‘The next day he came to our house to teach me the song more thoroughly. Thinking that she was only going to disturb us my mother never came to the room to check in on us. After some time the man suddenly said to me, “My dear, there’s something I want from you and you can’t say no.” He forced apart the legs of the terrified young girl I was and planted a kiss on my vagina. For days after this incident all I wanted to do was simply dunk myself in water and stay there. And I never spoke about this incident to anyone, neither my friends, nor my parents, for fear that they were going to think I was tainted. Till date the sight of a white beard makes me want to throw up and I try to stay as far as possible from their touch in case they insist on giving me their blessings and try something that might make me hate them ever more. Deep within I hope I only have a mother-in-law and not an apparently civilized father-in-law. Whenever I travel somewhere by bus I search for a young man to sit beside and not an older one. I have noticed young men try and get a conversation going and then let it go when they realize the futility of it all. Old men on the other hand, whether asleep or awake, make it a point to stick to your body. Please write about those young girls too who never learnt to save themselves from such so-called grandfathers.’
I read the letter and silently apologized to Mou. I should not have called old men infirm. Men were men, whether infant or old. Just like you could not clean a piece of coal by washing it in water, men’s characters too did not change even after they turned doddering old.
~
Inheritance laws in Bangladesh were formulated on religious lines. The discrimination in Muslim inheritance laws could give the impression that mothers and fathers were not equal, nor were sons and daughters, or husbands and wives. What was the reason behind such a stark dissimilarity between them? Why could mothers, wives or daughters not get the same due as fathers, husbands and sons? In turn men and women kept such dissimilarities going and told themselves they were happy and satisfied, when in fact they were simply digging their own graves with others watching them in the act and applauding it.
Since I was not too intelligent I could not feel the same happiness and satisfaction at how property was distributed. I was a much reviled, much abused, violated and helpless woman, and I was not ready to accept such draconian laws. I wanted a fair distribution of property and I could not help but ask if the first female prime minister of the country did not feel the burn of such discriminatory practices. If it stung me why did it not sting her? I was convinced that as a human being, as a woman, as someone who was compassionate, intelligent, honest and dedicated, the burden of such an unequal system was something she too was familiar with.
The accepted narrative was that if daughters inherited their father’s property it did not ‘suit’ them. The only one property suited was boys, as if it was only the penis that could do the heavy lifting. The ones that did not have a penis found property to be a heavy burden, sometimes even a fatal one. Cunning men fooled women into believing such things, depriving them of their rights. When it came to the division of property, the fathers thus benefited much more than mothers did. These tricks had been codified in the sharia which held property rights and distribution in a perennial stranglehold. Consequently, women were never inheritors of property; they were only entitled to leftovers. Quite obviously this automatically made them legitimate right-holders but only as second-class citizens. Whatever was left after things had been distributed among men went to them, just like how in many homes whatever was left after the men had eaten was kept aside for women. Wives, daughters, mothers, sisters, sisters-in-law—this rule of leftovers was uniform for all. Besides, there were a thousand social impediments even when it came to staking claim to what was left and often the tried-and-tested argument would be repeated again: property did not suit women.
I was convinced that steps had to be taken to ensure that property suited them; the solution could not lie in giving everything away to men. If wealth was to be distributed equally between fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives, everything was going to suit everyone. Otherwise, the government which made all the laws was not going to suit us for long. Hindu inheritance laws were worse. Women did not even feature anywhere in issues of inheritance. The role of women was restricted to being the perennial donors, who could never expect anything in return, with the general assumption being that women had no use for property of their own. She had three caretakers all her life: her father, her husband and finally her son. Society in general was not too keen on independence and self-reliance for women and all its efforts were directed towards keeping women as destitute, helpless and alone as possible.
Hindus in Bangladesh still relied a lot on their scriptures, not that Muslims were any less at the mercy of their own holy treatises. It is an inherently erroneous thing for laws to be premised on religious differences and it only foregrounds how progress and religion have always been antagonistic. If laws cannot rise above its base inclinations then neither can man, and religious differences in the case of laws are a sign of that disgrace. For human beings to truly call themselves civilized their laws have to be civilized too. In Bangladesh’s case it was imperative that strict laws be drafted at the earliest for many of its coarse, uncultured, not-so-modern people, to ensure that there remained no differences between men and women in cases of inheritance, marriage, divorce and custody of children. Everyone had to be equal before the law, whether they were Hindu, Muslim, Christian or Buddhist.
Many read my articles on the inheritance laws of the four aforementioned faiths and remarked that it was all too complicated. When I asked some women who held similar views why it was complicated they confessed they did not understand much about these things. Obviously they did not understand! If they had understood they would not have been so content with what they had, which was essentially handouts. In fact, so content were they that I could not figure out if they had sensed my sarcasm. But they did leave with the request that I stop writing about such difficult things as inheritance and write more about how to beat up men. No one wanted to get into complex issues related to inheritance. Neither did they feel it was ‘right’ to take up a tape to measure percentages, or fight with their own siblings over property. In effect the men were brothers, so what if they got everything!
Besides, if they appeared too keen on their father’s property people were going to call them greedy. The father had fed and clothed them and now the husband was performing the same duty; everything was fine. So what was the point in fighting over the father’s property like a hussy? This was the mindset of most middle-class and upper-class women around me. Obviously, the lower classes did not possess land to claim, and even if they did, the brothers usually had no qualms beating any desire for inheritance out of a woman. How long were such injustices going to go on? How long were our foolish, gullible, cheated girls going to believe that their fathers’ property was only meant for their brothers and not for them, that all they were entitled to were the dregs? When were they going to realize that all children had equal rights to their parents’ property? Because women were fullyformed individuals who were in no way less dear, less precious or less deserving than men. The day they were going to realize this truth they were going to step beyond the inheritance laws, go up to their parents and demand they be given their fair share. They were going to assert that they were not born to only give, that they wanted a hundred per cent of what was due to them. It was not as if only half an egg and half a sperm was required to make women, so why the discrimination when it came to property?
Men spearheaded many a progressive movement but not once did any of them utter a peep about inheritance and property laws. It was something they were not comfortable tampering with and I knew many a revolutionary social crusader who had cheated his own sisters in matters pertaining to property. Such men would get agitated over any alterations in the state machinery but when it came to variations in the sharing of land or property they were nothing but calm and never agitated. For them
it did not matter if nothing else followed the sharia as long as the inheritance laws did. That and marriage, since the sharia permitted a man multiple wives. Whatever had to be done had to be done by women. Women were going to have to create advantages and opportunities for other women and remove impediments from the path of other women to make their way ahead smoother. In our society it was easy for a Golam Azam to be born, but not so much an Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar. Hence polygamy persisted and property laws too were inherently discriminatory. Women had to become their own Pritilata Waddedar, Leela Nag and Begum Rokeya, and their water-like calm hearts had to flare up like a hundred flaming powder kegs for any change to happen.
There was a new rule in the works whereby a husband would have to get legal permission from the courts to be able to marry for the second, or third, or fourth time. Earlier, men only had to seek permission from the already existing wives. I failed to grasp how this was supposed to be beneficial for women. Was it so difficult for men to convince the courts to allow them to do something? Neither courts nor court orders were difficult things to acquire if one had the necessary resources. If new laws were being thought of why not rethink the entire custom of allowing men to commit polygamy in the first place? Or was that too bold a step to ask for? Did every law have to be geared towards making men happy in one way or another? If a bill had to be passed then it had to cut out the court permit nonsense and summarily prohibit polygamy right at the outset. We did not want token amendments; we wanted a complete revision of everything that was decayed and crumbling in society. We wanted civilized laws, humane laws and not religious, false and offensive laws any more. If a demand for rice was met with a few paltry crumbs we were prepared to go without in protest. The time of being content with nearly nothing was over and we wanted what was owed to us and all that we deserved.
It was men who had once invented iron chains to protect women’s chastity. It was men who had forced women atop burning funeral pyres to prove their purity. Men were still coming up with horrifying plans every day for the same end. By forcing a world of rules and regulation on her they were keeping a woman’s chastity for themselves. What used to be done with a suit of armour previously was being achieved by social pressure. Society was telling women to stay indoors, to seek their husbands’ permission whenever they wished to step out, not to mingle with other men, and risk talaq or even death if they paid no heed.
No man had the right to put a woman’s body in chains and keep the key; a woman had the right to her own body. Just as a woman needed financial independence she also needed sexual independence without which no other kind of freedom—economic, social or political—amounted to anything. The very idea of a woman’s sexual freedom was revolting to those who believed a sexually liberated woman was as good as a whore. If earning one’s complete freedom meant being called a whore then that was a better fate than remaining a man’s slave for life. Sexual autonomy was just like any other kind of autonomy; a woman was going to be called a whore no matter what freedom she wanted to achieve. If women were to extricate themselves from such historical conspiracies they had to pursue complete physical and mental liberation.
~
A new trend was doing the rounds, of randomly using words like ‘inshallah’, ‘mashallah’, ‘subhanallah’ while speaking, words I had stopped using no sooner than I had developed some sense. In fact I never used the traditional greeting ‘Asalam walekum’ or the traditional goodbye ‘Khuda hafiz’ either. Instead of such foreign words I used our more familiar Bangla greetings. Allah and Khuda were on everyone’s lips but did repeatedly uttering the name ensure His blessings? I did not believe it did. Instead one had to be honest, conscientious, kind-hearted, tolerant and rational. Only then could humanity hope for goodness and benevolence for both themselves and the world in general.
I had nothing but rebuke for the people who called our state a democracy. The first condition of any democracy was its complete separation from religion. Without fulfilling this necessary condition, to call oneself a democracy was surely a way to fool an entire people. There were limits to being despotic but the government was flouting such limits time and again and one was beginning to feel the need for the sort of public awareness and dissent witnessed against similar conditions back in 1990. People needed to come out on to the streets again for the sake of a secular nation. Like locusts to crops, the maulanas were destroying the villages of golden Bengal. If they were not uprooted in time then all of Bangladesh was soon going to be reduced to massive ruin. None of our cries and laments were going to amount to much then and one had to be vigilant while there was still time. The fatwa brigade was already at work in various villages across the country, serving fatwas to women who were trying to become self-reliant and making them outcasts. The new generation had to solemnly swear to ensure the exile of such fatwa-crazy maulanas; I was still alive and still proud of my country probably because I hoped that one day the fatwa brigade was going to be wiped off the face of Bangladesh.
Most progressives were of the opinion that all our problems were going to be solved with the eradication of communalism. They also maintained that there was no problem with religion per se, people were free to follow their own faiths and Islam could remain the state religion, as long as communal politics was no longer at work. I could not place much faith in their deductions because I firmly believed that communalism was a problem that was going to persist as long as there was organized religion. If you let a snake loose in the house and then placate the people inside saying you have asked the snake not to bite can that even make sense? In our case, if the snake was not biting that did not mean it was not going to at some point of time in the future. It was what a snake did and there was no way of changing its nature by ‘explaining’ things to it. Did pruning the leaves and branches of a poisonous tree ensure its poison had been neutralized too? No, it did not. We could not hope to eradicate communalism by simply cutting down the tree, until and unless the roots were destroyed along with it. Religion was at the root of communalism and unless we managed to deracinate it entirely communalism as a problem was not going away any time soon.
~
Around this time Boromama was a frequent visitor at my house. He no longer had his job at the Soviet embassy. He had been in charge of the international page of Bhorer Kagaj for the longest time but that too was over and done with. The newspapers were not keen on the way he wished to talk about international news; it was hardly surprising that they found it difficult to agree with a staunch Marxist and communist like Boromama. He was more like a freelance journalist and all his articles were usually published under a pseudonym. One day he came across a book titled Taslima Nasrin’er Islam Bidyesh o Opobyakhya (Taslima Nasrin’s Islamophobia and Misinterpretations) in my study, written by two well-known Islamic scholars. The back cover of the book had a description in bold letters of the punishment ordained for a Muslim for insulting Allah and the Prophet—one had to chop off the offender’s right hand and left leg with a sword from behind, and then their left hand and right leg. Having read a few pages of the book Boromama expressed interest in reading the entire thing and borrowed it from me.
When he came to return the book he also brought along the latest issue of Dainik Sambad where a critical review of the book had been published under his real name. He was a scholar of Islam and had used the tenets of Islam to attack not just other Islamic scholars but all those believers who held the Quran and the hadith in the highest regard but did not follow its tenets when it came to their own lives. About the various politicians in the country he had observed that although such people often preached how Islam was an entire way of life and how in religious gatherings they were always quick to advise people to live by the tenets of the Quran and the hadith, in their own daily lives and ways of thinking and actions none of these teachings were anywhere to be seen. On the one hand they wore shirts and trousers, which were the garments of non-believers, but in an Islamic gathering they were quick to change into more religion-ap
propriate outfits, right down to the fez cap, despite being clean-shaven! Both the Islamic hadith and the Bukhari hadith clearly stated that it was wajib, a pious duty, to keep a beard, and haram, a forbidden sin, to shave it off! If they were so fixed on Islamic ideals why did they commit such sins!
Since they are government officials they go to the religious events of other communities as chief guests and say things in praise of such faiths. But according to the Quran and the hadith all other religions except Islam are unacceptable! According to Islam is it allowed for them to show mercy to other faiths or attend their religious events to get better acquainted with them? The Quran and the hadith say, ‘Those who attend suchlike will be counted among them and will face the same hashr (exile or banishment).’ In the Quran Allah Himself is heard saying, while describing the characteristics of the mumin (believer), ‘Muhammad is the Prophet of God, those on his side are as firm with the non-believers as they are lenient with each other (48.29).’ In another ayat (verse) Allah declares, ‘They are indulgent with the mumin and severe with the kaffir (5.54).’ In yet another verse He instructs the believers, ‘Take not the kaffir as your friends (4.144).’ Why are the critics silent about these things?
In one section of Taslima Nasrin’er Islam Bidyesh the Islamic scholars had opined:
The word ‘namaz’ that Taslima Nasrin mentions is a Farsi word. In the entire Quran and the hadith sharif there is no mention of such a word. Instead the word that is used is ‘salat’. After the Night Journey, Muhammad decreed that Muslims perform the ‘salat’ five times a day.
In response Boromama had written:
The critic has pointed out something extremely valid. Namaz is of course a strange and confusing foreign word. It would not have been wrong to use the word ‘Quran’ instead of ‘namaz’ for ‘salat’, because even in the holy Quran in one particular ayat the word ‘Quran’ has been used twice to mean salat. In fact in ayat 78 of sura (chapter) 17, the word ‘Quran’ is used to mean the salat of fajr (dawn prayer). But where were the expert critics all this while? For a thousand years the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia have mistakenly used the word ‘namaz’ for salat like Taslima has, and right from the instruction manuals for prayers to the lakhs of books written on Islam the word ‘namaz’ has been used. Be it on television or radio every day the word ‘namaz’ is used multiple times before the azan (call to prayer) to declare that He is the Lord of all. Why is the word sawm not used, why is ‘roza’ used instead? The word ‘roza’ can be found nowhere in the Quran or the hadith. Besides, where did they find words like kulkhani, ‘chehlam’, ‘Fateha Doaz Daham’, ‘Fateha Yazdaham’, ‘Akhari Chahar Somba’? Is the word ‘Musalman’ even in the Quran or the hadith? The word ‘Musalman’ is a distortion of the word ‘Muslim’. The word ‘Muslim’ means ‘one who submits’, someone devoted, but what does the word ‘Musalman’ mean?
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