Bøger af Taslima Nasrin

Not since Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses has the publication of a book provoked such mob violence, public outcries for the arrest and death of the author, and international efforts to secure her safety.The animosity and bloodletting between Muslim and Hindu extremists on the Indian subcontinent is centuries old. When the Barbri Mosque at Ayodhya, India, was destroyed by Hindu fundamentalists on December 6, 1992, fierce mob reprisals took place against the Hindu minority in Muslim Bangladesh. These incidents form the backdrop for Dr. Taslima Nasrin's explosive and courageous book, Shame, describing the nightmarish fate of one family within her country's small Hindu community.Her book so angered Muslim leaders that a fatwa, or holy judgment, was invoked, offering thousands of dollars to anyone who would kill her. The Soldiers of Islam accused her of "blasphemy and conspiracy against Islam," while the Bengali government charged her with sacrilege merely for saying that the Koran should be revised. After months in hiding, Dr. Nasrin escaped to Sweden with the aid of American, French, and European Union authorities. Her commitment to eliminating religious extremism worldwide is stated in her preface to Shame: "The disease of religious fundamentalism must be fought at every turn. I will continue to write and protest persecution and discrimination. I am convinced that the only way the fundamentalist forces can be stopped is if all of us join together to fight their malignant influence. I, for one, will not be silenced."

Taslima Nasrin is known for her powerful writing on women''s rights and uncompromising criticism of religious fundamentalism. This defiance on her part had led to the ban on the Bengali original of this book by the Left Front in West Bengal as well as the Government of Bangladesh in 2003. While the West Bengal government lifted the injunction after the ban was struck down by the Calcutta High Court in 2005, Nasrin was eventually driven out of Kolkata and forced to expunge passages from the book, besides facing a four-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. Bold and evocative, Split: A Life opens a window to the experiences and works of one of the bravest writers of our times.