A movie was made on the separation of me and my cat. The Movie called Nirbashito got the Indian national award for the best Bengali film.
I am a forbidden name in the subcontinent. Many filmmakers wanted to make films about me or based on my stories. But no one could do that.
The Supreme Court delivered a verdict against Section 66 A of Information and Technology Act 2000. The Section gave the police powers to arrest those who post objectionable content online and provides for a three-year jail term.
I was one of the petitioners who challenged the law.
It was impossible to stop people from urinating in public in Bangladesh. No sign, no request in Bengali language worked so far. Finally some Arabic words are written on the walls. And it works like magic. Muslims respect Arabic language as they believe it is the language of Allah, the God. If you write I wanna fuck you, motherfucker in Arabic, Muslims as they can only recognize Arabic alphabets but do not know the language, would show respect to that slang. Allah’s language is only useful to stop peeing in public. I do not see any other uses of this language in non Arabic countries.
Muslims are losing their faith.
Many people know that Islamic extremism makes ordinary Muslims extremists. Not many people know that Islamic extremism also makes ordinary Muslims atheists.
IDENTIFYING Muslims who have renounced their faith is tricky. Few are open about doing so, even in safe and secular Britain. But among the country’s Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, who overwhelmingly describe themselves as Muslims, the numbers are growing, albeit from a tiny base. According to official statistics, between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of Bangladeshis who say they have no faith has more than tripled, from 0.4% to 1.4%. For Pakistanis it has doubled, from 0.5% to 1.1%. Some who explicitly identify as ex-Muslims are becoming more vocal. Groups such as the Council of Ex-Muslims in Britain (CEMB), set up in 2007, are helping.
Former Muslims’ reluctance to admit to their lack of faith rarely stems from a fear of violence, as in countries such as Sudan where laws make apostasy punishable by death. Rather the worry in Britain is about the social stigma, moral condemnation and ostracism that follows, says Simon Cottee of the University of Kent, who has written a book on the subject.
I am happy for Bangladeshis. Between 2001 and 2011 the proportion of Bangladeshis who say they have no faith has more than tripled, from 0.4% to 1.4%. Recently I have started using facebook, where most of my followers and friends are Bengalis from Bangladesh. I am so amazed to see a huge number of young people, both men and women, abandoned their faith. Avijit Roy’s Mukto Mona website has been a great platform for thousands of Bengali atheist bloggers.
Many do not divulge their unbelief to their families, let alone the wider community. At events organised by the CEMB, some come straight from the mosque. Women say they continue to wear their veil at home to conceal their change of heart. Those who are openly godless often use the language of gay rights, talking about “coming out” to those close to them.
Despite such difficulties, the internet is making life easier. Muslims questioning their faith can talk to others online. The CEMB’s forum has over 4,000 users, says Marayam Namazie, the group’s founder. In the past would-be atheists had to sneak off to libraries to explore their doubts. Doing so online is easier and more discreet. Nonetheless the CEMB also offers guidance on concealing such activities, advising those with doubts to erase e-mails and search histories and to use a computer to which others do not have access.
Ibrahim Mogra, an imam in Leicester, says that he has heard of only a handful of cases of Muslims who have openly renounced their religion over the past 30 years. More common, he says, are those who abandon many of the practices of Islam—regular prayers, the dietary laws and dress codes, for example—but still identify as Muslims. This group, which is culturally but less spiritually committed to Islam, is getting larger, suggests Mr Mogra. Growing up in secular Britain leads people, especially the young, to drift away. But many grow out of their doubts, he reckons, and return, especially when they have children.
Such a good news! Agnostics are growing. I want them to grow faster.
An intriguing news item was published in the Arab world a few days ago — a sex shop is coming up in Saudi Arabia’s holiest city, Mecca. Not just any sex shop but a halal sex shop. I have no clue whatsoever about terms and conditions upon which a sex shop is deemed halal or haraam. I also want to know, whether in this sex shop, a woman would be able to shop alone for her personal needs. In a country where women don’t have minimum personal liberty, and have no other identity beyond being sex slaves to men, there cannot be any doubt that the sex shop being opened there will be exclusively for the sexual pleasure of men.
Men from Saudi Arabia spend a lot of their ample wealth on sex. They go to various countries on sex tours to enjoy the company of expensive call-girls, and they roam around freely in the sex shops of foreign countries. From now on, however, they will no longer have to undertake the trouble of a foreign tour for sex-shopping, at least. For, EL Asira, the Sharia-compliant sex brand originating in Amsterdam and backed by Germany’s Beate Uhse, will soon branch out to the holy city.
Till now, the sex shops of Europe and America have not yet arrived in the progressive countries of Asia, but they have managed to reach Saudi Arabia, the most conservative and orthodox society in the world, where women are perceived only as moving genitalia.
The Saudi king, Abdullah, had 30 wives. Out of those, one was Alanoud al Fayez, who had been divorced by the king in 1985. But her four daughters are prisoners in the Saudi royal palace. Jawaher, Maha, Sahar and Hala are incarcerated in every sense of the word. They are not free to set foot outside the palace walls. They are hardly provided food twice a day, and their half-brothers beat them mercilessly. Some of the sisters are nearabouts or over forty years of age but have not been allowed to marry.
Alanoud, who is in self-imposed exile in London for the past few years, has broken her silence and spoken about the abuses inflicted on her daughters to the international media. To no avail, of course. If the most powerful nation on the planet, the United States, bows its head and pays obeisance to the mighty House of Saud, who else dare protest?
Barack Obama paid a high profile visit to Saudi Arabia a few months ago, accompanied by his wife. One does not recall any request from him to alleviate the situation of the sisters trapped in the royal palace, or even the general condition of women in the country.
This is the thing with Saudi Arabia. It’s kind of like a bratty child — whatever strikes its fancy, it shall go ahead and do. Saudi women cannot step out in the open without being covered from head to foot. They have no right to free speech. They can’t talk to strangers of the opposite sex because it’s considered haraam. They can’t take a car ride with someone without the fear of execution. They are punished cruelly if they happen to be victims of rape or torture.
The primitive laws of a seventh century society still prevail over a 21st century Saudi Arabia. Freedom of speech is unheard of. Writer-activist Raif Badawi, creator of the website, Free Saudi Liberals, is still being lashed liberally every other week for daring to have freethinking aspirations. Saudi Arabia doesn’t give two hoots about tenets of modernisation and civilisation. It is making first world nations dance to its tunes on the one hand, and exporting islamic terrorism to other muslim states, on the other. This state, without a shred of ethics and character, is going unpunished since there are no countries that can be brave enough to face the ire of a wealthy, oil-rich nation.
Such are the circumstances under which Saudi Arabia has opened its gates to a sex shop. What can this novelty do for Saudi men? Well, they can now be provided with leather belts, shackles, masks and an assortment of other weapons which they would now be able to use liberally to further treat women as sex slaves. To force them into dominant-submissive sexual role play. To bring into actual force the brutal primitivism of their patriarchal attitude against women by inflicting a new kind of sexual torture on them. And as usual, this too, shall remain unpunished.
If there is indeed any pleasure to be gained out of those shops, they would be exclusively for the men. The women are not to partake in any such thing. Those who do not have basic human rights must never aspire to sexual rights either. And those that do not have sexual freedom or rights, have no sexual pleasure. Sex slaves take no pleasure in sex — they need to be freed of their slavery first.
The world stands wondering when, if at all, the new generation of politically and socially aware Saudi youth shall spell the death knell of this dystopic dynastic rule. Time waits for them.
Many are of the opinion that these strange university protests that entail the putting up of sanitary products in public spaces, starting in Jamia and spreading to Jadavpur, are not in good taste. But why should they be?
If menfolk happened to have menstrual cycles instead of women, this would hardly have occasioned social shame for them. Instead, they would have celebrated their stains, declared the blood sacred and exhibited with considerable pride the sanitary pads that bore the signs of their power. Women’s menstrual cycles, on the other hand, have been deemed so hateful and their blood so impure for so long, that it is finally time for women to rediscover the sacrality of their own blood.
Social stigma
When men open their shirts in public, scribble slogans all over their bodies and walk with pride, they are heralded as harbingers of true revolution — people have felt awed and inspired by such sights, poets have written paeans in their praise, artists have immortalised such scenes on canvas and filmmakers have made memorable cinema of such landmark protests. When FEMEN activists do the very same thing, and display their nudity adorned with political slogans, policemen arrive in leaps and bounds and forthwith drag them all to the prison.
Male bodies inscribed with political will are things of beauty, and female bodies of the same order are objects of social stigma, shame and infringement. It’s because a women’s nudity disarms the conservatives, it makes them uncomfortable. Rupi Kaur’s photograph documenting menstrual blood opened a can of worms. Instagram removed the photograph and instantly, social media were alight with debates. I think the photograph was a stroke of genius. So was Deepika Padukone’s video, My Choice. Women are undergoing a sudden awakening everywhere. This awakening is becoming more and more necessary for the survival of mankind as a whole.
The thought of one half of the species brutally repressing the other half by virtue of sexual discrimination, through various tools of torture ranging from sheer brute force to social conditioning and superstition, for thousands of years, is perhaps more frightening as any other human rights violation. This awakening has been long due. The society mustn’t run by muscles, it must be run by liberated minds. It is ludicrous to think that the primary law lurking underneath sexual and gender discrimination is nothing but the discrepancy of physical force between the male and female of this species.
When I described in detail, in the first part of my autobiography, My Girlhood, the events leading to my first menstrual period, or later, how I was sexually abused, many disapproved of this with the sneering civility characteristically belonging to the bourgeoisie. I pity them, and I have never brought myself to pander to their socially curated tastefulness.
Banned book
My Girlhood was banned by the Haseena government in 1999. It’s still banned in Bangladesh. The middle classes are of the opinion that no decent woman belonging from a good family could have described, in gory details and with utter “shamelessness”, the indignity of the sexual abuse she had suffered. Some famous male authors have personally told me, “You know, the book was very well written, but you shouldn’t have described the sexual encounters. That was vulgar”.
Oh yes. When women write about the sexual crimes perpetrated against them, they become offensive; when they tell stories belonging to their own bodies, they are deemed notorious. But when men offer up depictions of female nudity and sexual intercourse, they become the grand documenters of high art.
Moral guardians
It seems that women’s bodies are the copyrighted properties of male authors and artists, for if women were to explore such areas, they would surely be no more than sluts. When women refuse to abide by these rules instituted by men, when they sidestep the rules laid down about what to say and when, and how far to go with it, this society’s men feel some amount of righteous indignation.
If this society hasn’t defamed you as a slut and whore, if you haven’t yet been able to confound at least a few of the society’s self-appointed moral guardians, then there isn’t much hope for you as a feminist. The named, on the other hand, are those who shall change and alter the fabric of this rotting state, and bring on a new evolution that shall signal a new kind of egalitarian atmosphere.
I therefore salute the students who have stepped forward to protest on behalf of all women who are stigmatised during their menstrual cycles. It is the duty of educational institutions to spearhead the revolution against superstitions, stigmas, social and sexual discrimination and spread social awareness and illumination amongst the common people. It is their moral obligation to take up the fight for womens’ rights, and they have done a good job of it.
Muslims are the world’s fastest-growing religious group, says Pew Research.
The expected growth of Islam around the world is perhaps the most striking finding in the recent Pew Research Center report projecting the future of religious groups. Indeed, Muslims will grow more than twice as fast as the overall world population between 2010 and 2050 and, in the second half of this century, will likely surpass Christians as the world’s largest religious group.
While the world’s population is projected to grow 35% in the coming decades, the number of Muslims is expected to increase by 73% – from 1.6 billion in 2010 to 2.8 billion in 2050. In 2010, Muslims made up 23.2% of the global population. Four decades later, they are expected to make up about three-in-ten of the world’s people (29.7%).
By 2050, Muslims will be nearly as numerous as Christians, who are projected to remain the world’s largest religious group at 31.4% of the global population.
Muslims are the only major religious group which is increasing faster than the world’ population as a whole. It is scary. Maybe a hell of a lot of Muslims would join Muslim terrorist organizations, and they would turn the world into Darul Islam, where not a single non-Muslim will be allowed to live. In the meantime, to save the world it is necessary to abolish Muslim terrorist organizations. Terrorists must be stopped and fundamentalists must not grow.
The main reasons for Islam’s growth ultimately involve simple demographics. To begin with, Muslims have more children than members of the seven other major religious groups analyzed in the study. Each Muslim woman has an average of 3.1 children, significantly above the next-highest group (Christians at 2.7) and the average of all non-Muslims (2.3). In all major regions where there is a sizable Muslim population, Muslim fertility exceeds non-Muslim fertility.
The growth of the Muslim population also is helped by the fact that Muslims have the youngest median age (23 in 2010) of all major religious groups, seven years younger than the median age of non-Muslims (30). A larger share of Muslims will soon be at the point in their lives when people begin having children. This, combined with high fertility rates, will accelerate Muslim population growth.
Large numbers of people are also converting to Islam. I sometimes do not understand why women convert. Educated and intelligent women convert to Islam knowing that Islam oppresses women And Islam is not reformed like other religion.
More than a third of Muslims are concentrated in Africa and the Middle East, regions that are projected to have the biggest population increases. But even within these high-growth regions – as well as others – Muslims are projected to grow faster than members of other groups. For example, Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa, on average, are younger and have higher fertility than the overall population of the region. In fact, Muslims are expected to grow as a percentage of every region except Latin America and the Caribbean, where relatively few Muslims live.
The same dynamics hold true in many countries where Muslims live in large numbers alongside other religious groups. For example, India’s number of Muslims is growing at a faster rate than the country’s majority Hindu population, and is projected to rise from 14.4% of India’s 2010 population to 18.4% (or 311 million people) in 2050. And while there were roughly equal numbers of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria as of 2010, Muslims have higher fertility there and are expected to grow to a solid majority of Nigeria’s population (58.5%) in 2050.
Meanwhile, religious switching, which is expected to hinder the growth of some other religious groups, is not expected to have a negative net impact on Muslims. By contrast, between 2010 and 2050, Christianity is projected to have a net loss of more than 60 million adherents worldwide through religious switching.
Oh My Goosebumps!
Remembering those days when I met him and talked to him. In Prague, in Berlin. He supported me and my struggle. He was nice, kind, strong, humorous. He was great as a writer and as a person. But still I do not understand why he hid for decades that he had served in the Waffen-SS during the war. I can not forgive him for hiding the truth. And again, I forgive him for not hiding the truth. Good that he revealed the truth while he was alive, in 2006. Good that he revealed, otherwise it would have been worse if people discovered the truth after his death.