Warren
Allen Smith shares his thoughts on
two people he’s been in contact with
recently.
James Randi
In March
2010, the sceptic James Randi, in a
post and on a radio interview, came out as
being homosexual at the age of 81.
Randi, on 9
April 2010, wrote to me, saying:
The
reaction to my coming out has been VERY
satisfactory, indeed! Hardly a sour
note in the HUNDREDS of responses I got!
Thank
you for your kind and encouraging words,
Warren! In this small world, we’ll meet
again, I’m sure!
To read
more, see John Brand’s article,
An
amazing escape, elsewhere
in this issue.
Taslima Nasrin
More than
2,500 people attending an atheists’
convention
in Melbourne, Australia, heard Southeast
Asian feminist Taslima Nasrin speak
about her exile from Bangladesh because of 5
fatwas issued by mullahs, followed by her
being physically attacked in some places and
finding she could not secure citizenship
even in India.
Called the
highlight speaker, Nasrin addressed
Australia’s first-ever 2010 Global Atheist
Convention, along with the Australian
philosopher and Princeton University
bioethicist, Peter Singer, and the
British evolutionary biologist, Richard
Dawkins.
As her
close friend and editor ever since we met in
1996 at the 13th World Humanist Conference
in Mexico City (I’m currently working on her
350-page My Exile for a German
publisher – I’ve edited several other of her
more than 30 books), I received her draft of
what she’d say only a few days before she
flew directly from India to Australia. I
re-wrote the beginning, knowing that she
likely was a stranger to most of those
assembled, so I recounted how her recently
re-published 2007 article advising Muslim
women to feel free not to wear the burqa, or
head-to-toe veil, had resulted in 3,000
Muslim fanatics rioting, the newspaper's
office burned with a petrol bomb, and
curfews being inforced after 2 were killed
by police in an area that is southwest of
New Delhi.
Taslima Nasrin (left) with G&LH
Assistant Editor, Dean Braithwaite
The 10-page
lecture needed a stronger ending and some
humour. I included how her mother had been
angry at her calling Allah dumb, for the
Qur’an states that the sun goes around the
earth. Her mother had scolded her, saying if
she said anything bad again about Allah, her
tongue would fall off!
I was eight
and had no idea that anyone’s tongue could
do that. So I went to the bathroom, locked
the door, and said “Allah is a son of a
bitch, Allah is a son of a dog, Allah is a
son of a pig’’ – all the slang we commonly
use in Bengali. Then I became worried. Maybe
my tongue really would fall off! However, a
minute passed, then two, then five minutes,
and my tongue was still there. I understood
right there and then that I could say
anything about Allah and my tongue would
stay in my mouth.
See
this
report
from the Hindustan Times. It and
other journals reported that Nasrin was the
only speaker to receive a standing ovation.
On 17
March, an eight-member gang attacked two
newspapers in Mangalore, an Indian city of
over 600,000, that had reprinted the
article.
The
University of Connecticut may provide her
with a temporary home as a resident scholar
in its English Department. Meanwhile, she
literally remains a woman without a home.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
at least had homes.
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