Bangladesh’s Controversial Feminist Writer Flees Country

Charged by a magistrate with offending Muslims and threatened by Islamic zealots with assassination, Bangladesh’s most controversial writer, feminist Taslima Nasrin, has furtively left her country.

Arriving in Sweden on what appeared to have been a secret flight from Southeast Asia, the 31-year-old author announced Wednesday that she wanted to “rest and work” and went into seclusion.

In Bangladesh, there were angry statements from some militant groups, while others wished their nemesis good riddance.

Home Secretary Azim Uddin Ahmed said that under terms of Nasrin’s bail, granted last week, “she was free to go anywhere she liked, and that’s what she did.”

Nasrin’s ultimate intentions were unclear. The Swedish Foreign Ministry, which announced in a brief statement her secrecy- and security-laden arrival in Stockholm, would not say how or when she traveled, where she was staying or what her final destination was.

Back home, some doubted that Bangladesh’s most keenly contested cultural figure will ever return. “I don’t think she’ll be coming back--at least not for some time,” said Serajul Islam Choudhury, a professor of English literature at Dhaka University. “She is rather desperate.”

Ali Ahmed, a leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami, the country’s largest Islamic political party, said of Nasrin’s departure: “If it is true, we shall now breathe easily.” He said she should have been deported “so the nation would not have unnecessarily wasted its time and energy on her.”

But Muslim clergyman Fazlulhaq Amini, who has already issued a religious edict calling for Nasrin’s death, declared “there is no safe haven anywhere in the world for the infidel.” A spokesman for 13 Bangladeshi fundamentalist groups demanded that the government of Prime Minister Khaleda Zia conduct a trial for the author in absentia and said it will be toppled if it fails to do so.

As protests from some Islamic organizations mounted, security was stepped up in the diplomatic enclave of the Bangladeshi capital where Western countries have their missions.

For those here who see the best guarantee for Bangladesh’s future in the consolidation of the existing secular state, the controversy over Nasrin sums up, in microcosm, the debate about what sort of Islam--fundamentalist or more tolerant--will prevail in the poor, densely populated country that until 1971 was part of Pakistan.

Outside Bangladesh, the case has been chiefly seen as one of the perils of free expression faced with an increasingly militant Islam.

It evokes parallels with the plight of Indian-born Salman Rushdie, who has been in hiding since 1989 because of Muslim death threats sparked by his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

Nasrin’s case also has posed questions about the role that women can rightfully aspire to in modern Islamic society.

The usually high-profile novelist and polemicist went into hiding on June 4 after many of her fellow citizens reacted with rage to comments she supposedly made about Islam’s holiest book. Nasrin was quoted as telling a Calcutta newspaper that the Koran needs to be revised to bring it up to date. She later said she had been misquoted.

Despite her denials, the often outspoken Nasrin was charged by a Dhaka judge with hurting religious feelings in a country whose population is 90% Muslim; a warrant was issued for her arrest. If convicted under a statute dating to the British colonial era, she could be sentenced to two years in prison.

On Aug. 3, after two months underground, Nasrin resurfaced in a sari and head scarf before the Bangladesh High Court and was granted bail upon payment of $120. “I feared for my life, and that is why I was hiding,” she told the court. No trial date was set then.

Militant Muslim groups had offered cash rewards of up to $5,000 to anyone who killed Nasrin. On June 30, they organized rallies across the country that brought 50,000 people into Dhaka’s streets, shouting for her execution. At least 55 people were hurt in clashes between her foes, supporters and police.

In Stockholm, Swedish Foreign Minister Margaretha af Ugglas told a news conference that Nasrin was in Sweden on a tourist visa and had not been granted political asylum.

Nasrin, in a brief statement issued through Stockholm journalist Gabriel Gleichmann, said: “I have come to Sweden at the invitation of the Swedish PEN Club (a writers organization) to rest and work. . . . I would like to thank all those who have supported me at home and abroad.”

Although the Bangladesh High Court provided her with police protection after granting her bail, Nasrin appeared fearful to people she met in Dhaka. About two dozen police were deployed at one point outside her apartment; the writer worried aloud that they might not be enough.

When an Associated Press reporter managed last week to sneak past the police cordon and make his way to her 10th-floor apartment, Nasrin snapped: “How could they let you in? This means they are not doing enough to check the visitors.”

Although reunited with her parents, brother and sister, she was still visibly suffering. “I had gone though terrible mental torture,” she said, breaking at one point into sobs. “During the days in hiding, I felt I was dying every moment.”

A physician who has been divorced three times, Nasrin writes with raw and unaccustomed candor about sex, orgasm, rape and family violence.

Last October, she turned clerics en masse against her by publishing the novelette “Lajja” (“Shame”). In searing detail, the book relates how Hindu families in Bangladesh were beaten and had their homes and temples destroyed by angry Muslims avenging the 1992 razing of the Ayodhya mosque in India. In December, the government banned the book; the next month, it confiscated the author’s passport.