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THE WORLD; Exiled Feminist Writer Tells Her Own Story

Date: August 28, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By DEBORAH BAKER STOCKHOLM
Lead:

"I AM not afraid of the fundamentalists, no. They try to kill me but I will never stop writing. They will kill my family but they will never stop my writing." The words are delivered softly, in a manner so understated it seems as if Taslima Nasrin is talking about someone else.

In the nearly three months since she went into hiding after the Bangladeshi Government charged her with defaming Islam, she has been attacked by fundamentalists and by her fellow feminists, who blame her for drawing the mullahs' wrath.
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It is one of the ironies of her case that, despite her fervent demands for women's rights and her equally ardent Bangladeshi nationalism, she has been defined by her detractors, accused of being a pawn in the hands of those who seek to undermine not only Bangladesh but the course of women's rights there. Nine days ago, after fleeing to Sweden, Taslima Nasrin spoke for herself.

"The fundamentalists are destroying our society," she said. "The silent majority is afraid of them. They will do anything in the name of God. The progressives are not so organized, they cannot bring together 300,000 people at one time."

It is clear why the mullahs have put a price on her head. She is three times married, she is an outspoken feminist, and she has written with contempt about the political motives and spiritual affectations of the Muslim clergy. "The country is infected with them," she said. "Their long hair, beards and robes conceal their insatiable lust for wealth and women."

But the Islamic fundamentalists are not the only enemies that Ms. Nasrin has made. Her own Government, led by Khaleda Zia, a woman prime minister, was unable or unwilling to stand by her. The more progressive leader of the opposition, Hasina Wazed, daughter of the assassinated "father of the nation," Sheik Mujibur Rahman, has said Ms. Nasrin doesn't deserve to live in Bangladesh. Her fellow writers were nearly mute during the two months she spent as a fugitive from a Government arrest warrant for blasphemy. Even the feminists in Bangladesh turned on her, accusing her of becoming a patsy for the West.

But Ms. Nasrin, 32 years old and trained as a physician, is not a creation of the West. Though often cast as a champion of Western feminism, she arises out of local ingredients, writes about tensions dominating not only India and Bangladesh but also Calcutta and Dhaka, the major cities of what was once an undivided Bengal.

The 1905 division of East and West Bengal along religious lines -- the east being predominantly Muslim and the west Hindu -- prefigured the 1947 partition of the subcontinent, when East Bengal became East Pakistan. Even after ridding the country of the Pakistani military in 1971, Bangladesh remains an uncertain parliamentary democracy. It is not always clear in which direction its loyalties lie -- with West Bengal and its shared language and centuries-old literary tradition, with the West, whose aid organizations underwrite hundreds of development schemes in the countryside, or, as an oil-poor state, with the Gulf, Pakistan and some idea of an international Islam.

This quandary is at the heart of Ms. Nasrin's troubles, which began in 1991 when she received an important Bengali literary prize from Calcutta. The award of this prize to a writer from Bangladesh would normally have received front-page coverage in Dhaka's many newspapers. But the Calcutta editors' choice of a book by a 28-year-old woman with a reputation for writing popular books about sex was considered a calculated insult to the largely male Bangladeshi literary community. The story of the prize received a minor mention on the back page and the resentments simmered. Hindus and Muslims

Ms. Nasrin's career was further complicated when her book "Lajja" ("Shame") was banned by the Government in 1993. This documentary novel concerned the plight of a Hindu family in Bangladesh following the demolition of a mosque by Hindu fundamentalists in India. In the violence that followed over 2,000 innocent Indian Muslims were killed. In Bangladesh, the majority Muslim community burned Hindu temples, shops and homes in retaliation.

When the banned book was pirated in India by the Hindu fundamentalists, and sold on buses and trains as propaganda, there was further grist for resentment of Ms. Nasrin. Though she issued a press release declaring her hatred of all fundamentalists, Hindu or Muslim, the secular intellectuals and politicians were unappeased, and by the end of 1993 one mullah stepped forward with a $1,500 reward for her assassination, the first of several. When human rights organizations took up her cause, she was accused of painting Bangladesh as a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism, even though the Islamic party has only 26 of the 330 seats in Parliament.

Ms. Nasrin is impatient with such criticisms. "When I was writing columns and poetry in Dhaka the literary community embraced me," she said. "When Calcutta took up my work I was accused of betraying Bangladesh," though, she said, every writer in Dhaka wants to be published by her Bengali publisher.

And when the West took up Ms. Nasrin's work, Calcutta retaliated. This past spring, flush from her first trip abroad, she gave a provocative interview to an obviously hostile journalist for a Calcutta newspaper who then quoted her as saying that she believed the Koran should be "thoroughly revised." Another journalist, present at the interview, denies Ms. Nasrin made such a statement.

The response was quick. A fundamentalist newspaper in Dhaka called for her arrest for violating a blasphemy clause left over from British rule. On June 4 the Government approved a warrant for her arrest.

That Ms. Nasrin is a woman, a loner, and an immensely successful writer partly explains her abandonment by the resentful literary community (though the writers Shamsur Rahman and Sofia Kamal are prominent absences on the list of her detractors). The same can be said of her relationship with local women's organizations. Ms. Nasrin recalls being approached by a prominent Dhaka feminist only to be asked who was she to be writing on women's issues. "She said to me, 'I have been working with the women of Bangladesh for 25 years and no one knows my name, just Taslima Nasrin's.' " Many Bangladeshi feminists are particularly discomfited by her writings on sexuality, feeling that there are more important priorities and that by writing about such intimate matters Ms. Nasrin exposes women to male titillation and betrays them.

"Other women write love stories, I write about sexual oppression," she says. And she writes about sex as she sees fit. "I have no shyness describing anything about a woman's body or a man's body because I am a doctor. [ The feminists ] have decided that women should not talk about sex, that it is a man's place." Waking Women Up

As a doctor for a Government family planning office in Mymensingh, Ms. Nasrin had ample experience of the sordid conditions of the women's lives she writes about. Still, she has often been taken to task for being contemptuous of women's activists, calling them, on occasion, "housewives." She insists now that she respects them. "My way is writing, their way is working in the villages. I think their ideology is to work slowly and keep silent and my thinking is different. Our goal is the same. To wake women up."

Yet it is precisely this silent work that some feel Ms. Nasrin has endangered. According to one local journalist, "There has been a quiet revolution in the countryside. Village women have become politically conscious and are beginning to assert themselves. The process was going on silently and suddenly Taslima Nasrin wrote about it and the fundamentalist opposition formed around her." Recently, the mullahs have called for ridding Bangladesh of Western-funded non-Governmental organizations. In the countryside, local clerics have issued fatwas against families who don't send their children to the mullah's schools, against women who leave their homes to go to work, or who bring their children to local health clinics.

The threat to the mullahs is real. "The money that is in education is in education for women," said a leader of a major aid organization, who requested anonymity. "The World Bank is focusing heavily on adolescent girls. The women's organizations have been making real progress on population control and these programs now reach one-third of the country. In the past the social structures were dependent on traditional values but now the whole concept of purdah, of dowries, is breaking down."

Perhaps Ms. Nasrin herself is partly the daughter of this silent revolution, begun in 1985 with the United Nations Decade of the Woman. Yet in Stockholm, despite her repeated references to "the civilized world," Ms. Nasrin seemed disgusted by the West's food, wearied by the effort of speaking English and, at times, quite alone. She was reluctant to comment on the lives of Western women. She was unwilling or unready, too, to consider why she, alone of all the world's writers in prison, in hiding from their governments, in fear of their lives, had been rescued by the West. It is hard to imagine, however, that she will not continue to challenge those who would write her story for her.