Death To the Author

By JAMES WALSH

Her face is among the best known in her homeland, a status most authors would envy. In Taslima Nasrin's case, it is cause for dread. The writer whose image is framed by a noose on hundreds of vindictive placards went into hiding two months ago when her challenge of Scripture prompted legal charges and Muslim fatwas, or religious decrees, calling for her death. Last week, as she emerged from a Toyota sedan into Dhaka's High Court building, a black head scarf and tinted glasses disguised her features. She appeared grim and jittery through a 45-minute hearing that ended with her release on $250 bail. Then she fled home to relatives she had not seen since June 4. By the consensus of literary critics, Nasrin, an outspoken feminist and atheist, is no Salman Rushdie. Her rather slapdash stories have gained notice mainly as screeds against the ill treatment of women. What she shares with the author of The Satanic Verses, a novel that earned an Iranian death warrant against Rushdie 5 1/2 years ago, is the misfortune of becoming a lightning rod for the passions of Islamic zealots. Five days before her surprise appearance in court to face charges of making inflammatory statements, a crowd of 100,000 demonstrators gathered outside the Parliament building in Dhaka to bay for her blood. They branded her "an apostate appointed by imperial forces to vilify Islam." One particularly militant faction threatened to loose thousands of poisonous snakes in the capital unless she was executed.

Formerly a practicing physician, Nasrin has been a target of Muslim fundamentalists since the publication last year of her novella Shame (Lajja) which portrays the brutalization of a Hindu family amid Muslim reprisals. A Hindu chauvinist party in India used the book for propaganda purposes, fomenting further animus against her at home. Bangladesh banned the book.

What fully enraged Nasrin's opponents, however, was an interview last May in an Indian newspaper, the Statesman of Calcutta, which quoted -- misquoted, she insists -- a comment by her to the effect that the Koran should be "revised thoroughly" to give equal rights to women. Islam's central article of faith is that the Koran is the literal word of God and thus above revision. Mosques began ringing with calls for her head. Dhaka experienced an astonishing escalation of violent protests, bombings and clashes between Islamic militants and secularists. Nasrin's succes de scandale afforded conservative mullahs and their followers a means of increasing their influence in a country that is nearly 90% Muslim but traditionally nonsectarian in its government policies.

Back home at her apartment last week, Nasrin was virtually crippled by fright after discovering that TIME reporter Farid Hossain had slipped past the official security detail. She shouted, "If he could come in, any killer can walk in!" Two months of fugitive life, in a hideout Nasrin has refused to identify, had taken a toll. During her confinement to a single room, she lost not only weight but all awareness of events in the outside world after the telephone was removed. "It was like living in a jail cell," she said. "I felt as if I was dying every moment."

Her surrender to authorities places her at the mercy of Begum Khaleda Zia, the female Prime Minister of an otherwise male-dominated country. The bail ruling had clearly been prearranged with Nasrin's lawyers, and she was allowed to keep her passport. Zia's government, which has depended on fundamentalist support in Parliament, evidently was hoping that the writer would quietly skip the country to enjoy her newfound celebrity in the West.

In her own country, even liberals have been loath to champion a deliberately sensational writer who chain-smokes, wears her hair in a distinctly untraditional bob and, at the age of 31, has been married and divorced three times. Her characterizations of men as insects and rapists, along with the darts she aims at religion, have made her an easy target for ultraconservatives who resent much of the social change that is transforming Bangladesh. In one of the world's poorest nations, Western-sponsored charitable enterprises provide education, health care and self-employment to some 12.5 million people, including many illiterate girls and women; such efforts have begun to take on the dimensions of culture clash as rural clerics resist what they see as a challenge to their authority and a sabotage of Muslim folkways.

The backlash is a familiar theme by now across the belt of Islamic societies from North Africa to South Asia. Nasrin, while intending to promote feminism, stumbled into a battleground bigger than she anticipated. Even her May 13 clarification of the Statesman quote rebounded against her. She wrote, "I hold the Koran, the Vedas, the Bible and all such religious texts to be out of place and out of time." Many of the faithful, however, see the time as out of joint. They have demonized Nasrin as a way of rewriting the script.

With reporting by Farid Hossain and Anita Pratap/Dhaka and Jefferson Penberthy/New Delhi