Taslima Nasrin has not asked for financial assistance, but she could use funds to help her further her causes. In January, the 36-year-old Bangladeshi physician barely escaped from Islamic fundamentalists who call her an atheist and who placed a fatwa on her head and hunted her in order to kill her in a Dhaka public square. Now safely in Sweden, she cannot practice medicine and receives funds only from speaking and from poetry royalties.

Once the subject of a "60 Minutes" telecast and featured in Annie Laurie Gaylor's Women Without Superstition: No Gods--No Masters, Nasrin is interviewed in the current Winter 1998/99 Free Inquiry. She has variously been termed "the most dangerous woman in the world," "the 20th Century Humanist Heroine," "Asia's Antigone," and "the female Salman Rushdie."

Dr. Nasrin's homepage with photos and samples of her poetry are located here

--Warren Allen Smith