Bangladeshis Clash Over ‘Infidel’ Writer : Asia: Woman still in hiding after militants accuse her of insulting the Koran, call for her death. Nearly 150 people are hurt in fighting during strike.

Thousands of Muslim fundamentalists, demanding a feminist writer be put to death as a blaspheming infidel, clashed with opponents and police Thursday on the streets of Bangladesh’s capital.

Businesses in Dhaka were closed and the streets empty of traffic as the result of a half-day strike called by Islamic militants to demand Taslima Nasrin’s execution for allegedly insulting the Koran.

Police used tear gas, water cannon, rifle butts and batons to repulse Muslim zealots, who hurled rocks and crude homemade bombs and waved bamboo clubs as they tried to penetrate barbed-wire barriers put up by police near a central mosque.

In half a dozen downtown areas, fundamentalists and rival political and student groups fought with knives and threw simple, firecracker-like explosives at each other. Police dispersed them with batons and tear gas.

Almost 50 people were reportedly injured in the fighting around the mosque, including four police officers. Authorities said the number of people hurt rose to nearly 150 as fighting between rival groups spread after the Islamic radicals extended their strike until dusk.

At Kishorganj, northeast of the capital, police opened fire as thousands of rampaging fundamentalists reportedly tried to seize their rifles. One man was killed and about 10 people injured, including six police officers.

The day’s events highlighted the growing importance of Islamic militancy in poor, densely populated Bangladesh, where it is a relatively new phenomenon, as well as the tardiness of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia’s government in coming to grips with the challenges it poses.

“The major political parties in the country are wooing the fundamentalists to be in power, and this has put the Islamic groups in an exceptionally advantageous situation,” Kamal Hussain, a former foreign minister, said.

At dawn, rival groups took to the streets, pelting each other with stones across police barricades and shouting abuse. About 300 people paraded through the streets of central Dhaka, chanting, “Death to Taslima Nasrin, the infidel!” A few blocks away, the same number of university students, demonstrating in the writer’s favor, yelled insults against the “traders in religion.”

Bangladeshi student and political groups opposed to the Muslim militants had called their own one-day strike to “resist the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalists.”

Since June 4, when a Dhaka court ordered her arrest for offending the religious feelings of Bangladeshis, 90% of whom are Muslim, Nasrin has been in hiding. A Calcutta newspaper, The Statesman, quoted her as demanding that the Koran, the Islamic scriptures, be “thoroughly revised.” She later claimed she was misquoted. She only advocated changes in Islamic law, she said, to give women the same rights as men.

The explanation didn’t satisfy Muslim militants. The Sirat Majlish, said to be a front organization of the right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami, the country’s largest fundamentalist party, offered $2,500 to anyone who would kill Nasrin. The Bangladesh Clerics’ Council demanded she be hanged. Mosques throughout the South Asian country were used to demand the writer’s arrest and public execution.

“Taslima Nasrin is a creature of Satan,” one cleric said from the pulpit of his mosque in the southern city of Khulna.

Thursday’s strike was meant to further pressure the government to arrest Nasrin and execute the doctor-turned-writer. Although the danger of mob violence seemed very real, officials were painfully slow to react. It was more than a week after the $2,500 price was put on Nasrin’s head that the Home Ministry warned fundamentalist groups against issuing threats or taking vigilante action.

On Sunday, Bangladeshi newspapers said Nasrin was seeking asylum in the United States. “Any time, the fundamentalists will kill me,” she was quoted as saying. “The government is against me.”

A U.S. Embassy spokesman in Dhaka said the mission was in contact with Nasrin but declined to make details public.

Nasrin, 31, has provoked enormous controversy by attacking religion and marriage and endorsing free love. A book she published a year ago, “Shame,” offended many Bangladeshis with its accusations of Muslim persecution of the Hindu minority. It was banned.

Mahfuz Anam, editor of the Daily Star, an independent Dhaka daily, believes the uproar over Nasrin betrays the country’s failure, after 16 years of strongman presidential rule ended in 1991, to deal with pressing social and economic problems.

“The secular parties have failed to really provide any solutions to the problems of the moment,” Anam said.

Reacting to Nasrin’s situation, Indian-born novelist Salman Rushdie, himself under an Islamic death sentence since 1989, accused Bangladesh’s authorities of cowardice.

“It is even more upsetting that the government has caved in to the demands from the fundamentalist groups, even though we know those factions are not very strong in Bangladesh,” Rushdie was quoted as saying in Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper.

“I fear for her life, should she be arrested,” he said. Rushdie spoke during a secret stay in Oslo this week to visit William Nygaard, who was shot and seriously wounded in October after publishing in Norwegian “The Satanic Verses,” the book by Rushdie that incited Iran to offer a reward to any Muslim who kills the author.