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.

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

By Amina Saddiq

AT 28, Malalai Joya is Afghanistan’s youngest member of parliament, one of only a handful of women MPs. And Joya is a consistent fighter for women and girls.

Solidarity Editorial:
When King Charles The Second was dying in 1685, after 25 years on the throne, Catholic priests were smuggled in to accept him into the Church and give him the comfort of the last rites of the “one true Holy and Apostolic religion”. Both Charles and the priests believed that he was, so to speak, having his passport put in order to ensure, after he died, a quick and smooth journey to Paradise.

by Pat Yarker

Some on the left argue that Muslim women have taken to wearing the ‘veil’ (used here to mean such attire as the niqab or burqa) as a political act with a positive content.

BY Sofie Buckland

As the Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq campaigns against honour killings in Kurdistan (see www.workersliberty.org/node/8491), news of honour killings in Britain has been splashed across the press. Centring on the case of Banaz Mahmod, a young Kurdish women, whose uncle and father have just been convicted of her murder, British press coverage exposes the failure of police to take this kind of violence seriously.

As I write this we are awaiting the High Court judgement on the case that a 16 year old girl, Lydia Playfoot, has brought against her school for stopping her wearing a “purity ring”.

Richard Preece discusses the recent anti-government demonstrations in Turkey

Much mainstream liberal and centre-right reporting on the crisis in Turkey has portrayed the debate as being a kind of “clash of civilisations in one country” between “Islamists” (or even “Muslims” according to others) supporting the ruling Adalet ve Kalk¦nma Partisi and “secularists” supporting the army and the opposition Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi.

The Guardian recently published an edited version of a letter from a number of Socialist Teachers’ Association activists. They had responded to new advice issued by the DfES about school uniform.

The liberal Establishment, including the liberal newspapers, have responded to the still-burning political explosion ignited by the Danish cartoons showing Muhammad in a downright disgraceful way.

By Amina Saddiq

22 year old Egyptian blogger and former law student Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman, or Kareem Amer as he is known online, was arrested by the authorities in Alexandria on 22 February and charged with the following offences:

By John O’Mahony

Jack Straw’s article three weeks ago about the wearing of the hijab has unleashed a large and very important public discussion about the relationship of Muslims to the rest of British society.

By Amy Fisher

The furore over Jack Straw’s comments on the niqab has generated hundreds of column inches from liberal commentators at The Guardian. Many, including David Edgar, quite rightly rail against state bans on religious clothing and stand up for the right to wear whatever you choose. As Edgar says "if we want to have a leg to stand on when we stand up for The Satanic Verses or Behzti or Jerry Springer, we must defend to the death the right to wear it [the niqab]". However, the issue of choice is much more complicated than this.

Can a Teaching Assistant carry out her job in the classroom whilst wearing a niqab? Being prepared to take it off when no male is present does not resolve the issue. Men work in schools.

Jack Strawsays that he asks Muslim women to take off their veils so that he can talk to them "face to face".

It seems bizarre to ask women to take off the veil in the name of "community relations" and avoiding "a visible statement of separation and difference". They should be able to dress and express themselves as they please, and it is strange to suggest that this makes it difficult to engage with them.

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.

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”.

By Sacha Ismail

In the run up to May Day, Iranian socialists and labour movement activists in the International Alliance in Support of Workers in Iran have launched a new call for international solidarity. The statement puts forward a clear “third camp” perspective against both US war threats and Iran’s theocratic dictatorship, in refreshing contrast to the mealy-mouthed pro-Islamist position of much of the British left.

Much of the ostensibly “revolutionary socialist” left has fallen on its knees before the forces of reactionary anti-Western political Islam, hailing it as a progressive “anti-imperialism”.

By Mark Thomas (first printed in the New Statesman, Monday 27 February 2006)

Being a card-carrying confused liberal, i.e., someone who is resolute in their lack of certainty, I was dismayed - as I'm sure you can imagine - when I sliced open an aubergine to find the seeds forming a picture of the Prophet Muhammad holding an AK-47.

An International Women’s Day statement from iranian feminists

For International Woman’s Day the women of the “Campaign for Abolition of all Misogynistic Gender Based Legislation and Islamic Punitive Laws in Iran” have planned a daring protest which will start from Frankfurt on 4 March and end on 8 March in front of The Hague international court.

Dear Maryam,

The organisers of the “March For Free Expression” (against political Islam) planned for 25 March are advertising you as a prominent supporter — alongside the Freedom Association, an extreme right-wing movement best known for its strike-breaking efforts during the Grunwick strike of 1977.

The SWP have had another go at theorising their opportunism by appealing to the classics. In the 4 March issue of Socialist Worker, Anindya Bhattacharyya claims that the SWP’s attitude to Muslims and Islam as a religion mirrors the approach Marx outlined in his famous essay On the Jewish Question.

“But [against the state] socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either.
That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes 'Islamic' forms. It would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty bourgeois utopianism which cannot even succeed in its own terms.

Mark Sandell’s letter (Solidarity 3/87) attacking my article on secularism in France did make a sustained effort at picking holes in my argument, but did little to justify his own position.

By Alan Thomas

At the present time, Muslim populations across Europe are under-privileged and oppressed. Within the UK as well, Muslim populations suffer all the usual social indicators of racism, as well as being at the sharp end of the recent “antiterror” laws, as well as a wider post-9/11 backlash. The image of Muslim as savage, terrorist “other” is thus at the fore in a way that it has not been in many years.

By Vicki Morris

I’m not against people being allowed to publish or see the cartoons. I oppose people threatening people with violence for publishing them. And, yes, seeing them does give people more information about them (for example, they’re not all bad). But if the AWL were humanity’s last hope of seeing these cartoons, should it give them houseroom?

by Sami Zubaida, Emiritus professor of politics and sociology, Birkbeck College, London (open democracy website)

Apart from the debatable wisdom, good taste or motives for publishing the offending cartoons, the episode does raise important questions.

A petition being circulated by the Worker-communist Party of Iraq

This is a issue between political Islam and freedom of speech, but it is secondary to the killing of Van Gogh who was murdered by Islamic people in Netherlands because of his short film about the real situation for women under Islamic rule.