Taslima Nasrin (তসিলমা নাসরিন), also spelled Taslima Nasreen and popularly referred to as 'Taslima', her first name, rather than 'Nasreen' (born 25 August 1962 in Mymensingh, Bangladesh) is a Bengali Bangladeshi ex-physician turned author, feminist who describes herself as a secular humanist. Her own experience of sexual abuse during adolescence and her work as a gynaecologist where she routinely examined young girls who had been raped, influenced her a great deal in writing about the treatment of women in Islam. From a modest literary profile in the late 1980s, she achieved a meteoric rise to global fame by the end of the twentieth century, for her feminist views are seen as a criticism of Islam and of religion in general. She currently lives in exile in India in a secret place and has received death threats from Islamic fundamentalists.
