Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (34 page)

In Chakaria, in southeastern Bangladesh, a family of Christian converts was attacked in November 2008. Laila Begum, forty-five, was assisting a local NGO micro-credit agency when a group of Muslims demanded that a Muslim woman repay a loan even though Begum had already repaid it on her behalf. Upon her refusal, the group attacked her with sticks, iron rods, knives, and machetes. Her husband and son came to her rescue when they heard her screaming, at which point Begum reports, “They thrust at my son with machetes and a sharp knife and stabbed him in his thigh…They also beat the kneecap of my husband and other parts of his body.” Her eighteen-year-old daughter was assaulted and partially stripped in front of the crowd. One attacker allegedly said, “Nobody will come to save you if we beat you, because you are converted to Christianity from Islam.”
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On September 25, 2009, William Gomes, a Catholic convert from Islam, fled his burning home after a group of Islamic militants stormed his house and accused him of apostasy. The riot was started after inflammatory sermons in a local mosque, from which the rioters went to Gomes’s house and set it on fire.
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Taslima Nasreen has suffered ongoing persecution in her native Bangladesh, which continued even after she tried to settle in neighboring India. Born in 1962, the daughter of a village physician and a devoutly religious mother, she was trained as a medical doctor. Nasreen gradually became a critic of religion, a feminist, and a self-described atheist.
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In the 1980s, she criticized Islam as a cause of the oppression of women, and her poem “Happy Marriage” depicted physical and emotional abuse within a marriage, matters rarely discussed openly in Bangladeshi society. In her novel
Lajja
(Shame), she explored the problems faced by Bangladesh’s Hindu minority. She has won many awards, including the 1994 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European parliament and the 2000 Global Leader for Tomorrow award from the World Economic Forum.

The Bangladesh government banned
Lajja
, as well as other books written by Nasreen, while radical Islamist groups called for her to be killed. In 1993, following complaints about her newspaper columns, she was charged with “deliberately and maliciously hurting Muslim religious sentiments.” After massive and sometimes violent Islamist demonstrations against her, she went into hiding. In 1994, the government ordered her detention, and, after two months, she surrendered to the High Court. Faced with the banning of her books, legal threats, and radical imams issuing fatwas demanding her death, she fled to Sweden after being released on bail and was granted asylum. However, after a decade in exile in Europe, mostly in Stockholm and Paris, she sought to settle in Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, where much of India’s Bengali population lives.

However, many in India’s Muslim community also turned on her. In January 2004, upon her arrival in Kolkata, Syed Noor-ur-Rehman, a powerful Muslim cleric, promised “20,000 rupees ($440 US) to anyone who can tar her face or put around her a garland of shoes.”
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Hindu radicals passed out copies of
Lajja
, and Muslim radicals responded by burning the book and calling for her death. Despite this, successive Indian governments denied her requests for asylum. Some Indian Muslim groups asked for a ban on her 2002 autobiographical book,
Dwikhondito
, (Divided) and demanded that she be deported. In response, and while maintaining that
Dwikhondito
’s religious references were based on “universally accepted” works on Islamic history, she said that, to avoid hurting people’s feelings, she would be willing to remove “controversial lines.” On November 16, 2004, the Kolkata High Court banned the book, though the ban was lifted in September 2005 after an appeals court rejected it as “unjustified and untenable.”
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In March 2007, the All India Ittehad Millat Council promised 500,000 rupees to anyone who beheaded Nasreen, an offer that would be rescinded only if she “apologizes, burns her books and leaves.” On August 9, 2007, she was physically attacked by members, including some elected members, of the political party Ittahidul Muslimin at the launch of her book’s Telugu translation,
Shodh
, in
Hyderabad, South India. One elected member threatened Nasreen with beheading were she ever to return to Hyderabad. The Hyderabad City Police also filed a case against her for “hurting the religious sentiments of Muslims.”
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In November 2007, the government of West Bengal told Nasreen that it could not ensure her security and deported her from the state. She moved to an undisclosed location—some reports say in a safe house run by India’s intelligence bureau near Delhi.

On January 9, 2008, it was announced in Paris that Nasreen had been awarded the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for her writing on women’s rights. On February 15, with great hesitation, the Indian government cautiously extended her visa for six months, but, the next day, West Bengal’s Muslim clergy and political leaders warned that they would take to the streets if she were offered ongoing shelter. In March 2008, she short-circuited the debate by leaving India “voluntarily” and went to Norway. However, she returned to India on August 8, 2008, and is again at an undisclosed location. As she has noted, “If India gives in to the fundamentalists’ demand to deport me, the list of demands will become an endless one. A deportation today, a ban tomorrow, an execution the day after. Where will it cease?”
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Indian Muslim Ali Asghar Engineer defended the author’s right to free expression. While agreeing “Taslima has written provocative articles on Islam,” he argued, “We must counter it by arguing on the basis of Qur’an rather than attacking her physically. No one can cite a single verse of the Qur’an or any hadith to support violence against others, even enemies, as long as they are peaceful. On the other hand we can cite several verses from the Qur’an, to support dignified behavior.”
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Salahuddin Shoaib Choudhury, a man of moderate Islamic religious views, was the editor of
The Weekly Blitz
and has written about Al-Qaeda’s activities in Bangladesh. He has also criticized anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic attitudes in Muslim-majority countries. His major difficulties began in 2003 when he developed an interest in Israel and started corresponding with an editor of
The Jerusalem Post
. This led to his article in the
Post
advocating peaceful relations between Bangladesh and Israel. He was then invited to the International Forum for the Literature and Culture of Peace conference in Tel Aviv to lecture on “[h]ow the media can foster world peace.”
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On November 29, 2003, as he was about to board a plane on his way to Israel, he was arrested, and his passport was confiscated. He was blindfolded, beaten, and questioned by security officials for ten days to get him to confess to espionage for Israel.
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He was initially charged with, inter alia, criminal conspiracy, sedition, and “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.” He was held for seventeen months in hellish conditions and suffered isolation, torture, and denial of medical attention. He was released in April 2005 but faced more harassment, threats on his life, attacks on his newspaper’s offices, and a pending trial. PEN Center USA awarded him its Freedom to Write Award in 2005, and the
Bangladesh Minority Lawyers Association gave him its Courageous Journalism Award in 2006. When the American Jewish Committee sought to present him with its Moral Courage Award in May 2006, Bangladeshi authorities again kept him from leaving the country, and he addressed the meeting via video.

While Choudhury was awaiting trial, about forty people, including senior members of the governing political party, looted his offices. He was beaten—his ankle was broken—and robbed. Police did not permit him to lodge charges against his assailants and also denied him any protection, so that he had to go into hiding. At his trial, in Dhaka on November 13, 2006, the presiding judge described his crimes: “By praising the Jews and Christians, by attempting to travel to Israel, and by predicting the so-called rise of Islamist militancy in the country and expressing such through writings inside the country and abroad, you have tried to damage the image and relations of Bangladesh with the outside world.”
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The charges could carry a sentence of up to thirty years’ imprisonment or death. The case dragged on, and February 12, 2008, marked his forty-first court appearance in thirty-four months.
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The only offense that the authorities have been able to pin on him is that he violated the Passport Act by seeking to travel to Israel, a country with which Bangladesh does not have diplomatic relations, which is an offense usually punishable by a small fine. In February 2009, a gang broke into his newspaper’s headquarters, attacking the staff until they found him, brought him out to the street, and beat him in broad daylight, claiming the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, employed him. There is no indication that authorities intervened at all in the situation.
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Arifur Rahman was the sole breadwinner of his family and supported his elderly mother, no mean feat for a twenty-three-year-old self-taught cartoonist in Bangladesh. As a young artist with a promising future, he drew comics for
Aalpin
, the weekly satirical supplement of
Prothom Alo
, the country’s largest Bengali-language daily newspaper. In 2007, he won first prize in the national Anti-Corruption Cartoon Competition sponsored by
The Daily Star
. However, on December 18, 2007, he was taken into custody and interrogated about a cartoon titled “Naam” (Name) that he had published the previous day. The text of the cartoon shows a man addressing a boy:

Q. Boy, what is your name?

- My name is Babu.

Q. It is customary to mention Muhammad before the name. What is your father’s name?

- Muhammad Abu

Q. What’s this in your lap?

- Muhammad cat.
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Arif was certainly not the first to joke about the common practice in Islamic societies to name everything and everyone Muhammad, and similar items had circulated widely in previous years. Arif told police that he had not meant to hurt anyone’s religious feelings and that this was a common joke in his home village.
Aalpin
’s deputy editor was dismissed, and
Prothom Alo
not only apologized for publishing an “impertinent” and “unacceptable” cartoon but also promised never to publish Arif’s work again. Despite these abject apologies, Arif was taken to Tejgaon police station and held overnight. He was not told why he was being held, given any opportunity to tell anybody his whereabouts, nor allowed access to a lawyer.
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Arif was initially detained under Section 54 of the criminal procedure code, which permits police to arrest suspects with neither a warrant nor orders from a magistrate. Under the Bangladesh State of Emergency, he was not guaranteed any legal representation. He was originally held for thirty days on the orders of a deputy secretary of the Ministry of Home Affairs, with three-month extensions ordered October 11 and again in January 2008. For over a month after his arrest, he did not know of the detention order against him. While he was supposedly being held in “preventive detention,” the actual allegation against him was that he had violated Section 295A of the penal code by “hurting religious sentiments” with his cartoon.

Opportunistic Islamist politicians immediately jumped on the issue in an attempt to silence a newspaper that had often been critical of the military regime. There were street demonstrations and vandalism throughout Dhaka, with protests led by radical Islamist groups, including Hizbut-Tahrir Bangladesh (HT) and Islami Shasantantra Andolon (ISA), under the auspices of the All Party Resistance Committee. Demonstrators burned effigies of Arif and called for his death, as well as for the deaths of his editor and publisher.
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Islamists found a ready partner in the military government, and a delegation led by Obaidul Haque—the
khatib
(preacher) of the Baitul Mukarram, the national mosque—called on law and information advisor Mainul Hosein and demanded cancellation of
Prothom Alo
’s license and the arrest of its editor, along with others concerned, “for showing disrespect to the Prophet.” After the meeting, Hosein told reporters: “It is a conspiracy to destabilize the country. We are very concerned over the issue.”
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Hizbut-Tahrir is active in many countries, and a spokesman of its U.K. wing said that the cartoon and article were “deliberate attempts to ridicule Islam’s Prophet.”
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They launched protests in London, calling for the suspension of the publications’ licenses, the arrest of everyone involved with the cartoon, and the reinstatement of sharia and Khilafah laws to “protect Islamic faith and values.” They also charged that Arif’s cartoon was, together with the caricatures of Muhammad published in Danish and Swedish papers in September 2005 and August 2007, part of an international crusade against Islam.

The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders defended the cartoon as nothing more than “a joke about cultural custom” and said that the “play on words had no
intention of attacking the Prophet” and called for Arif’s immediate release.
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On September 25, 2007, the Vienna-based International Press Institute also urged his release in the name of press freedom.
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Nonetheless, the military regime continued to resist international pressure for press freedom.
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After being held for six months in Dhaka’s central jail, Arif was released in March 2008, but, in November 2009, he was found guilty of “hurting the religious sentiments of the Muslim community” and sentenced to six months’ hard labor. Arif says he was not aware that a trial was even taking place and has asked his lawyers to inquire further.
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