Controversial Author Comes Home

The Associated Press

 By FARID HOSSAIN

DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) -- Facing death threats from Islamic extremists,
controversial feminist author Taslima Nasrin said Monday she risked her
life to return to Bangladesh out of love of her ailing mother.

``I know I've taken great risks. But I want to be with my mother in her
last days,'' Nasrin told The Associated Press by telephone in her first
interview since coming back to her homeland, where her presence has sparked
angry protests.

``I fear for my life. I don't know what is going to happen to me,'' she
said from her hideout.

Nasrin, 36, had lived in self-imposed exile in Europe since 1994, when the
government ordered her arrest for blaspheming Islam. She returned to
Bangladesh with her 60-year-old mother, Eid-ul-Ara Begum, who underwent
treatment in New York for colon cancer.

Islamic extremists have renewed their death threat and announced a cash
reward of $5,000 to anyone who kills her. Hundreds of Muslims paraded
through the Dhaka streets on Friday calling for Nasrin to be hanged.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's liberal government is under pressure to
reopen a 1994 criminal case against her.

Government lawyers said the case is pending and she is still a fugitive in
the eyes of law.

Some Muslims were angered after a newspaper quoted Nasrin as saying the
Koran, the Islamic holy book, should be rewritten.

She has denied making the comments, but suggested changes in Islamic laws
to give more rights to women in Bangladesh's conservative Islamic society.

Her novel ``Lajja,'' or ``Shame,'' criticized Muslims for attacking the
country's minority Hindus after Hindu zealots destroyed a mosque in
neighboring India in 1992.

``Taslima Nasrin is a self-confessed infidel. Its government's moral
obligation to arrest her,'' Matiur Rahman Nizami, a spokesman for the
country's largest conservative Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami, said in a
statement Monday.

Liberal writers have criticized the anti-Nasrin protests and asked the
government to protect her.

A tiny minority here wants a state run according to Islamic law. Bangladesh
is a predominately Muslim country with a secular constitution that has been
run by a series of liberal governments.

Nasrin fled to Stockholm, Sweden, in 1994 after former Prime Minister
Khaleda Zia's government ordered her arrest. From there, she traveled to
many European and American cities to speak to writers and women's rights
activists.