RELIGION AS A WEAPON AGAINST WOMEN

Taslima Nasrin has now left Bangladesh and is now living in exile in Sweden. Following the Islamic issuing a fatwa against her for her writing and comments on Islamic law, she has been expounding her position while visiting various parts of Europe.

Taslima Nasrin now lives in hiding in Sweden as a guest of Swedish PEN. She has visited Paris and Prague and has addressed a private meeting organised by the Human-Etisk Forbund in Oslo, and in December she visited Great Britain. She also visited Strasbourg, where she received the Sakharov Prize of £12,000. In Norway she was awarded 10,000 Norwegian crowns from HAMU --Humanist Action for Human Rights in Developing Countries.

Her trip to Britain, which was organised by International PEN, had to be kept secret until it was over, which made impossible any kind of proper public meeting, and she spent most of her time giving press, radio and. television interviews and making informal contact with human rights, women's and anti-fundamentalist groups. She received visitors in an office of a humanist organisation.

Her primary ideology is clearly militant feminism, drawn from the bitter predicament of women in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the Indian sub-continent and the Muslim world. But she is also an uncompromising atheist, who has rejected not just Islam but all supernatural religion, demands the replacement of established religion by a secular state and has developed a sophisticated conception of humanism not from other people but from her own experience and observation

In Oslo she spoke to about 70 invited guests in the premises of the Norwegian Humanist and Ethical Association. Taslima Nasrin is reported by Barbro Sveen:

'I don't mind people who are convinced religious people provided that they keep quiet about it. Both my parents are religious, and I respect them and their attitude to life. People who live according to their religious belief should be respected. But I have also seen the other side of religion, the one that results in violence, rapes, persecution and death. I have seen groups of people professing the same religion fight each other bitterly. I have also witnessed how millions of Hindus have been obliged to leave their country just because they are Hindus and not Muslims. I asked myself: is this religion?

'Later I discovered other things. Not a single religion affords equality to women. They are always treated as number two and often even as slaves. It is woman's duty to please a man - never the other way round. Is this equality? I am a rationalist. I am a doctor and I do not believe that it is possible to get well from an illness by praying to God for recovery.

'I do know now that there are fundamentalists within every religion, not only .within Islam. Just think of those Christians in Europe who are out for the blood of Muslims or other Christians who are against family planning.

'Historically, we find that every religion is subject to changes. In earlier times Christian women called witches were burnt at the stake. This is not done nowadays. Hindus used to bum the widow - alive - on the same pyre as her dead husband. Every single religion tends to suppress women. That is why religions and women do not get on very well together. Therefore -- if we are of the opinion that women have a right to be human beings - we have to separate religion from the state. It is only in a secular society that women can rely on being free.'

NASRIN IN DIALOGUE IN BRITAIN

Vera Lustig, who attended the meeting with Taslima Nasrin at a Women's Theatre Conference in December in London, writes:

Last summer as we watched on our TV screens thousands of men massing in the streets of Dhaka, calling for the blood of writer Taslima Nasrin, it seemed that they would indeed succeed in silencing her forever. We might not have dared hope that a few months later she would be speaking in London.

Although the Bangladeshi doctor, feminist and writer has so far survived the death threats, there is little cause for celebration. True, she has been given a safe haven by the Swedish Centre of the campaigning and support group for persecuted writers, International PEN. But while she lives in exile, unable to move around freely, her family in Bangladesh are being victimised.

In Britain Nasrin appeared at 'Blood and Letters', a conference organised by the women's theatre company, 'The Sphinx', in conjunction with the National Theatre's Education department. Her visit was planned by PEN in an atmosphere of total secrecy. Nasrin's presence was only announced by the Chair, Helena Kennedy, QC, when the 250-strong audience - predominantly women - was installed in the National Theatre's Cottesloe auditorium, with the security man hovering in the wings and the building unobtrusively surrounded. Nasrin shared the platform with dissident Ukrainian poet Irina Ratushinskaya (now resident in Britain) and writer and activist on black women's and anti-racist issues, Amrit Wilson.

Nasrin comes from a liberal and sympathetic Muslim family; but as a gynaecologist, she saw for herself the separation of women 'from the entire human race' She spoke of women weeping after they had given birth to girls; of women with ruptured wombs from bearing child after child in an attempt to produce a son to please their husbands; of women beaten, murdered even for setting up their own co-operatives; of malnutrition,' because 'the men get all the best food'.

Helena Kennedy asked Nasrin whether she tried deliberately to shock and what she felt about accusations from some quarters that Lajja was titillatory. Amrit Wilson intervened with a rather lengthy tirade against the West's attitude to human rights and its complicity with oppressive regimes and sectarian strife. She also took issue with the word 'fundamentalism', saying that it had come to evoke Muslims and therefore was becoming part of the currency of racism. When the meeting was thrown open to the floor, this comment was strongly refuted.

Much of the tenor of the conference was divisive, both before and after the discussion was opened up to include the audience. The emphasis on Nasrin as a feminist, rather than as a dissident, excluded Ratushinskaya, who declared herself to be a Christian and not really a feminist. Sexual politics did not come into the Soviet equation in the same way as they do in those countries where sexual apartheid is practised. What most forms of oppression do have in common is their grounding in patriarchy -- a word brought into the debate by a member of the audience.

There was much argument as to what forms fundamentalism took (though none about what are its roots), and a representative of the British group Women Against Fundamentalism spoke of the small but powerful fundamentalist Christian lobby in the UK, which was intervening in educational matters such as the daily collective act of worship and the content of sexual education. The consensus was that it was vital that the state should remain secular. Yet, Ratushinskaya's experience shows that a secular state, too, can practise a form of ideological fundamentalism which destroys lives.

UNIVERSAL HUMANISM

When asked by an individual interviewer about her ambiguous position as a western liberal humanist in an eastern religious society, she protested: 'Humanism is not western or eastern or southern or northern. It is just humanism' (Guardian, 14 December I994).

The English translation of Shame, which has been published in New Delhi, bears the epigraph: 'Let Another Name for Religion be Humanism'. She has added a preface which contains the following passage:

'The disease of religious fundamentalism is not restricted to Bangladesh alone and it must be fought at every turn. For myself, I am not afraid of any challenge or threat to my life. I will continue to write and protest against persecution and discrimination. I am convinced that the only way the fundamentalist forces can be stopped is if all of us who are secular and humanistic join together and fight their malignant influences. I, for one, will not be silenced.'