Taslima Nasrin

Taslima Nasrin (2014)

Taslima Nasrin ( Bengali তসলিমা নাসরিন IAST Tasalimā Nāsarin , Anglicized: Taslima Nasreen ; born August 25, 1962 in Maimansingh ) is a Bangladeshi doctor and writer .

Life

Taslima Nasrin advocates equal rights for women and opposes the suppression of religious minorities in Islamic societies such as her homeland, Bangladesh. Threatened with death by Islamic fundamentalists , she was forced to flee her country in 1994. She first turned to Sweden. Nasrin has lived in exile since then. In 1995 she first lived in Berlin.

Taslima Nasrin's literary work has been translated into thirty languages. Her book Lajja (Shame) sold sixty thousand copies in five months, but then the book was banned and her passport was withdrawn. Other plants in Bangladesh and West Bengal were also banned.

After her escape in 1994 she received the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought . In 2004, Taslima Nasrin was awarded the UNESCO Prize for Promoting Tolerance and Nonviolence. In 2002 she received the Erwin Fischer Prize of the International Association of Non-Denominational and Atheists . In 2015 she received the Emperor Has No Clothes Award from the Freedom From Religion Foundation .

She is one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the 12 against Islamism as a new totalitarian threat.

In 2004, an Indian Muslim cleric offered 20,000 rupees reward to anyone who would "blacken their face", an act considered a grave insult. In March 2007, the All India Ibtehad Council offered 500,000 rupees for beheading her. The group's president, Taqi Raza Khan, said the bounty would only be withdrawn if they apologized, burned their books and left India.

Nasrin has already been a victim of violence because of her beliefs. She was attacked by supporters of radical Muslims at a reading in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in August 2007 . Nasrin intended to settle in exile in West Bengal. After violent protests by Bengali Muslims in Calcutta (Kolkata) in November 2007, which led to the deployment of the army and the imposition of a night curfew over the city, Nasrin first moved to Jaipur and from there to Delhi. The Indian central government has advised her that her safety can only be guaranteed in Delhi and that her visa may not be extended if she insists on moving to Calcutta. After further death threats, she left for Europe in mid-March 2008. In early 2009 it was announced that she would find refuge in France. The city of Paris will provide its honorary citizen with an apartment on February 1st.

Critics accuse Taslima Nasrin of pleading for changes to the Koran in order to achieve more rights for women. However, she denies this. In 1994, on allegations of this kind, she declared that it was not the Koran but the Sharia that had demanded that it be changed in favor of women.

Allegations in the mid-1990s

In the German media there were allegations against Nasrin that she owed her fame only to the media portrayal of her person as an alleged victim. In the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Nasrin was called a "false martyr". Burkhard Müller-Ullrich wrote about Nasrin in 1996: “It is simply grotesque that an asylum seeker of such a small intellectual size as Taslima Nasrin is celebrated as an intellectual star”. "Your novel pamphlet 'Lajja' completely failed the domestic criticism - not only because it was recognized as linguistic trash, but also because word got around that the author had copied uncontrollably with others".

Works

Taslima Nasrin, together with Ibn Warraq : Why I am not a Muslim , Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-88221-838-X
Shame. Lajja , ISBN 3-596-13153-7
Song of a sad night Women between Religion and Emancipation , ISBN 3-453-12298-4 or ISBN 3-455-11141-6
Talking about one's own country , 1995, ISBN 3-89480-126-3
The Girl I Was , ISBN 3-499-60945-2

literature

Peter Priskil : Taslima Nasrin - The murder call and its background . Ahriman, ISBN 3-89484-402-7 (apologetic).
Burkhard Müller-Ullrich : media fairy tale. Thinkers in journalism . Munich 1998, ISBN 3-442-75532-8 , pp. 77-90 (critical).