Mushfiqur Rahim (born 9 May 1987) is a Bangladeshi wicketkeeper-batter from Bogura and the country's most-capped international cricketer. The first Bangladeshi to play 100 Tests and the nation's leading Test run-scorer and century-maker, he captained Bangladesh from 2011 to 2017 and, after retiring from T20Is in 2022 and ODIs in 2025, remains an active Test cricketer.
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Mohammad Mushfiqur Rahim (born 9 May 1987) is a Bangladeshi cricketer from Bogura who has played international cricket for more than two decades — longer than any of his countrymen. A right-handed wicketkeeper-batter, he has appeared in more than 480 matches for Bangladesh across the three formats and scored over 16,000 international runs, both national records. He is the first Bangladeshi to play 100 Test matches and, as of 2026, his country's leading run-scorer and leading century-maker in Test cricket.
Mushfiqur captained Bangladesh in all three formats between 2011 and 2014, and in Tests until 2017, overseeing the first home series wins and landmark Test victories over England and Australia. He retired from Twenty20 internationals in September 2022 and from one-day internationals in March 2025, but remains an active Test cricketer in his late thirties — a specialist in the longest format, still setting records two decades after a teenage debut at Lord's.
Mushfiqur was born in Bogura, in northern Bangladesh, to Mahbub Habib and Rahima Khatun. He was educated at Bogura Zilla School and trained at the Bangladesh Institute of Sports, the country's national sports academy, universally known as BKSP, which has produced many of Bangladesh's leading cricketers.
He represented Bangladesh at under-19 level between 2004 and 2006, playing three Youth Tests and 18 Youth One Day Internationals. At the 2006 Under-19 World Cup in Sri Lanka he captained a side that included two other future pillars of the national team, Shakib Al Hasan and Tamim Iqbal, and led them to the quarter-finals. Unusually, he was already a Test cricketer by then — one of only two players at the tournament with senior Test experience.
Cricket did not entirely crowd out education. He studied history at Jahangirnagar University alongside his international career and completed a master's degree in 2012, a distinction few international cricketers of his generation can claim.
In Bangladesh's first-class competition, the National Cricket League, Mushfiqur represented Rajshahi Division in 2006 and again from 2008 to 2024, with a season for Sylhet Division in 2007 and a return to Sylhet in 2025. He has accumulated well over 9,000 first-class runs.
When the Bangladesh Premier League (BPL) launched in 2012 he was an "icon player" for Duronto Rajshahi, whom he led to the semi-finals. In the 2013 edition he was the tournament's leading run-scorer, making 440 runs for Sylhet Royals. His most productive BPL season came in 2019–20, when he scored 491 runs for Khulna Tigers at an average above 70. In January 2023 he became the first cricketer to play 100 matches in the BPL, and in 2024 he joined Fortune Barishal. His overseas franchise experience has been modest compared with some contemporaries: he played for Karachi Kings in the Pakistan Super League in 2016 and for Nangarhar Leopards in the Afghanistan Premier League in 2018.
Mushfiqur was selected for Bangladesh's first tour of England in 2005 as a back-up wicketkeeper, but scores of 63 against Sussex and an unbeaten 115 against Northamptonshire in the warm-up matches forced the selectors to pick him for the first Test at Lord's, on 26 May 2005, as a specialist batter. Still a teenager, he made 19 in the first innings and was one of only three Bangladeshis to reach double figures as the side was dismissed for 108. An ankle injury ended his tour, but a 21-year international career had begun.
His ODI debut followed against Zimbabwe at Harare on 6 August 2006, and his T20I debut against the same opponents that November. By the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean he had displaced the veteran Khaled Mashud as first-choice wicketkeeper. The early years were not smooth: a run of low scores in 2008 saw him dropped for Dhiman Ghosh, and it took time for his batting to match his tidy glovework.
His maiden Test century, against India at Chittagong in January 2010, was the fastest then scored by a Bangladeshi in Tests, off 112 balls. The defining innings of his career arrived on 11 March 2013 at Galle, when his 200 against Sri Lanka made him the first Bangladeshi to score a Test double century — overtaking, on the same day, the 190 made by Mohammad Ashraful. Double hundreds became his signature: 219 not out against Zimbabwe in Dhaka in November 2018, which remains the highest individual score by a Bangladeshi in Test cricket and made him the first wicketkeeper in history to score two Test double centuries, and an unbeaten 203 against Zimbabwe in February 2020, a third double hundred that no other Bangladeshi has matched.
His one-day career peaked later than most. At the 2015 World Cup he shared a 141-run partnership with Mahmudullah against England that carried Bangladesh into the quarter-finals, and at the 2019 tournament he scored an unbeaten 102 against Australia at Trent Bridge. His finest ODI innings, 144 against Sri Lanka at Dubai in the 2018 Asia Cup, remains his highest score in the format. In May 2021 he became the first Bangladeshi to win 150 international matches, and in March 2023, against Ireland, he struck the fastest ODI century by a Bangladeshi, off 60 balls, in the same series in which he passed 7,000 ODI runs.
The milestones did not stop as he approached forty. He made 191 against Pakistan at Rawalpindi in August 2024 and 163 against Sri Lanka at Galle in June 2025, and in a home series against Pakistan in May 2026 his 137 at Sylhet took his tally of Test centuries to 14 — more than any other Bangladeshi — in the same month that his career aggregate passed 16,000 international runs.
Mushfiqur was appointed captain in all formats on 20 September 2011, succeeding Shakib Al Hasan after a disappointing tour of Zimbabwe. The following March he led Bangladesh to the Asia Cup final for the first time, losing to Pakistan by two runs. His tenure was turbulent: in May 2013 he announced his resignation, only to withdraw it within days and be retained by the board. In September 2014 the white-ball captaincy passed to Mashrafe Bin Mortaza, but Mushfiqur kept the Test side, and under him Bangladesh recorded some of their most celebrated victories — beating England in Dhaka in 2016, Sri Lanka in Colombo in their hundredth Test in 2017, and Australia in Dhaka later that year. In all he captained Bangladesh in 34 Tests, 37 ODIs and 23 T20Is.
The end came abruptly. After a winless tour of South Africa in late 2017, the Bangladesh Cricket Board removed him as Test captain on 10 December 2017 and restored Shakib, saying the change would allow Mushfiqur to focus on his batting. Events lent the board's reasoning some support: his highest Test score, 219 not out, and his third double century both came in the years after he gave up the leadership. Even so, the manner of his removal remains the most debated episode of his career.
As a batter, Mushfiqur built his game on compact defence, soft hands against spin and a productive sweep shot, compensating for his small stature — he stands about five feet two inches — with impeccable footwork and unusual powers of concentration. His best innings have often come in adversity, and few cricketers of his era have trained as famously hard, a work ethic that explains how a player of his build has survived more than twenty years of international cricket.
Beyond the 2013 resignation episode and his 2017 removal as captain, Mushfiqur's career has been largely free of scandal. The notable exception came in December 2020, during the Bangabandhu T20 Cup, when — captaining Beximco Dhaka — he angrily confronted his own team-mate Nasum Ahmed after the two nearly collided while going for a catch, and appeared to threaten to throw a punch. He apologised, and the BCB fined him 25 percent of his match fee and handed him one demerit point.
He also holds one of cricket's rarest dismissals. In a Test against New Zealand in Dhaka in December 2023 he was given out obstructing the field after deflecting a ball away from his stumps with his hand following a defensive shot — the first such dismissal in Test cricket since Len Hutton's in 1951.
Mushfiqur has retired format by format, on his own terms. He stepped away from T20 internationals in September 2022, days after the Asia Cup, to concentrate on the longer formats, finishing with 1,500 runs in 102 matches. His ODI retirement followed on 5 March 2025, announced on social media a week after Bangladesh's winless Champions Trophy campaign; he closed that career with 7,795 runs from 274 matches, as the country's most-capped player in the format. The following day his Mohammedan team-mates gave him a guard of honour in the Dhaka Premier League.
What remains is Test cricket, and he has made the format his monument. On 19 November 2025, aged 38, he became the first Bangladeshi to play 100 Tests, against Ireland at Mirpur, marking the occasion with a century. In August 2026 he made his first Test tour of Australia and played in Bangladesh's first Test victory on Australian soil, a nine-wicket win at Darwin. In October 2026 he played his 106th Test, a one-off match against Afghanistan in Abu Dhabi, making 81 in the second innings of a drawn game. He holds a Grade B central contract for 2026 and, as of late 2026, has given no indication that he intends to stop.
Mushfiqur married Jannatul Kifayet Mondi in 2014, and their son, Mayan, was born in 2018. His wife's sister is married to Mahmudullah, making the two most durable Bangladeshi batsmen of their generation brothers-in-law as well as long-time team-mates.
His legacy is one of longevity and accumulation rather than flamboyance. For most of two decades he was Bangladesh's wicketkeeper, their middle-order anchor and, for six years, their captain, surviving changes of regime, the loss of the captaincy and the rise of younger rivals without ever losing his place on merit. That he is still adding to his records — most Test runs, most Test hundreds, most caps — in his fortieth year makes him a unique figure in Bangladeshi sport: not merely a survivor of the country's cricketing adolescence, but one of its principal authors.
