Dissident Women's Voices Coming Out of Islam

Taslima Nasrin

"Let humanism be the other name of religion."

Taslima Nasrin was born in 1962 to a Muslim family in what was then Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. She excelled in both
literature and science, earning a medical degree in 1984. She began her writing career with several books of poetry and then
began to write regular newspaper columns about women's oppression, criticizing religion, tradition and oppressive cultural
practices that discriminate against women.

In 1990, Islamic fundamentalists began protesting Nasrin's writings by street demonstrations and marches. They began a
campaign to intimidate her by breaking into the newspaper offices where she wrote, suing her editors and publishers and
threatening her life. In 1993, a fundamentalist organization called Soldiers of Islam issued a fatwa against her. Rather than
supporting her, the government sided with the fundamentalists and confiscated her passport, asked her to cease writing
and banned her book Lajia (Shame) in which she depicted atrocities committed by Muslim fundamentalists against Hindus.

She describes herself as "a physician, a writer, a radical feminist, a human rights activist and a secular humanist."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

"Any political party discriminating against women or homosexuals should be deprived of funding."

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia. When she was six years old, her mother and grandmother forced her to undergo
female genital mutilation. Her family moved around before settling in Kenya, where she attended the Muslim Girls'
Secondary School in Nairobi. She was sympathetic to Islam, agreed with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and wore a
hijab. In 1992, her father arranged for her to marry a distant cousin who lived in Canada. While en route to join him for the
marriage, she left while on a stop in Berlin, Germany, because she did not want to go through with the marriage.

She then went to the Netherlands, where she studied political science and worked as an interpreter for Somali women in
battered women shelters and asylum centers. While there she witnessed so much violence against women-she saw women
who had been locked inside their homes for years, women who had been raped and beaten, girls who were killed for
holding hands with boys-that she began to seriously question Islam. She renounced Islam and became an atheist.

She wrote the script for a movie, "Submission," which was highly critical of the way women are treated and viewed in Islam.
Islamic fundamentalists in the Netherlands were outraged. The film's director, Theo van Gogh, was brutally murdered in the
street, and a death threat to Hirsi Ali was pinned to his body with a knife.

Hirsi Ali won an election to become a member of parliament in the Netherlands in 2003, but the threats for her defense of
women's rights and her criticism of Islam were so severe that she was forced to go into hiding. Some members of the Dutch
government tried to force her to leave the Netherlands by questioning some details on her citizenship application. She
ultimately left the Netherlands and is working as a scholar at a right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, in
Washington, D.C.

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