Death To the Author

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."