Four years after the storm, Taslima Nasreen remains unrepentant
HAS she or hasn't she apologised? With a warrant of arrest hanging over her head and Muslim zealots calling for her death for insulting the Quran, Taslima Nasreen remains as defiant as ever, refusing to be cowed by any threat. "I've said or done nothing wrong, therefore there's no question of tendering an unconditional apology," she told Outlook, refuting a news report that she had asked Muslim clerics for forgiveness for her 'blasphemous' comments.
Speaking from her hideout on a mobile phone, Nasreen, who returned to Dhaka recently after a four-year exile, says she's absolutely distraught that "I can't remain with my parents in their final days". According to her brother Faizul Kabir, Nasreen stayed with them for only a couple of days at their upscale apartment at Shantinagar in central Dhaka before she was forced into hiding again by the fundamentalists' renewed protests triggered by the news of her secret return.
Taslima Nasreen, 36, a physician-turned-writer, accompanied her parents back from the US on September 16 after doctors at a New York hospital gave her cancer-stricken mother only three months. Her 75-year-old father, a retired doctor, is also suffering from a serious heart condition.
Although protests are nowhere near their high-decibel level of four years ago, Nasreen still feels insecure to venture out of her hideout because the fatwa against her stands. The fatwa, carrying 50,000 takas for her head, may not be a whopping fortune, but Kabir fears it is "lucrative enough to goad a professional killer, if not a fundamentalist, into chopping off her head".
The reward was announced by an obscure religious group called Soldiers of the Prophet based in northeastern Sylhet district after Nasreen, in an interview to The Statesman in Calcutta in 1994, said "the Quran must be changed as it's unfair to women".
In fact, in her novels, poems and newspaper columns Nasreen has relentlessly advocated the women's right to choose their sexual partners and even have children out of wedlock—propositions that shocked even her most ardent supporters, including feminists. "She has done more harm than good to our cause," says Kushi Kabir, a women's rights activist, who thinks her writings verge on pornography.
As if to challenge the Muslim law which allows a man to have four wives, Nasreen, now a divorcee, who smokes and drinks—something extremely rare among women here—herself married three times. To be fair, her writings, often bold and shocking because of the explicit sexual imagery, made little impact in a population where the literacy rate is less than 50 per cent.
However, it's her comments on the Quran made in The Statesman interview that unleashed strikes and protest rallies in Dhaka and elsewhere in the country. Although she denied having made the comments, saying that she had been misquoted in the interview, the protests nonetheless escalated in the following days.
Sensing a sinister design by the fundamentalist forces who have often sought to use any kind of unrest to promote their own agenda and also perhaps to calm the common people's anger, the Khaleda Zia government brought charges against her for "hurting the religious sentiment of the majority". But instead of arresting her, the government, ostensibly under international pressure, allowed her to slip out of the country.
The warrant, still pending, has been revived by the present government since she returned home seven weeks ago. Idris Rahman, a member of Nasreen's legal team, says they are trying to obtain bail for her from the court. Earlier, on November 3, a bail petition made on her behalf was rejected on the ground that Nasreen must appear in person before the court. The case has now been adjourned until January 5. If found guilty, she could be sentenced to up to two years in prison. Interestingly, many believe that the revival of the arrest warrant could be a ploy to defuse fresh upsurge of fundamentalist protests. But the Muslim clerics don't seem too impressed and say "they would continue to call for the apostate's death until she returns to the faith".
Sounding bitter and glum, Nasreen blames the present government, widely considered to be secular and liberal, for being soft on the zealots. She is especially upset over the comments made by prime minister Sheikh Hasina that "Taslima must not cross limits and that her writings are basically trash". She has every right to express her opinion, Nasreen says, but "these kinds of remarks from a prime minister only serve to encourage religious fundamentalists in a country where they're a minority". Not to mention the fact that such utterances underline the increasingly lonely battle that lies ahead for her.