By K. Govindan TASLIMA NASRIN has long been unpopular with Muslim fundamentalists and secular liberals for her atheist and feminist views which she expressed in a regular newspaper column.
Her forced exile in Sweden since August of last year and meetings she has addressed around Europe have informed many on the reasons she left Bangladesh.
The publication of her fifteenth book Lajja (Shame) in 1993, conveying her dismay at the oppression of the Hindu minority and the erosion of secular values, focussed fundamentalist ire upon her.
A little known fringe group called the Council of the Soldiers of Islam declared a fatwa (religious opinion with legal effect) offering 50 000 takas for her death. This was seized upon by the fundamentalist Jaamat-eIslami party, when it and associated groups launched agitations and mass demonstrations demanding her death and state action against her - resulting in the banning of Lajja -though not before it sold 60,000 copies.
The controversy was revived in May 1994 when, in an interview with the Indian newspaper Statesman, Taslima Nasrin was quoted calling for the revision of the Muslim holy book, the Quran.
This was equivalent to doubting the divinity of the text and challenging its adherents belief in its infallibility. Nasrin said she had been misquoted. She claims instead that she had urged reforms in the Sharia (Muslim laws and regulations), which discriminate against Blasphemy Scandalised by her audacity 100,000 fundamentalists demonstrated in the capital city, Dhaka, against Nasrin and for the enactment of a blasphemy law. While the Bangladesh government had dragged its feet on providing police protection to Nasrin, and has taken no action against those who have physically assaulted her and made death threats, they speedily began legal proceedings against her!
Nasrin is currently charged under the 'secular' criminal law with blasphemy. Her trial was due to begin this month but has been postponed; the maximum penalty is two years imprisonment and a fine.
The least understood dimension of this affair is that the attacks on Taslima Nasrin's intellectual freedom and the real threat to her life is part of a wider trend in her country.
When the government led by Khaleda Zia of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), herself a woman, acceded to fundamentalist demands and was backed by the major opposition party the Awami League led by another woman, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, both feared giving ground to the Jaamat-e-Islami.
A fatwa madness has gripped Bangladesh. The death threats are aimed at women's groups and other non-governmental organisations.
Bangladesh has a large non-governmental The mullahs "would kill everything progressive in Bangladesh if they are allowed to prevail"
lives of millions. the Grameen Bank.
Begum
sector employing hundreds of thousands of field workers and having a real impact on the Two of these NGOs in particular have been targetted by fundamentalists and accused of being un-Islamic, the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) and that distrust.
Both these organisations pioneered schemes to alleviate rural poverty through adult literacy programmes, health education and credit for women's co-operatives.
warns:
What the mullahs fear is that as more women beome literate and economically independent they are beginning to challenge reactionary values and ideas in their homes and villages. To maintain their authority these clerics have forbidden women from working for NGOs; prevented children from attending BRAC schools and launched a moral crusade against 'western' values.
In many instances women have been forced to commit suicide, schools have been burned and NGO activists threatened as a result of the hysteria induced by these fatwas.
All of society is in turmoil. Opposition parties have boycotted Parliament for over two years and in their latest move have resigned their seats en-masse.
Meanwhile there are numerous mass agitations from demonstrations, to pickets, to one day general strikes which regularly paralyse life in the commercial centres of Dhaka and Chittagong.
The opposition is calling for the formation of a caretaker government in which all parties would be represented, and immediate elections.
Nationalism exhausted Nationalist politics - based on an amalgam of mixed economic policies, anti-imperialist and pro-Islamic rhetoric has been exhausted. Its historic standard bearers the BNP and Awami League stand discredited.
Neo-liberal policies reign supreme and as prices rise, wages are frozen and unemployment and with it popular discontent grows.
There is no confidence in Left parties which are in ideological confusion following the collapse of stalinism and pro-capitalist reforms in China and Eastern Europe.
Meanwhile fundamentalist groups, like the Jaamat-e-Islaami, reviled for a generation because of their support for Pakistan in the 1971 war of independence, have overcome They are flush with petro-dollars from religious foundations in the Middle-East and their model of an Islamic state, 'neither capitalist nor socialist', is deceptively seductive.
In the preface to Lajja, Taslima Nasrin •The mullahs who would murder me would kill everything progressive in Bangladesh if they are allowed to prevail".
Campaigning for the unbanning of Lajja, the dropping of blasphemy charges and Nasrin's freedom to write and live, also means campaigning against religious fundamentalism and answering its false solutions with a democratic socialist feminist alternative.