REVIEW
Weeds In Our Own Backyards
Taslima Nasreen's story is about the weeds that stifle the verdancy of humanism.
DHIRAJ SINGH

 


MY GIRLHOOD—AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
by Taslima Nasreen, Translated by Gopa Majumdar
KALI FOR WOMEN
PAGES: 324; RS 350
 
Books like these have a way of upsetting a lot of people because it is books like these that fly in the face of both the orthodox and the partially-illumined. Post-September 11, the latter have proliferated greatly among the so-called liberal apologists and their tiresome defence almost always begins with: This is not true Islam... What they do essentially establish is high-quality subterfuge—not sincere defence and theological soundness.
They lay the blame entirely on interpretation, absolving the human hands and minds that 'revealed' the scriptures of prejudice, misogyny, injustice and other heinous crimes of civilisation as we know it today. Why are the scriptures beyond Higher Criticism? What is fundamentalism? Is it only a group of armed cavemen doing strange things in the middle of nowhere? Or is it the weed in our own backyards? Taslima Nasreen's story is about these weeds that stifle the verdancy of humanism, are nourished by the conservative spirit and that thrive on the high winds of a presumptuous mythology. But Nasreen is no Rushdie (although they can be compatible spiritual allies). However, the story she seeks to put before us is so deliciously conflicted that it, like an unwiped teardrop, can head only one way: towards the heart.