Workers' Liberty

When Archbishop Rowan Williams proposed that British courts should use Islamic sharia law for family matters among Muslim citizens, he met with a just uproar of denunciation.

Williams was not concerned only with extending the role of sharia law amongst Muslims in British society. He wants — and he said so clearly — to increase the role of all the different religions, in British society, and not least the one at whose head he stands.

An 81 year old retired Irish cardinal, Desmond Connell, has gone to the High Court in Dublin for a writ to stop his successor as Archbishop of Dublin from handing over church files on paedophile priests to a state-organised inquiry into clerical abuse of children.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has proposed that British courts should use Islamic sharia law for family matters among Muslim citizens.

Adapted from the introduction to Workers' Liberty 3/1.
In many countries, religion and disputes about, or expressed in terms of, religion have long been central to political life — in Christian Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or the USA; in Muslim Iran or Algeria; in Lebanon; in Israel-Palestine. Today, since Islamist terrorists attacked New York on 11 September 2001, religion, or concerns and interests expressed in religion, are at the centre of international politics to a degree without parallel for hundreds of years. We have not, as in Francis Fukuyama’s thesis after the fall of the USSR, reached “the end of history”. We seem to be reprising long-passed stages of our history.

Originally posted 22 May 2004.
The campaign for the 10 June 2004 Euro and local elections by the Respect coalition, set up by the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) in January, is descending into a shameful scramble to grab the 'Muslim vote'.

Fifty-two per cent of people in Britain, asked in a YouGov poll in February 2007, oppose the growth of faith schools in this country. Only ten per cent positively approve.

What follows is a diary, recorded day by day, of the week in 1997 when Britain seemed to go mad. - Sean Matgamna

By Nikolai Bukharin

The working class and its party — the Communist-Bolshevist Party — aim not only at an economic liberation, but also at a spiritual liberation of the toiling masses. And the economic liberation itself will proceed all the more quickly, if the proletarians will throw out of their heads all the crazy ideas that the feudal landholders and the bourgeoisie and manufacturers have knocked into them.

“40 reasons why Tariq Ramadan is a reactionary bigot” was written by the French Marxist, Yves Coleman and has been reproduced by the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty (AWL). The text presents factual information about the politics of Tariq Ramadan.

In many countries, religion and disputes about, or expressed in terms of, religion have long been central to political life — in Christian Spain, Portugal, Ireland, or the USA; in Muslim Iran or Algeria; in Lebanon; in Israel-Palestine. Today, since Islamist terrorists attacked New York on 11 September 2001, religion, or concerns and interests expressed in religion, are at the centre of international politics to a degree without parallel for hundreds of years.

By John O'Mahony
The Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahri has (July 10th) threatened Prime Minister Gordon Brown with mass murder in Britain, in retaliation for the award of a knighthood to Salman Rushdie. The knighthood, al-Zawahri said, was an "insult" to Muslims. This once more expresses, and in its most brutish and blood-thirsty form, the paradoid intolerance that governs political Islam.

File this under 'Deaths That Will Cause Me No Tears'. Jerry Falwell, religious fruitcake and rampant reactionary, has departed this mortal coil, aged 73.

Here are some of his lowlights:

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Bantam Press).

Earlier this year Guardian journalist Madeleine Bunting wrote a column called ‘Why the intelligent design lobby thanks God for Richard Dawkins’, suggesting the eminent evolutionary biologist is too rude, too confrontational, and too simplistic in his argument against religion.

Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, better known by his Internet pseudonym Kareem Amer, is a 22-year-old Egyptian law student. On February 22, 2007, Kareem was sentenced to four years in prison: three years for ‘contempt of religion’, and one year for ‘defaming the President of Egypt’. Why?

Equal rights for all!

Dear Mr Murphy O’Connor,

Courage in “Defence of the Faith” is, I suppose, a requirement of your office. Even so, I find it hard not to admire your courage — or bare-faced cheek — in attempting to “lay down the law” to the British government and the people it governs on what legal rights gay people in the UK should have and what legal rights granted to others should be denied them.

By Sean Matgamna

“They take each other by the hand today, but they will take each other by the throat, tomorrow,” we said not long ago, commenting on the United Front of Christian, Muslim and Sikh zealots to repress “disrespectful” comments on their respective religions.

Sean’s article on the Gay Adoption Row (Solidairity 105) was an excellent expose of the issues raised, a bit long, more like the kind of coverage you get in the News of the World of some expose of some celebrity, but well worth reading through all the same. But, from a Marxist perspective what I have a problem with is Sean’s solution to the problem. In the end Sean’s conclusion of the cause of the problem is that British bourgeois democracy unlike the US is not bourgeois democratic enough, exemplified by the non-separation of Church and State. His solution, therefore, is, as is common in most of the AWL’s politics nowadays, to argue for more bourgeois democracy.

By Ernie Haberkern

The exploding scandal of collaboration on the part of individual members of the Polish clergy with the secret service during the Stalinist era threatens to bury a far more important question. That is the official and open collaboration between the Polish church and the regime going back to Wladislaw Gomulka’s second administration. Once a sufficient number of individuals are disgraced, Polish and international public opinion is all too likely to turn away in disgust and the matter will be dropped.

By Sean Matgamna

Members of a militant conservative Catholic youth movement called “Youth 2000” marched through Glastonbury on 2 November to commemorate the 467th anniversary of the beheading of the last Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Richard Whiting, and other Catholics martyred by the Protestant English state.

The imam of Australia’s biggest mosque, in Lakemba, Sydney, recently caused an outrage after being reported as having “told a service at the mosque that women who do not wear the hijab, or headdress, are like uncovered meat.” In an apparent reference to the (actually 55 year) sentence given in a notorious gang rape case Sheik Hilaly was reported as saying:

I watched the Dispatches programme on Channel 4 last night, "Women only Jihad", about Muslim Women and MPAC campaigning for the right of women to pray in Mosques, with interest. For some time I have thought that young Muslim women were likely to be the most likely modernising force within Muslim communities, and watching the trailers for the programme I was interested to see how much this was coming about. Having watched the programme I'm not sure.

I was gathering my thoughts about Jack Straw's comments about Muslim women and the veil and had a look at Respect's response.

There was a discussion at Workers' Liberty's 'Ideas for Freedom' discussion weekend about 'The Left and Cultural Relativism'. The two speakers were Janine Booth and Peter Tatchell. These are the notes from Janine's contribution.

By Dan Katz

Following a small — 60-strong — march in Brick Lane, East London, the companies involved in making a film of Monica Ali’s novel, Brick Lane have unfortunately caved in to the protestors’ demand that they stop filming in the area.

Hat tip to John Angliss's blog for this snippet ...

Apparently, the House of Lords, while discussing bird flu, was most concerned that men of the cloth should get the medicine first. Why? Because they are 'key workers' of course!

An exhibition of paintings by the internationally renowned Indian painter M F Husain was recently closed for “security reasons”. The announcement by the exhibition hosts, Asia House, the was a reaction to a protest by the so-called “Hindu Human Rights Group”.

RUTH Kelly is to leave the Department of Education and take up responsibility for local government, which has provoked sighs of relief in some quarters, particularly teachers and parents not keen on religious schools. Surely her more off-the-wall, Catholic fundamentalist opinions will have no effect in her new job?

Ruth Kelly, newly appointed as Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, is also the Minister for Women and Equality. She will be responsible for the planned Equality Bill, and for other issues connected to gay rights. Yet when interviewed on BBC Radio Five Live, she refused to answer whether she thought homosexuality was a "sin".

By Paul Hampton
Read this article in French here.

An article, “Marx and religion” by Anindya Bhattacharyya in Socialist Worker (4 March 2006) argued that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were not very hard on religion and scorned “liberal” contemporaries (especially Bruno Bauer) who were.

A play by Peter Burton examining the origins of Christianity.