On October 21, 1993, leaders of the CSI held a press conference in Dhaka to announce they were spreading the campaign against Nasrin throughout the country. They demanded that she be executed and said that if the government did not oblige, they would try her themselves. They also announced the inauguration of a new campaign to institute the death penalty for blasphemy and other crimes against Islam, the Prophet Mohammed or the Koran. Members of the group had already brought charges against two of Nasrin's books in private legal suits, on the grounds that they questioned Islamic law and offended religious sentiments.

A brief item on this press conference went out on an AP wire and was picked up in England, and the London office of International PEN notified me, as I was then chair of its Women Writers' Committee. I obtained Nasrin's contact information from Ain O Salish Kendra and began a regular correspondence with her by fax.

International PEN and Amnesty International wrote the Bangladeshi government about returning her passport, which it did in April 1994. Nasrin left the country in May to speak in Paris. On her way home she passed through India and gave an interview to a reporter from the Calcutta Statesman, who asked provocatively if she would support changes in the Koran. Nasrin's affirmative reply, which she says was misquoted, created a great furor in Bangladesh, and she wrote the Statesman to clarify her views on May 11, 1994:

I do not hold the view that "the Koran should be revised thoroughly," because I think it is impossible to revise the Koran.... Why should we try to change a religious text which is held as sacred by many? My view on this issue is clear and categorical. I hold the Koran, the Vedas, the Bible, and all such religious texts determining the lives of their followers as "out of place and out of time." We have crossed the sociohistorical contexts in which these were written and therefore we should not be guided by their precepts. The question of revision, thorough or otherwise, is irrelevant. We have to move beyond these ancient texts if we want to progress. In order to respond to our spiritual needs, let humanism be our new faith.

A leading Bangladeshi cleric told the press that her retraction was worse than her original statement and more filthy than The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Another called Nasrin "an apostate appointed by imperialist forces to vilify Islam," put a price of $2,500 on her head and called for her immediate death by hanging. The following week, 5,000 members of the extremist Muslim party Jamaat-e-Islami staged a demonstration in Dhaka calling for Nasrin's execution. This was an alarming development; the campaign against her was no longer confined to an obscure rural sect but had reached the capital.

And why did the government of Bangladesh not act against these extremists? Then as now, it was led by the BNP under Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia, and Jamaat-e-Islami, which then held a number of seats in Parliament, was a member of its coalition. If the Prime Minister had moved against the Islamists in 1993, Jamaat might have withdrawn from the coalition and her government might have fallen. So Prime Minister Zia sacrificed democracy to party expediency and gave in to the fundamentalist agenda. On June 4, 1994, the police chief in central Dhaka filed a case against Nasrin under Section 295A of the Penal Code, which provides for two years' imprisonment for "deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class of citizens by insulting its religion or religious beliefs." A warrant was issued for her arrest, and she and her family went into hiding.

At that point Taslima Nasrin became an international press sensation, the "female Rushdie," a poster girl for the oppression of Muslim women. Such international press interest was unprecedented for a writer who had not even been translated into one of the "power languages"; of course it was a good story, with an appealing heroine who could be presented as a damsel in distress, but despite the fact that the Western press was sympathetic, I soon came to see their coverage as a double-edged sword. Many of the reporters I talked to seemed to want to use the story as a stick with which to beat Islam; I would talk about the rising tide of all kinds of religious extremism, Christian, Jewish and Muslim; but none of that ever got into a story. The Western press tended to portray her solely as a victim and symbol of the oppression of Muslim women, downplaying her courage and ignoring the work of the Bangladeshi women's movement. And, worst of all, every new Western article or broadcast about Nasrin seemed to create a more vigorous desire to kill her back home; her persecutors reveled in the publicity. Huge crowds of bearded men marched in the streets of Dhaka, holding up her picture and shaking nooses for the TV cameras. There were counterdemonstrations by feminists and human rights supporters, not only in Bangladesh but all over the world.

Nasrin remained underground for six weeks, and the situation was very problematic. So many organizations were involved that coordination was difficult; the press was all over everything, and the cost of a mistake could be a person's life. There were also issues of conflict of interest, since some of the human rights people involved were also journalists writing about her case. In arguments over strategy, the journalists, most of whom happened to be men, increasingly lined up on one side, urging ever more heat from the international press, while the rest of us, mainly women, wanted to hold back. Two guys, one Swedish and one French, actually declared they would go into Bangladesh and rescue Nasrin personally, despite her lawyers' request that they do no such thing; one responded to my incredulous questions by saying, "Does a lawyer in Bangladesh know more than a European journalist?" Several of us concluded that there had to be a better way to do this kind of human rights work and, in the fall of 1994, founded the Women's World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development (Women's WORLD) to develop a more feminist approach to helping besieged women writers.

Taslima Nasrin remained in hiding until August 1994, when her lawyers, Dr. Kamal Hossain and Sarah Hossain, with background pressure from several states, reached an agreement with the Bangladeshi government. She was offered a visa to attend a conference in Stockholm, made a brief court appearance, was given bail and left immediately for Sweden, where she received political asylum. Although she has moved around quite a bit since then, she is unable to return to her own country. She tried in 1998, when her mother was dying of cancer, and was immediately greeted by the same mob scene she had fled in 1994, somewhat reduced in size but still virulent. Her father is now old and she would like to see him, but the same thing would undoubtedly happen again. In fact, in mid-October of this year, she was tried in absentia by a rural court in Gopalganj, about sixty miles from the capital, in a case brought by a local extremist leader; the magistrate found her guilty of offending religious sentiments and sentenced her to a year in jail should she return to Bangladesh. In addition, three of her books, including Meyebela and its sequel, are still banned in Bangladesh.

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