|
 She is either the bravest or
most foolish person I've ever met," a friend of Nasreen's is quoted
as saying .
There is no question about the bravery of Taslima
Nasreen--a government anesthesiologist and the daughter of a county
physician father and a devoutly religious mother, who was suddenly
thrust into the spotlight upon the angry response of Islamic
militants to her feminist writings.
Nasreen's writings express her
thoughts on religion, feminism, and sexuality clearly--issues that
are not often expressed in the open in the traditional Muslim
society of Bangladesh.
In 1994, the government ordered her detention following
complaints about the
publication of "Nirbachinto Kolumn," ("Selected Column").
A state
court charged her with "deliberately and maliciously hurting Moslem
religious sentiments," and Islamists took to the streets in massive,
often violent protests against the author.
![[ image: ]](../Bangladesh/_225676_Troubled_years_factbox.gif) Nasreen fled to Sweden,
and then traveled throughout the United States and Germany. A
subsequent book, "Lajja" ("Shame") also drew the wrath of Moslems,
and the volume was banned in Bangladesh.
In "Lajja" ("Shame"), Nasreen
again criticized the Islamic view of women, and defended the right
to practices such as sex outside of marriage.
Contrary to the claims of Moslem fundamentalists, she did not
call for a rewriting of the Koran, but stated that religious
doctrines should be replaced by civil codes as the guiding principle
of any enlightened society.
But in an interview months before Taslima Nasreen's return to
Bangladesh, she said "When I began to study the Koran,
the holy book of Islam, I found many unreasonable ideas. The women
in the Koran were treated as slaves. They were nothing
but sexual objects. Naturally I set aside the Koran and
looked around me. I found religion equally oppressive in real life."
Taslima's defiance of the establishment earned her thousands of
admirers. Hindu and Muslim fundamentalist groups quickly and publicly took stances on their views of Taslima: Hindu
fundamentalists adopted her as their new ally, distributing copies
of her book, whereas Muslim fundamentalists burned hundreds of
copies of her work, Lajja (Shame), and demanded her
execution.
 She
frequently addresses the oppression of women in her
witings. In her poem "Happy Marriage" . Nasreen describes instance
of male domination over women.
In the poem "Happy Marriage ", she describes her husband as ". .
. a monster of a man." who physically, emotionally and sexually
abuses her with no qualms at all. In the first half of the poem,
Nasreen writes about the male's fantasies of control in visceral
terms:
He wants my body under his control
so that if he wishes he can spit in my face. . .
so that if he wishes he can rob me of my clothes. . .
so that if he wishes he can slash my thigh with a dagger.
. .
so that if he wishes he can string me up and hang me. .
The repitition of the phrase "so that if he wishes. . . "gives
the reader a sense of the numerous injustices and atrocities the
husband commits against his wife, and the increasing severity of
each wrongdoing that push her closer and closer to death.
Matters came to a head when a fatwa was issued against the writer
Taslima Nasreen for her novel, Shame. The government registered a
case against her.
Taslima Nasreen,
has asked the Indian authorities to grant her asylum.
Ms. Nasreen has been denied entry into the country by
successive governments.
Talking to journalists on a visit to India, Taslima Nasreen
said she was bored of living in the West for over a decade and
would like to settle down permanently in Calcutta, the centre
of India's Bengali community.
She said she needed a Bengali environment to let her
creativity flourish.
Also Read:
 Bangladeshi
writer seeks asylum in India
Death
threat for Bangladesh sculptor
| 
