About Taslima Nasrin Author Taslima Nasrin (Bengali: তসলিমা নাসরিন; also Taslima Nasreen, born 25 August 1962) is a Bengali author and former physician who has lived in exile since 1994. From a literary profile as a poet in the late 1980s, she rose to global fame by the end of the 20th century owing to her essays and novels with feminist views and criticism of Islam in particular and of religion in general. Since leaving Bangladesh in 1994 on account of threat calls, she has lived in many countries; as of June 2011 she lives in New Delhi. She works to build support for secular humanism, freedom of thought, equality for women, and human rights by publishing, lecturing, and campaigning. Personal life[edit] Nasrin was born to Rajab Ali and Edul Ara in the town of Mymensingh in 1962. Her father was a physician and she was raised in a secular environment. She became a gynecologist. Nasrin has been married three times: first to Bengali poet Rudra Mohammad Shahidullah, then to Bangladeshi journalist Nayeemul Islam Khan and finally to editor Minar Mahmood. Early career[edit] 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 Shenjuti After graduation, she worked at a family planning clinic in Mymensingh for a while, then she practised at gynecology department of Mitford hospital and at anesthesia department Dhaka medical college hospital. While she studied and practised medicince she saw girls were raped and heard in the delivery room women cry out in despair if their baby was a girl. She was born into a Muslim family, however she became an atheist over time. In course of writing she took a feminist approach Literary career until Lajja[edit] Early in her literary career, she wrote mainly poetry, and published half a dozen collections of poetry between 1982 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 (Bengali: লজ্জা Lôjja), or Shame, in which a Hindu family is persecuted by Muslims. This publication changed her life and career dramatically. Nasrin suffered a number of physical and other attacks following the publication of Lajja. She had written against Islamic philosophy, angering many Muslims of Bangladesh, who called for a ban on her novel. 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 abolition 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 and religious Muslims. A few hundred thousand demonstrators called her an apostate appointed by imperial forces to vilify Islam; a militant faction threatened to set 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, consequently ceasing her medical practice and becoming a full-time writer and activist.
Posted on: Sat, 02 Aug 2014 17:20:41 +0000
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