These words, are, of course, shocking and will be profoundly offensive to many. But Nasrin believes in being shocking, in throwing herself against the bars of culture rather than trying to dismantle them bit by bit. Her methods have been criticized by many people, including Muslim feminists who call her approach simplistic and say it is necessary to see Islam, and other religions, as historical and social constructs that have been modified in the past and can be again. They say she generalizes incorrectly about Islam from the variant she experienced in Bangladesh, and that anyway you can't change culture by attacking it head on. But Nasrin is not convinced. As she said in a 2000 interview:

People often tell me it is a question of tactics...but I do not believe in tactics. I am not a diplomat or a politician, I just want to say whatever I believe in. That means abolishing religion.... Because religion and freedom of expression, religion and human rights, religion and women's rights, religion and democracy, religion and freedom cannot coexist.... Using tactics takes too long; it will take too much time to establish secularism this way.... What I want is a revolution--for women's freedom, for humanism, and to throw out unnecessary things like religion.

Such fervent anticlericalism sounds strange to me, like something out of the eighteenth century. But of course I live in Multiculture Central, where vehement atheism is likely to be criticized more on the grounds of tactlessness than of blasphemy. Nasrin thinks attacking religion will bring about a world change in consciousness. I have my doubts; perhaps the anger in Meyebela distracts me from its message. I keep wondering how much of this story can be reduced to the unresolved furies of a mistreated child.

And then, since I am American, I think of the blasphemy of Huckleberry Finn, who was taught that slavery is sanctioned by the Bible. Huck believes he is committing a deadly sin by helping his friend Jim, the runaway slave. He is actually writing a note to inform on Jim when he realizes that, even if it means he goes to hell, he can't betray his friend. "All right, then, I'll go to hell," he says, in words that still resonate through the American school system, where Huckleberry Finn is taught in countless English classes--and, over a hundred years after it was written, is one of the most frequently censored books in the United States.

I believe Nasrin's Meyebela will, like Huckleberry Finn, become a classic of controversy, hated, loved, banned, made a school text, removed from the schools and fought over as long as people read. But there is an important difference between the two books. Huckleberry Finn is a novel, and, though it has a first-person narrator, there is a clear distance between Huck, the character, a believer who will do what's right even if it means he has to go to hell, and Twain, the secular-humanist author, who is using Huck to show the hypocrisy of religion. In Meyebela, there is no authorial stance distinct from that of the narrator; the voice is that of the young Taslima as she comes to hate religion and blame God for the cruelties of man. Because all the author's stories, and all her conclusions, are told in the voice of an angry, rebellious, imaginative child, some may feel they are simplistic. But even those who long for more distance must recognize that Meyebela's bravery, vividness and groundbreaking subject matter make it a remarkable achievement, and one that will live.

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