One woman lifts the veil on her Islamic life

Less than a decade ago, Muslim clerics in Bangladesh issued a series of fatwas against a 31-year-old woman who had written a novel they found offensive. The woman, Taslima Nasrin, was a physician from a small town in the northern part of the country. Having worked as an anesthesiologist in the gynecological department of a hospital, she had treated scores of battered women and raped girls who had no legal or social recourse against their attackers. Prompted by these experiences, Nasrin had written a series of newspaper columns addressing the question of women’s rights under Islam. In 1993, she had spoken out against the stoning death of a woman whose second marriage had been deemed a violation of Islamic law: The woman was buried waist-deep in a pit and killed with more than 100 stones. Later that year, Nasrin’s “Shame” was published -- a novel about the plight of Hindu citizens of Bangladesh under Muslim rule. This, the clerics declared, was the last straw. Nasrin’s writings were officially deemed apostasy -- an offense punishable in Islam by death -- and a fatwa was issued with a price on her head.

Through the summer of 1994, 300,000 Bengali Muslims participated in violent nationwide strikes against Nasrin. Prompted by the mullahs, they demanded her arrest and public hanging. The government responded by bringing criminal charges against Nasrin. She was forced into hiding and later exile, where she lingers still, but she was not silenced. Over the last eight years, she has continued to write novels, essays and poetry. And she has published the first volume of her memoirs.

“Meyebela” is the story of a young girl born into a middle-class Muslim family in what in 1962 was still East Pakistan. Nasrin’s father is a former peasant who received a secular education and who now practices as a physician in government employ. He personifies the often torturous plight of many citizens of traditional societies engaged in the effort of secular modernization: He is enlightened enough to believe in the rule of Reason above Faith, the merits of secular laws over religious ones and the importance of education for both men and women. But he cannot shake the vestiges of a thousand years of inherited thought, the legacy of lies, cruelty and violence that is often visited upon the weak -- women, children and ethnic and religious minorities -- in such societies.

So, he marries his wife when she is only 12, but he does allow her to stay in school until her own father steps in to put an end to such foolishness. He bemoans his wife’s ignorance, but he keeps her restricted to the house much of the time and makes every decision, large and small, regarding the family. He tells his children that an education is the only possible route to happiness, but he beats them -- and his wife -- violently when they fail his expectations, straps his sons to a tree when they disobey him, and he makes his daughters rub mustard oil in their eyes so as not to fall asleep over their books at night. He practices medicine -- a science devoted to improving human life -- but he loots the homes of his Hindu neighbors after they are driven away in the war of independence in 1971.

Nasrin grows up watching her mother, aunts and female neighbors be beaten and humiliated by their men. She lives in a permanent state of terror at her father’s ever-increasing violence. She is so alienated by him that she forgets how to speak in his presence. She understands quickly that her mother has no refuge or escape: The laws of the country, based on Islamic principles, recognize no rights for women, and their upbringing -- little or no education, no job training and very limited contact with the world outside the house -- has virtually ensured that they will starve to death without help from a man.

Almost by instinct, therefore, Nasrin keeps to herself the fact that she has been molested by a male cousin and an uncle. She stands by quietly as her mother pleads for help under her husband’s blows, as her brother is almost killed by their father, as her mother, in turn, beats and starves the servant girls in the house. She is too weak to fight the seemingly invincible, but she does know enough to distinguish between what is and what should be.

When Nasrin is in elementary school, her mother’s helplessness leads to a depression that leaves her nearly mad. She emerges from the depression in the early 1970s, only to become a regular at the home of a fundamentalist cleric who promises eternal salvation at the expense of earthly suffering.

In the mullah’s home, young women are kept prisoner in windowless rooms with near unbearable heat and humidity. They are brought here by their fathers as punishment for bad behavior, or if they are believed to be possessed by jinn. To cure the girls, the mullah’s officers beat them, or visit with them behind closed doors. Every day, visitors come to pray at the mullah’s feet -- the women fighting each other for a chance to touch the mullah, waiting for him to expectorate so they may swallow the phlegm or rub it on their faces and chests in hopes that his holiness will be transmitted through his fluids. They bring the mullah money and food, massage his body, take to heart his every admonition, every command, every warning of damnation if they stray from the path.

None of this makes sense to young Nasrin. At school, she has learned about the moon landing, but the mullah tells her mother that this is “just a rumor spread by Christians.” She has learned to eat at a table, that slavery is wrong and that attacking innocent neighbors is a sin. The mullah, however, has said that it is “sinful to eat at a table. Jews and Christians do that.” He claims that the Koran permits men to have sexual relations with their female slaves, that real Muslims have a duty to attack and set fire to Hindu homes. “This is simply an effort to save Islam from its enemies,” he says. Surely, Nasrin imagines, the mullah has misinterpreted the Koran, presented his own version to the scores of believers who, illiterate in Bengali, have the additional handicap of having to recite prayers in Arabic, a language they do not understand. But Nasrin’s logic, like the locks her father puts on the doors to stop his wife from leaving for the mullah’s house, is no match for the woman’s new fundamentalism. When Nasrin questions the mullah’s teachings, her mother berates and beats her. When she asks the meaning of the prayers her mother forces her to recite in Arabic, she is threatened with hell’s fire. Still hoping that her mother has misunderstood Islam, she searches the house and finds a Bengali translation of the Koran. Here, she reads that the “earth always stands still. If it does not lean on one side, it is because all the mountains, acting like nails, are holding it in place.” She reads that “[o]ne of the bones in a woman’s neck is crooked. That is the reason why no woman thinks straight, or walks on a straight path.” She reads that “if a woman is disobedient, her husband has the right to ... talk some sense into her, but if she remains disobedient, he can beat her.” She reads that men can have four wives, that they can divorce any of them simply by uttering the word talaq -- divorce -- three times. Women are not allowed to seek a divorce at all.

If the Koran contains such principles, 14-year-old Nasrin concludes, then it isn’t a single man or mullah one can blame for the injustice committed against women; it is Islam itself, the rule of blind faith at the expense of reason, of religion instead of logic. “Meyebela” ends at the threshold of this realization. It will be many years until the quiet young girl will find the voice and the heart to commit blasphemy and earn a fatwa or two. Her courage is all the more stunning to those who have lived under the reign of silence that pervades the Muslim world, who have seen how not only men but also very often women join in the effort to perpetuate fear and violence against other females, how a dissenting voice, a rebel mind, is quickly reformed or purged.

Ultimately, however, it isn’t Nasrin’s courage or even the horror of what she must endure under the fatwa that makes her story remarkable: It is the message she brings to the well-intentioned observers in the West who have explained away the damage caused by the rule of Islam in terms of economic misery or the loss of identity in the Muslim world. This wish not to offend believers of another religion, not to criticize what we do not understand or not to impose Western values on the East, although noble in its intentions, misses the point entirely: The truth, as Nasrin and a handful of other brave souls have dared to utter, is that not all traditions are worthy of keeping, that not all long-held principles are equally valid. Not every word written in a holy book -- any holy book -- is indeed holy. Not every attempt to bring enlightenment to the shadows of ignorance can be dismissed as “cultural imperialism.”

In the West, reform movements within Christianity and Judaism, and the separation of church and state, have brought much-needed relief from the inevitable tyranny of absolutist thought. In the Muslim world so far, as in all other places and times where religion has ruled supreme, the biggest victims of faith have been the believers themselves.