Author: Agencies
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: August 19, 2007
URL: http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=91043
Undeterred by the attack on her by radical
Muslim fundamentalists in Hyderabad and a fatwa against her, exiled Bangladeshi
writer Taslima Nasreen is busy penning the sequel of Lajja, 14 years after
the book annoyed clerics in her country.
"Sharam, the sequel of Lajja (Shame),
has the principal characters of the first novel who came over to India from
Bangladesh in 1993 and is set in the backdrop here," Taslima said.
Lajja, which drew attention to the torture
of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, raised the hackles of Muslim clerics and
was banned by the Bangladesh government.
Terming her detractors as proponents of "irrational
blind faith," Taslima, who has been living in exile for 12 years and
whose Bangladeshi passport stands revoked, said "they are averse to a
rationale logical mind."
Taslima was attacked by activists of Majlis-e-Ittehadul
Muslimeen in Hyderabad on August nine at the release of the Telugu translation
of her latest work 'Shodh'.
She said though her forthright views about
the condition of women in Muslim society had been widely publicised and invited
the wrath of clerics, she had also come out strongly against fundamentalists
in other religions on certain issues.
"I had criticised those who stopped the
shooting of Deepa Mehta's film Water in Varanasi in 2001 in my writing in
a leading Bengali daily," Nasreen recalled.
