Secularism

A challenge to freedom

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. The denunciations of the cartoons are couched in wider demands: that we should all be bound by Muslim religious prohibitions regarding portrayals of the prophet, as well as showing respect. In Egypt, which is supposedly a pluralist society with room for different religions and for secularism, Islamist demands have long amounted to censorship and...

oppose political Islam!

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. Now political Islamic forces and Arabic nationalist governments in the Middle East are provoking the religious feeling of people in Arab countries, Pakistan, and abroad. They are expanding this crisis, so they can reach their goals of preventing criticism or expression about the Islamic...

Respect the believer not the belief

Paul Anderson, writer, journalist and academic (from Tribune) It’s clear that Jyllands-Posten was deliberately attempting to provoke a reaction when it decided to publish, and by some accounts it seems to have been motivated by a rather crude antipathy to Islam. I also accept that the cartoons might offend Muslims either because they include images of the Prophet or because a few of them (though by no means all) ridicule aspects of their faith — the ban on depicting the Prophet, the vision of Paradise, the doctrine of jihad (holy war). But… in the end, so what? Even if Jyllands-Posten’s...

The right to provoke

By Salil Tripathi, writer and journalist (from the Index on Censorship website) IN 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini posed a stark choice: would we support an author’s right to express himself freely, or would we stand by as he is hunted down by state-sponsored assassins? Margaret Thatcher was no fan of Salman Rushdie, but her government supported his right (at least in the early years), even as British Muslims burned copies of The Satanic Verses in Bradford and riots spread in South Asia. Today, another British government praises the British media for its restraint in not republishing the Danish...

Religion, reaction and free speech

by Martin thomas Danish author Kare Bluitgen could not find an illustrator for a children’s book on Islam. The illustrators were scared of being attacked by Islamists. Eventually Bluitgen found an illustrator to do the work anonymously. A Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, picked up on this story. They asked cartoonists to draw Muhammad. I do not suppose that they had any higher motives than staging a stunt and provoking a stir. One of the cartoonists did not draw Muhammad at all, but instead tried to poke fun at the Jyllands-Posten. Two of them focused on the plight of scared cartoonists. A...

Say no to sharia law!

A call from the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq To all women’s, progressive, secularist and labour movement organisations Make International Women’s Day on 8 March a day of saying no to Islamic sharia law in Iraq Iraqi women are facing a historic threat. The US/UK occupation has strengthened political Islamist groups, who now constitute a majority in the US-installed parliament and have a dominant position in the new constitution based on ethnic division and the principles of Islamic sharia law. After decades of erosion by Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s secular personal status law has now been...

No gods no masters

David Broder contributes to our ongoing debate on religion and secularism. December marked the 100th anniversary of the separation of the French state from the Church, an event marked by a Parti Socialiste (PS)-run "debate" at the Assemblée Nationale. Various PS MPs and academics fêted secularism as a tenet of rationality in government, and as "the keystone of the republican system" - their analysis centred around a sort of bourgeois irreligion, proud of replacing Catholic values in government with those of liberal enlightenment. Such an attitude was illustrated by the comments of Jean-Marc...

Stand up for secularism!

On 15 November, Wandsworth Stop the War Coalition, in South West London, held a public meeting on civil liberties in Tooting Islamic Centre. An email advertising the meeting made the following request: “We have been asked to dress modestly and that women cover their heads. Also, we are asked to respect the men/women seating arrangements... Considerable discussion took place within the Muslim community before agreement was reached that a political meeting could take place in a holy building.” The meeting went ahead as planned, with segregated seating and head coverings passed out to women on...

What is the Bolshevik-Trotskyist tradition?

What follows is a summary of the political and ideological traditions on which Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity base ourselves. Isaac Newton famously summed up the importance of studying, learning, and building on forerunners. “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, he wrote, referring to René Descartes, his contemporary Robert Hooke, and presumably also to his direct predecessor Isaac Barrow. In science few people think they can neglect the “tradition” and rely on improvisation. In politics, alas, too many. The summary here, written in 1995, starts as...

Atheism, Secularism And Marxism

Maria Exall’s article on religion and secularism in Solidarity 3/76 reflects a broader debate on the left following the growth of fundamentalisms and issues such as faith schools. Maria essentially puts forward an indirect defence of religion against secularism and atheism, presenting it in terms Marx’s ideas on the social roots of religion. Maria rightly emphasises Marx’s insistence that the social roots of religion lie in the alienation of humans from their existing conditions of life. She however counterposes this to atheism as if Marx was rejecting religion and atheism on an equal footing...

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