Ground Realities of Bigotry, severed heads and writers' rights

Taslima Nasrin is the winner of the 2004 UNESCO-Madanjeet Singh Prize for the promotion of tolerance and non-violence.

Somewhere in India, a Muslim bigot has decreed that Taslima Nasrin be beheaded. The one who can accomplish the deed, or misdeed, will be rewarded with nothing less than a tidy sum of five hundred thousand rupees.

When you sit back and reflect on the edict, disturbing as it is, you cannot but wonder at the temerity with which the so-called defenders of the faith have regularly taken it upon themselves to define the course of life for people who happen to think of temporal existence in terms of the literary and the philosophical.

It is quite another point whether or not you agree with a writer. But it becomes a positive threat to decency and human dignity when an individual thinks nothing is remiss when he lets the world know that a writer who has aroused his ire must be dispatched with swiftness to the grave.

Such a threat was held out back in 1989 to Salman Rushdie when Ayatollah Khomeini, convinced that he was the new guardian of Islamic religious thought, ordered a bounty on the writer's head. It was a bad move. It went against the principle of liberal thinking. It made Muslims everywhere shudder in unease.

History is, of course, replete with instances of individuals and groups and governments persuading themselves that they ought to be arbiters of the moral parameters which underpin, or should underpin, life. There is the story of Leni Riefenstahl, the German film-maker and admirer of Hitler (until the Third Reich collapsed in a heap), for whom life after 1945 was essentially a tale of unbridled vilification.

There has been nothing to suggest that she collaborated with the Fuhrer in the latter's nefarious attempts to reshape German society according to Aryan specifications. Not a shred of evidence has been found to implicate Riefenstahl in any of the crimes the Nazis committed in their twelve-year dominance of their country. But the film-maker continues to be reviled.

In our times, the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk, whose Nobel certainly ought to have come later, is a man whose running battles with the state convince us that the historical image of the writer being at the receiving end of persecution is a reality that has acquired permanence of a definite kind.

Naguib Mahfouz was never in the good books of the regime, any regime, in his native Egypt. And if you remember the trauma that Boris Pasternak went through once the Nobel for literature came to him in 1960, you will have cause to comprehend anew the many shades of darkness courageous writers live under from day to day.

It is these shades of darkness Taslima Nasrin has been living through for the past thirteen years. There has been no official decree formalising her exile abroad; and yet no government in Bangladesh since 1994 has felt any compulsion of bringing her back home.

There are the bigots who man the ramparts, here in Bangladesh, intent on ensuring that Nasrin does not make her way back to her country. In the mid-1990s, with the Awami League holding political authority in Bangladesh, the natural expectation arose that conditions would be facilitated for the writer to end her exile abroad and come home.