consider real-world ethical disagreements on issues like capital punishment, economic inequality, or failures of negotiations. Even among most religious believers, there is a deep disagreement about what morality requires. 

That suggests that morality is not simply downloaded from divine command, but interpreted through human reasoning. At the same time, defenders like Alvin Plantinga argue that belief in God can ground moral realism in a way that secular systems will most definitely struggle to complete. 

The booklets undermine that and try to disprove the idea that this debate had already been resolved. As you already may have guessed, it is far from the truth.

That is one of the central flaws of the Paradoxical Sajid series; it often confuses an argument that will feel persuasive with an argument that comes out as complete. The book is indeed very readable and is, to an extent, dramatic. 

Even sympathetic readers sometimes admit that the logic can be a bit “stretched”, which is a revealing point, as the book is admired for making difficult questions easily understood, not for meeting the standards of a formal philosophical text. But when you are trying to touch on a sensitive topic such as theology, you have to have a series of arguments that will not be easy to read, and that is how it has been. Any attempt to change that will create logic that is as horrendous as the ones being placed in Paradoxical Sajid.

The surrounding controversy shows the same pattern. Debates around Paradoxical Sajid-2 at the Ekushey Book Fair show how quickly intellectual disagreements can turn into public disputes.

In the end, the best way to understand the idea behind Paradoxical Sajid is to start questioning the statements that set the model of the book rather than directly bypassing the dilemma whenever extraordinary claims seem self-evident. Hume would have done the same. Popper would object whenever a theory becomes too flexible to be tested properly. Socrates would object whenever a moral definition assumes the very thing it is trying to prove.

The book tries to turn faith into an authoritarian explanation. That is why the limitations are so open and visible. Because the more total the claim, the higher the standard of reasoning required to sustain it.