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June 15, 2006

India: Islamists Want Author Taslima Nasreem Deported

The life of 43-year old Taslima Nasreem (pictured) has been littered with difficulties and successes, but she has been a persistent target for crazed Islamists. In her native Bangladesh, she qualified as a doctor, but she also wrote a column for a paper and became an author. In her first novel, called Lajja, or "Shame" she documented the plight of Hindus in Bangladesh, as well as the oppression of women..

But with Islam, to expose its ugly truth always brings violent reaction. Bangladeshi imams put a bounty upon her head of $5,000, and then the fundamentalists forced the government to bring criminal charges, for "deliberately and maliciously hurting Moslem religious sentiments". Every day, thousands demonstrated in the country she had grown up in, demanding her death.

But even as a columnist in Bangladesh, she had invoked the wrath of Islamists, states a report by Jaideep Saikia for the University of Illinois, on Islamic extremism in North East India. In one article, she wrote of an incident which took place in 1993. A mullah had caused a woman who had engaged in a second marriage to buried up to her waist in a pit.

On September 12, 1994 she gave an interview to the New Yorker, in which she said: "Why shouldn't I write about what I've seen? I'm a doctor, remember! Do you know what's it like to see a woman crying out in the delivery room when she gives birth to a girl, terrified that her husband will divorce her? To see the ruptured vaginas of women who've been raped? The six and seven year olds who have been violated by their fathers, brothers and uncles - by their own families? No, I will not keep quiet. I will continue to speak out about these women's wretched lives."

In 1994, Taslima Nasreem was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Almost prophetically, in her New Yorker interview from that year, she claimed that if progressive forces in Bangladesh did not unite, "if they don't stand up to the fundamentalists, then there's no question the fundamentalists will have won."

Type the word "Bangladesh" into our search engine, and you will find enough evidence to show that they already have. The government contains a coalition of four parties, with the ruling Bangladesh National party refusing to acknowledge the existence of long-standing Islamist terror organisations in the country until last year, and also two parties with extreme Islamist tendencies. The leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party waged sectarian war against Hindus at the time of Bangladesh's independence, and the Islami Oikya Jote party wages war against the Ahmadiyya sect. The Jamaat party has longstanding links with the terror group JMB which attempts to impose Sharia through bombings.

Taslima fled to Sweden in 1994, after a state court ordered that she should be detained for writing the "anti-Islamic" statements contained in her work, where she discussed the plight of Hindus and women and even argued that sex outside of marriage was defensible. As well as the court statement, an imam had issued a fatwa calling for her death, and daily thousands of people had formed demonstrations calling for her execution (pictured below). The fatwa had offered a bounty of $5,000 on her life.


She returned to Bangladesh in 1998, but within weeks, police began to hunt for her, after a charge of blasphemy was brought against her for the contents of her book called Nirbachinto Kolumn, or "Selected Column".

She was forced to leave Bangladesh again in January 1999, after her name was found on the top of a hit-list seized from Islamist militants. That month, on January 18, the respected poet Shamshur Rahman was attacked in his home by Islamists from Harkatul Jihad. Three men armed with axes broke in and the poet's wife was severely injured by axe-blows. Taslima returned to Sweden.

In Mumbai, India, in March 2000, the head of the Islamic Raza Academy ordered that if Taslima Nasreem ever set foot in Mumbai, she would be "burned alive".

In April 2002 after spending much of her time in Sweden and France, Taslima Nasreem requested asylum in India, to live in Calcutta. She was allowed to stay in India, though not formally granted asylum. In August that year, a third book, Wild Wind was banned in Bangladesh. Taslima said at the time: "It is a democratic country but... there is no real democracy in Bangladesh. The political parties use religion for their own interests and whenever they find any criticism about religion, they can't tolerate it, so they ban the book." Shame had been banned in Bangladesh for blasphemy, as well as "My Girlhood", written in 1999.

Only in 2001 did one of her books (French Lover) appear in Bangladesh. But even in India, where Taslima had settled, she was not safe. In January 2004 the head cleric of Calcutta's main mosque, S.M.N. Rahman Barkati, issued threats against her. In front of a crowd of 10,000 at Friday pravers, the imam said "Her writings are against humanity and Islam....Her face can be blackened with ink, paint or tar. Or she can be garlanded with shoes." The latter are regarded as extreme insults in the Indian subcontinent. The cleric ordered a bounty of 20,000 rupees ($436) for anyone who would carry out the act. She had to remain under police protection, following this "fatwa".

The persecution against her in Calcutta continued last year. The state government of West Bengal in India had banned one of her books, "Dwikhondito" (Split in Two). On Friday, 23 September 2005, a Calcutta court over-ruled the ban.

But today, according to Reuters India Taslima is facing more harassment from Muslims in the state of West Bengal. On Saturday (10 June) Taslima attended a conference entitled "Irrelevance of religion in the era of technology" in Kokalta (Calcutta).

In this speech, it is claimed that she made anti-Islamic remarks, saying she used to curse Allah as a child, and claiming that the Koran "contains contradictions". She had apparently said: "As a eight-year-old child, I was warned by my mother that if I abused Allah I would be punished, but I did that and nothing happened to me."

Muslim leaders have written to the Indian government, demanding that she be immediately deported. They plan to hold demonstrations against her presence. The general secretary of the Muslim Council of Bengal, Hasan Ahmed Imran, said: "Communal harmony is in danger and she must be asked to leave if she has problems with Muslims."

Taslima claims that she cannot remember exactly what she said at Saturday's seminar, stating: "Every day, I am saying one thing or the other."

Whether Taslima is an apostate or not is fully clear. She says on her website: "If any religion allows the persecution of the people of different faiths, if any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, then I can't accept that religion."

The website is full of information on her life, and contains articles.

Posted by Giraldus Cambrensis at June 15, 2006 8:07 AM

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Posted by: John Sobieski at June 17, 2006 2:47 AM

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