Dhimmi Life: Bangladesh

Taslima Nasreen

She lives a life in near captivity. Holed up in her tenth floor apartment in downtown Dhaka, deprived of her passport and with a death sentence fatwa dangling over her head, Bangladesh's firebrand feminist-writer Taslima Nasreen now spends her days quietly penning her experiences of being "imprisoned" in her own country and home.

For Nasreen, who has always provoked the ire of Bangladesh's fundamentalist groups, the September 24 declaration of a fatwa - an award of 50,000 takas for her head - by the Bangladesh Sahaba Sainik Parishad (BSSP) is the biggest blow ever.
The BSSP, a little-known Sylhet-based group of clerics, is seeking to punish her for "writings which conspire against Islam".
Life as a fiercely independent and outspoken writer has never been easy for this 31-year-old anaesthetist-turned-writer, but the last 10 months have been the most harrowing.
In January, the Bangladeshi authorities seized her passport, alleging that she had wrongly declared her profession as journalism. And then the Lajja publication, the ensuing controversy and the fatwa. It couldn't have been worse.
Outraged by what she calls the Muslim fundamentalist backlash against the Hindu minority in Bangladesh after the Ayodhya incident and angry with the Khaleda Zia Government's "tacit backing of fundmentalist forces", Nasreen wrote the 79-page Lajja - a story of the life and times of a Hindu family of Dhaka in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition.

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