Nasrin's problems began when her newspaper columns were brought out as a book, Nirbachitha, and won an important literary prize given by Ananda Bazaar Patrika, a newspaper published in Calcutta. In January 1993, when she tried to board a plane to Calcutta, she was denied an exit visa on the grounds that her occupation (she is both a physician and a writer) was listed incorrectly on her passport. As a result, the government confiscated her passport.

The next month her novel Lajja (Shame) was published. Nasrin wrote Lajja in a white heat in 1992, after Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) destroyed the ancient Babri mosque in Ayodhya. This act led to terrible communal riots in India, with many deaths on both sides. (The same BJP is now running the Indian government and trying to erect a temple on the site of the destroyed mosque, which they believe to have been the birthplace of the god Rama.) In response to this provocation by Hindu extremists in India, Muslims in Bangladesh attacked Hindu families and businesses, resulting in terror, destruction and confiscation of property. Lajja, which showed the sufferings of one Hindu family, was a sensation, selling 50,000 copies in Bangladesh in its first six months of publication. It was also widely promoted by the BJP in India, in pirated editions.

The BJP's use of Nasrin's book to encourage anti-Muslim feeling in India angered many in Bangladesh, while its content enraged religious extremists, who pressured the government to withdraw it from circulation. The party in power at the time was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which banned it in July 1993. The ban was publicly protested by writers and human rights activists, who saw it as a sign of the growing influence of the religious right.

It was not the only sign. Ain O Salish Kendra, a Bangladeshi women's humanrights organization, had been documenting a noticeable increase in crimes of violence against women in the countryside, as religious zealots had begun to take the law into their own hands, returning to punishments that were sanctioned by Sharia but outlawed under the Bangladeshi civil code. In January 1993 a newly married couple in Sylhet was buried chest-deep and stoned for zina (adultery) because the woman had previously been divorced; in May, a woman in Madhukhali was burned at the stake, also for zina. In response to such events, Nasrin's newspaper columns became more militant. On September 1, 1993, a tribunal in Kaligani, led by the superintendent of the local madrassah (religious school), condemned a 16-year-old girl to a public flaying with 101 lashes; she had been accused of having an affair with a Hindu boy. After the beating, the girl died, allegedly a suicide. Nasrin wrote a newspaper column about this incident, calling upon the government to indict the mullahs involved for premeditated murder.

The backlash was swift. On September 16, 500 members of the Bangladesh Sahaba Sainik Parishad, or Council of Soldiers for Islam (CSI), a militant group based in a madrassah in Sylhet, held a rally calling for Nasrin to be executed for "blasphemy and conspiracy against Islam, the Holy Koran and its prophet." On September 23 they offered a bounty of $1,250 for her death within fifteen days. On October 2 they staged another march, this time threatening a general strike unless she was arrested by October 7. Though political strikes are common in Bangladesh, they are not normally aimed at individuals.

September 11, 2001, shows these events in a new light. Wahhabism, the extremely strict form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, had not only penetrated the countryside in Pakistan and Afghanistan (where the Taliban captured Kabul in 1996) but was also gaining a foothold in Bangladesh, carried by migrant laborers and spread by modern communications. Sylhet had been a center of emigration since the 1950s; thousands of young men went abroad each year to settle and send money home to their families; increasingly, they went to the Middle East. The money they earned there enabled them to come back and become landowners and leaders in their villages, and to set up madrassahs that taught the Saudi variation of Islam. The fatwa put on Taslima Nasrin in 1993 must now be seen as an early warning signal that this globalized, politicized form of Islamic fundamentalism was growing more aggressive and looking for an opportunity to test its strength in Bangladesh.

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