Taslima Nasrin

Taslima Nasrin (born 25 August 1962) is a Bangladeshi writer, physician, feminist, secular humanist, and activist.

She is known for her writing on women's oppression and criticism of religion; some of her books are banned in Bangladesh.

She has also been blacklisted and banished from the Bengal region, both from Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.

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 wrote and edited a poetry journal called Shenjuti.

After graduation, she worked at a family planning clinic in Mymensingh, then practised at the gynaecology department of Mitford hospital and at the anaesthesia department of Dhaka Medical College hospital.

While she studied and practised medicine, she saw girls who had been raped; she also heard women cry out in despair in the delivery room if their baby was a girl.

She was born into a Muslim family; however, she became an atheist over time.

In the course of writing she took a feminist approach.

She started publishing prose in the late 1980s, and produced three collections of essays and four novels before the publication of her documentary novel Lajja (লজ্জা) in which a Hindu family was being attacked by Muslim fanatics and decided to leave the country.

Nasrin suffered a number of physical and other attacks for her critical scrutiny of Islam and her demand for women's equality.

Hundreds of thousands of fanatics took to the streets demanding her execution by hanging.

Early in her literary career, Nasrin 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 gained global attention by the beginning of 1990s owing to her essays and novels with feminist views and criticism of what she characterizes as all "misogynistic" religions.

In October 1993, a radical fundamentalist group called the Council of Islamic Soldiers offered a bounty for her death.

Nasrin has been living in exile since 1994, with multiple fatwas calling 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 criticism from Islamic fundamentalists.

A few hundred thousand demonstrators called her "an apostate appointed by imperial forces to vilify Islam"; a member of 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.

After fleeing Bangladesh in 1994, Nasrin spent the next ten years in exile in Sweden, Germany, France and the US.

Leaving Bangladesh towards the end of 1994, Nasrin lived in exile in Western Europe and North America for ten years.

Her Bangladeshi passport had been revoked; she was granted citizenship by the Swedish government and took refuge in Germany.

She allegedly had to wait for six years (1994–1999) to get a visa to visit India.

In 1998 she wrote Meyebela, My Bengali Girlhood, her biographical account from birth to adolescence.

She never got a Bangladeshi passport to return to the country when her mother, and later her father, were on their deathbeds.

After living more than a decade in Europe and the United States, she moved to India in 2004 and has been staying there on a resident permit long-term, multiple-entry or 'X' visa since.

She now lives in New Delhi, India.

Nasrin is the daughter of Dr. Rajab Ali and Edul Ara, who were from a Bengali Muslim of Mymensingh.

Her father was a physician, and a professor of Medical Jurisprudence in Mymensingh Medical College, also at Sir Salimullah Medical College, Dhaka and Dhaka Medical College.

She returned to the East and relocated to Kolkata, India, in 2004, where she lived until 2007.

In 2004, she was granted a renewable temporary residential permit by India and moved to Kolkata in the state of West Bengal, which shares a common heritage and language with Bangladesh; in an interview in 2007, after she had been forced to flee, she called Kolkata her home.

The government of India extended her visa to stay in the country on a periodic basis, though it refused to grant her Indian citizenship.

While living in Kolkata, Nasrin regularly contributed to Indian newspapers and magazines, including Anandabazar Patrika and Desh, and, for some time, wrote a weekly column in the Bengali version of The Statesman.

Even abroad controversy followed: on the US Independence Day weekend in 2005, she criticized US foreign policy and tried to read her poem titled "America" to a large Bengali crowd at the North American Bengali Conference at Madison Square Garden in New York City, but was booed off the stage.

Again her criticism of Islam was met with opposition from religious fundamentalists: in June 2006, Syed Noorur Rehaman Barkati, the imam of Kolkata's Tipu Sultan Mosque, admitted offering money to anyone who "blackened [that is, publicly humiliated] Ms Nasreen's face."

After she was physically attacked by fanatics in Hyderabad, she was forced to live under house arrest in Kolkata, and finally, she was made to leave West Bengal on 22 November 2007.

She was then forced to live under house arrest in New Delhi for three months.

She had no other alternative but to leave India in 2008.

She was not allowed to live in India for a while, but ultimately Nasrin, determined to live in the subcontinent, moved to India from the US.