However, noted painter Shuvaprassana said Ms Nasreen had compromised by withdrawing the lines.

“This is a compromise that she has been forced into for the sake of getting refuge. But if she can drop two pages to get refuge in India, she can drop three pages and go back to Bangladesh,” he said.

Here is the link to the article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7120473.stm

Speaking as yet another Bengali who read some of her work, her essays were not bad. In contrast, I found her fiction and autobiography to be well, not quite as good, filled as they were with inconsistent characterizations such as female protagonists switching instantaneously from victims to staunchly liberated women, or male characters switching from being portrayed as dimwits in one page to the gleeful embodiment of knowingly evil patriarchy in the next. She also has a tendency to take potshots at certain male acquaintances, in some cases other writers and artists, often using sex and their reported attraction to her as weapons. Now, given that her writing often celebrates pre-marital and extra-marital sex in women, I find her use of that same device to attempt to shame some of her male acquaintances a little tacky.

That said, and while I think my (the Bangladeshi) government handled the case poorly, most moderate Bangladeshis are probably a little divided on how they feel about Taslima. I believe Tazeen Murshid does a fairly decent job of bringing this out in a paper presented in the Women’s Human Rights Net.

I did look into this issue quite some time back. To the best of my recollection, clitoridectomy or other forms of FGM are not mentioned in the Quran. There are a couple of Hadiths which appear to be supportive of (or at least not opposed to) FGM, but these are considered to da’if (weak) and not shahih (strong) hadiths (for those who don’t know what I am talking about, hadiths are considered by Muslims to be statements or actions performed by Muhammad, as reported by his companions; shahih hadiths are those which are reported by several independent sources and thus are the ones which many Muslims put credence in, while da’if hadiths are those whose about whose provenance there are some doubts). The practice is outlawed among the Shiite branch of Islam. And I believe three of the four Islamic schools of jurisprudence are opposed to any form of FGM; the fourth allows slight trimming of the hood of the clitoris.

Keep in mind that this is all from memory; I looked into this about a decade ago. But I’m inclined to believe that FGM is more a consequence of the local culture than the original religious tradition (though it can and has easily diffused to becoming a part of the local religious tradition) — note, for instance, that FGM was practiced among Ethiopian Jews while not being part of Judaism per se, or the persistence of FGM even among Christians in Ghana.

If the overall view of clitoridectomy as a practice not sanctioned by Islam is true – then, while her outrage against clitoridectomy itself is justified, using that as a broad brush against Islam in general is questionable at best, though that does not by itself negate any other critique she might have regarding gender relations within Islam. But it also raises a more general point – to what extent are even those critiques applicable to Islam as Islam – and to what extent are they critiques of patriarchal societies in general?

You are good at nitpicking, razib. you start with my comment being simplification and then you agree to what i am saying. this is not a simplification. I am talking about the recorded history between jews and muslims and for the most part, jews had a better time with muslims than christians, ie, up until 20th century. compare your examples of yemen and iran to the violent expulsions of 1492 spain & portugal, from england in 1200s, various crusades etc.. the 20th century conflict has a lot to do with israel palestinian issue than anything else. this is not the thread about jews vs muslims, so i would stop on this now.

I guess if you went through genital mutilation (like what happened to Ayaan Hirsi Ali) you have a very different perspective of Islam:

<i>Somali culture began to demand that Ayaan too become a submissive woman who scrubbed away her own personality and sexuality. When she was five years old, she was made “pure” by having her genitals hacked out with a knife. It was a simple process. Her grandmother and two of her friends pinned her down, pulled her legs apart, and knifed away her clitoris and labia. She remembers the sound even now – "like a butcher, snipping the fat off a piece of meat." The bleeding wound was sewn up, leaving a thick tissue of scarred flesh to form as her fleshy chastity belt. She could not walk for two weeks.</i>

<i>Ayaan soon realised that in a culture so patriarchal it could not tolerate the existence of an unmaimed vagina, "I could never become an adult. I would always be a minor, my decisions made for me. But I wanted to become an individual, with a life of my own."