Workers' Liberty

Nasrin Parvaz is a member of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran (Hekmatist), one of the organisations involved in the protest against March4Sharia and the EDL. She spoke to Solidarity.

On Saturday 31 October, “Islam4UK” — a hardline Islamist organisation descended from Al-Muhajiroun — was due to hold a demonstration through central London in which it would demand the unilateral imposition of religious Sharia law on the UK.

On the weekend of 31 October, British Muslims for Secular Democracy organised a demonstration against the (cancelled) Islam4UK march in central London. Its vice-chair, Dr Shaaz Mahboob, spoke to Solidarity, about their aims and political views.

British Muslims for Secular Democracy (BMSD) began in 2006. It was felt that the concept of democracy was being slowly eroded within the British Muslim community. More and more Muslims had the idea that politics is entirely about foreign policy — the Iraq war, Palestine and so on — and confidence in democratic forces and the governing principles of democracy were fading.

Protest against "Islam4UK" and "EDL: St George's Division" - 1-2pm, Saturday 31 October, Edith Cavell statue, St Martin's Place, London WC2 (between National Portrait Gallery and St Martin's In The Fields).

Facebook event here

On 31 October, two groups of bigoted reactionaries will take to the streets of London to promote their racist, oppressive and anti-working class worldviews.

AWL comrades attended a meeting at the SWP’s “Marxism 2009” event (2-6 July) on “Islamism and the new Arab left”, in fact mostly about Egypt.

On the last day of the SWP's Marxism 2009 event, AWL comrades attended a meeting on 'Islamism and the new Arab left'.

As an organiser for the “Organisation of Student Unity”, Ahmadinejad played a key role in the Islamist counter-revolution of 1979-80, establishing control of the universities by purging left-wing and dissident lecturers and students, many of whom were later executed. Following a period as an engineer and military commander in the Iran-Iraq war, he worked in “internal security”, earning notoriety as an interrogator and torturer.

Khamenei spent a lot of his speech on Friday 19 June attacking those he sees as Iran’s historical and current enemies. Iranian Islamist populism has always relied on evoking external threats and whipping up nationalism. The speech was also strategy for strengthening the internal crackdown — attacking America, the UK, the UN, and trying to link those powers to the opposition movement in Iran.

There are striking parallels between the SWP's attitude to Islam over the last period and the way the Communist Party used to relate to Irish Catholic immigrants in Britain. I had some experience of that.

For a while, over forty years ago, I was involved in the work of the Communist Party among Irish people of devout Catholic background in Britain, people from the nearest thing to a theocracy in Europe, where clerics ruled within the glove-puppet institutions of a bourgeois democracy.

Solidarity with the Palestinians — but don't line up behind Hamas!

ON 13 APRIL [2002] there was a big London march "for Palestine". What happened was shocking from a socialist standpoint, and harmful to the Palestinian cause.

Israel's offensive in Gaza is in the tradition of the US-British slaughter of Iraqi conscript soldiers retreating from their occupation of Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf war in 1991. An American soldier described that as "like shooting fish in a barrel". So in Gaza now.

Examining Gilles Kepel's comprehensive history, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Harvard University Press).
"Left-leaning Arab intellectuals have traditionally regarded the [Muslim] Brothers as a populist movement... [with] similarities to the workings of European fascism during... the 1930s...
"In the eyes of leftist intellectuals, both among Muslims and in the West, Islamist groups represented a religious variety of fascism...

Iraqi LGBT have recently obtained new video evidence highlighting the brutality of the Badr Corps and police treatment of LGBT people in Iraq. It shows LGBT people being arrested, held in custody and having their heads shaved and taunted with songs of hate and revenge.

The first video shows two gay men celebrating a wedding ceremony when they are stopped at a checking point between Al-Kut and Baghdad and violently pulled out of their car.

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.

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.

Gillian Gibbons, the teacher who was locked up by the Sudanese authorities for allowing her class to call a teddy bear Muhammad, said of her experience: “The Sudanese people I found to be extremely kind and generous and until this happened I only had a good experience.”

Eve Garrard has circulated the following on the activists' e-list of the lecturers' union UCU (first published here 22/11/07). Our union is affiliated to the Stop the War Coalition, which is holding a conference on December 1st. One of the speakers it has invited to this conference is Ibrahim Mousawi, the editor of al-Manar TV, Hizbullah's broadcasting network.

Eve Garrard has circulated the following on the activists’ e-list of the lecturers’ union UCU.

“Our union is affiliated to the Stop the War Coalition, which is holding a conference on 1 December. One of the speakers it has invited to this conference is Ibrahim Mousawi, the editor of al-Manar TV, Hizbullah’s broadcasting network.

Review of The Islamist, by Ed Husain

About three hundred people marched through central London on Sunday 7 October as part of the “Al Quds Day” march organised by the Islamic Human Rights Commission.

This article will attempt to explain and define Islamic feminism, positioning the emergence of Islamic feminism within a wider political context and finally raising some questions which might help us to consider how we, as socialist feminists, might think about/ relate to Islamic feminism.

From gay rights campaigner, socialist and Green Party activist Peter Tatchell. We would not agree with the way Peter puts everything here, but the basic sentiments are absolutely correct.

On 7 October, supporters of the Iranian regime are organising an “Al Quds Day” demonstration in London (assembling 12:30 at Marble Arch).

I’m going to give a quick definition and overview of Islamic feminism in this lead off (which hopefully the reading should already have given you.)

“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.

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.