Justice & Law Quote by Taslima Nasrin

Nasrin’s sentence is built like a moral stress test: if a faith tradition demands women’s subordination, she argues, it doesn’t just “have a problem with gender” - it fails the entire civic checklist. The intent is bluntly diagnostic, not conciliatory. She’s collapsing what many institutions try to keep separate (private belief versus public rights) and insisting they are structurally linked. You can’t cordon off misogyny as a cultural quirk while expecting liberal democracy to survive intact.

The subtext is about power, not piety. “Oppressive to women” functions as a tell, a visible symptom of a deeper political orientation: comfort with hierarchy, deference, and enforced silence. That’s why she pairs it with democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression - the trio most threatened when authority claims divine immunity from critique. If women’s autonomy is negotiable, everyone’s autonomy is.

Context matters because Nasrin isn’t speaking from a seminar room. As a Bangladeshi writer who has faced threats and exile for criticizing religious fundamentalism, she writes with the lived knowledge that “freedom of expression” isn’t an abstract Western virtue; it’s the line between writing and disappearing. Her framing also anticipates a familiar dodge: defenders of oppressive norms often demand “respect” for religion while weaponizing that respect to discipline dissenters, especially women.

The sentence works because it refuses the comforting fiction of isolated injustices. It draws a straight, politically inconvenient line: the treatment of women is not a side issue; it’s the regime’s operating system.