Who is Taslima Nasrin?: An attempt to unravel the mythology and persona of the controversial author

Hanifa Deen, a Melbourne-based author of Southasian descent writing narrative non-fiction (as she calls her genre), has built a career exploring issues related to Islam and women, and particularly to the mutual misunderstandings that often arise between Islam and the Western world. Understandably, Deen has long been intrigued by Taslima Nasrin, best known for the controversy surrounding her 1993 Bengali novel Lajja (Shame), which prompted threats against her life from Islamic fundamentalist groups and forced her into a protracted exile from Bangladesh in 1994. Deen included a section about Nasrin (I follow this more common spelling, though Deen prefers 'Nasreen') in her 1998 work Broken Bangles, and she returns to the subject in her latest book, the extensively and painstakingly researched On the Trail of Taslima.

This, however, is not the book's only avatar. In a slightly different form, On the Trail of Taslima was originally released in 2006 by the US publisher Praeger under the title The Crescent and the Pen: The Strange Journey of Taslima Nasreen. But the US edition was only published in hardback and sold at high cost, and was barely distributed in Australia, where Deen lives. Deen correctly felt that the story, and the enormous amount of research that went into it, deserved wider recognition. In 2012, she purchased the paperback rights from Praeger and revised the manuscript to reflect intervening political developments and changes in the lives of her protagonist and informants. She then re-published it herself under her preferred title, which captures the essence of the work and the motivations behind it far better than the original one.