see page history
Taslima Nasrin (Bengali: তসলিমা নাসরিন is a Bengali Bangladeshi ex-doctor turned author who has been living in exile since 1994. From a modest literary profile in the late 1980s, she rose to global fame by the end of the 20th century owing to her feminist views and her criticism of Islam in particular and of religion in general.
Since fleeing Bangladesh in 1994 she has lived in many countries, and currently (Mar 2010) lives in Sweden after expulsion from India in 2008 where she was denounced by the Muslim clergy and received death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. She works to build support for secular humanism, freedom of thought, equality for women, and human rights by publishing, lecturing, and campaigning.
She was born Taslima Nasreen to Rajab Ali and Idul Ara in the town of Mymensingh in 1962. Her father was a physician, and she followed in his footsteps. Her mother was a devout Muslim. After high school in 1976 (SSC) and higher secondary studies in college (HSC) in 1978, she studied medicine at the Mymensingh Medical College an affiliated medical college of the University of Dhaka and graduated in 1984 with an MBBS degree; in college, she showed a propensity for poetry by writing as well as editing a poetry journal. After graduation, she practiced gynaecology at a family planning clinic in Mymensingh, "where she routinely examined young girls who had been raped," and heard women in the delivery room cry out in despair if their baby was a girl. She was reassigned in 1990 to work in Dhaka. Born into a Muslim family she became an atheist over time. In course of writing she took a feminist approach.
Early in her literary career, she wrote mainly poetry, and published half a dozen collections of poetry between 1986 and 1993, often with female oppression as a theme, and often containing very graphic language. She started publishing prose in the early 1990s, and produced three collections of essays and four novels before the publication of her 1993 novel Lajja, or Shame, in which a Hindu family is persecuted by Muslims. This publication changed her life and career dramatically.
Following the publication of Lajja, Nasrin suffered a number of physical and other attacks. In October 1993, an Islamic fundamentalist group called the Council of Islamic Soldiers offered a bounty for her death. In May 1994 she was interviewed by the Kolkata edition of The Statesman, which quoted her as calling for a revision of the Quran; she claims she only called for revision of the Sharia, the islamic religious law. In August 1994 she was brought up on "charges of making inflammatory statements," and faced death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. A hundred thousand demonstrators called her "an apostate appointed by imperial forces to vilify Islam"; a "militant faction threatened to loose thousands of poisonous snakes in the capital unless she was executed." After spending two months in hiding, at the end of 1994 she escaped to Sweden. One of the results of her exile was that she did not get to practice medicine anymore; she became a full-time writer and activist.
Overview edit
Bibliography
See complete bibliography (31)Personal edit
- Legal name: Taslima Nasrin
- Birthdate: August 25, 1962 (age 49)
- Birthplace: Mymensingh, Bangladesh
- Nationality: Bangladeshi, Swedish
- Gender: Female
- Official Website: http://taslimanasrin.com/
- Genres: Criticism of Islam, Women in Muslim societies, List of former Muslim
Unbound edit
This content section has been deprecated.
Please help us clean up the page by moving the content from this section into other relevant sections. Once it has been emptied this section will no longer appear on the page but the edit history will still be available in the page's history.
Since fleeing Bangladesh in 1994 she has lived in many countries, and currently (Mar 2010) lives in Sweden after expulsion from India in 2008 where she was denounced by the Muslim clergy and received death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. She works to build support for secular humanism, freedom of thought, equality for women, and human rights by publishing, lecturing, and campaigning.
She was born Taslima Nasreen to Rajab Ali and Idul Ara in the town of Mymensingh in 1962. Her father was a physician, and she followed in his footsteps. Her mother was a devout Muslim. After high school in 1976 (SSC) and higher secondary studies in college (HSC) in 1978, she studied medicine at the Mymensingh Medical College an affiliated medical college of the University of Dhaka and graduated in 1984 with an MBBS degree; in college, she showed a propensity for poetry by writing as well as editing a poetry journal. After graduation, she practiced gynaecology at a family planning clinic in Mymensingh, "where she routinely examined young girls who had been raped," and heard women in the delivery room cry out in despair if their baby was a girl. She was reassigned in 1990 to work in Dhaka. Born into a Muslim family she became an atheist over time. In course of writing she took a feminist approach.
Early in her literary career, she wrote mainly poetry, and published half a dozen collections of poetry between 1986 and 1993, often with female oppression as a theme, and often containing very graphic language. She started publishing prose in the early 1990s, and produced three collections of essays and four novels before the publication of her 1993 novel Lajja, or Shame, in which a Hindu family is persecuted by Muslims. This publication changed her life and career dramatically.
Following the publication of Lajja, Nasrin suffered a number of physical and other attacks. In October 1993, an Islamic fundamentalist group called the Council of Islamic Soldiers offered a bounty for her death. In May 1994 she was interviewed by the Kolkata edition of The Statesman, which quoted her as calling for a revision of the Quran; she claims she only called for revision of the Sharia, the islamic religious law. In August 1994 she was brought up on "charges of making inflammatory statements," and faced death threats from Islamic fundamentalists. A hundred thousand demonstrators called her "an apostate appointed by imperial forces to vilify Islam"; a "militant faction threatened to loose thousands of poisonous snakes in the capital unless she was executed." After spending two months in hiding, at the end of 1994 she escaped to Sweden. One of the results of her exile was that she did not get to practice medicine anymore; she became a full-time writer and activist.
