Nasrin was unknown in the United States until recently: she writes in Bengali, and although her latest novel, “Lajja” (“Shame”), has been translated into English, it is not yet available here. But at home she has been notorious for years. A newspaper columnist and the author of 21 books, she has been married and divorced three times. Her columns demanding women’s rights are blunt; and in her fiction and poetry, she writes about women’s sexuality in terms so explicit even some Bangladeshi feminists recoil. Yet the book that appears to have most enraged the country’s Muslim extremists isn’t about women at all. “Lajja” – which appeared in February 1993, three months after Hindu militants in India destroyed a mosque and set off bloody rampages – is a fierce denunciation of religious violence, told from the point of view of a terrorized family in Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. Nasrin is no stylist; this novel reads like a political tract, but it sold 60,000 copies before fundamentalists got it banned. By last May, when an Indian paper quoted Nasrin as calling for changes in the Koran, fundamentalists had already put a price on her head. Nasrin insists she was misquoted, that she had been criticizing Islam’s code of law, the Sharia, not its holy book. She fled just before the police showed up to arrest her.
American writers never rallied around Nasrin the way they did around Rushdie, although several have been active on her behalf. “I’ve been signing a lot of petitions that originate in Europe,” says Susan Sontag. “But I haven’t received any phone calls from writer friends here saying, “We’ve got to do something’.” One reason is Nasrin’s obscurity; Rushdie was famous even before he was condemned to death for writing “The Satanic Verses.” Another reason may be that human-rights organizations don’t want another Rushdie, whose very name became a lightning rod for intractable Muslim fury. Many were dismayed to see an open letter he wrote to Nasrin, published widely in July. At International PEN, the writers’ organization, the strategy for Nasrin involved quiet, persistent pressure on the government of Bangladesh. “We’ve taken our cue from her lawyers,” says Siobhan Dowd, program director of the PEN American Center Freedom to Write Committee. “They want public pressure, but not so strident that it would backfire.” Meredith Tax, chair of the International PEN Women Writers Committee, says major public demonstrations here might have played into the hands of the fundamentalists. “America is seen as a big bully,” she says. “Anybody who stands up to the bully is heroic.”
Nasrin’s supporters say her case is far from unique: more than 150 Bangladeshi journalists have been arrested in the last year. Fundamentalists are also targeting women activists, from feminist leaders to villagers at work raising silkworms in a project aimed at boosting their economic self-sufficiency. “Their mulberry trees were cut down,” says Dorothy Thomas, director of the Human Rights Watch Women’s Rights Project. “Islamic militants said the women were being converted to Christianity.”
“I detest fundamentalism and communalism,” writes Nasrin in the introduction to the English translation of “Lajja.” “The mullahs who would murder me will kill everything progressive in Bangladesh if they are allowed to prevail.” Her style may be blunt, but what she lacks in grace, she makes up for in courage.
