Taslima Nasrin , also spelled Taslima Nasreen and popularly referred to as 'Taslima', her first name, rather than 'Nasreen' is a Bengali Bangladeshi ex-physician turned feminist author who describes herself as a secular humanist. 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 severe criticism of Islam and of religion in general. She currently lives in exile in Sweden in a secret place and has received death threats from Islamic extremists.