Secularism

Blaming The Victims

The Algerian socialist-feminist Marieme Helie-Lucas responds to Deeya Khan's film Islam's Non-Believers , which was broadcast on ITV on 13 October. For the past three decades, we have been witnessing the implementation in politics of the concept of perversity in psychology. Truly, this is a case study. I first realised this during the “dark decade” in Algeria, in which around 200,000 people became victims, many of armed fundamentalist groups, with women constituting a large proportion. Following an inexorable process, these were the steps taken by the fundamentalists: targeted assassinations...

France and the burkini bans

On 26 August, the Supreme Court of France ruled against bans on the “burkini” by some south-of-France municipalities. The ruling was greeted with relief by women, by Muslims (including those opposed to religiously-imposed dress rules for women), and for the millions of women and men outraged by seeing four armed policemen on the beach of Nice publicly humiliate a Muslim woman in a burkini. The Court concluded that the ban is a “serious and illegal violation of basic freedoms”, and that local authorities may take such measures only if the burkini is a “proven risk to public order”. The “burkini...

Algerian feminists comment on France's "Hijab Day"

We republish commentaries from three Algerian feminists on the recent "Hijab Day" in Paris. Introduction By Marieme Helie-Lucas On Wednesday, April 20 2016 , some students at the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Sciences which prides itself with educating France’s elite, organized a "Hijab Day", a replica of the worldwide event that was initiated in 2013. It is supposed to help non-veiled non-Muslim students realize how discrimination affects veiled women. This will no doubt come as a surprise to many English-speaking readers who still believe that veiling is legally banned in France...

Solidarity Statement: Stand With Students and Teachers of JNU

This statement is republished from Secularism Is A Women's Issue The Hindu-Right government of India identifies the nation with its Hindu majority and imposes the domination of Hinduism over all citizens of other denominations and “lower” castes. Over the past few years, the Hindu-Right has curtailed free speech at universities, banned books, and falsified history. Students protesting against the oppression of non-Hindu citizens and “lower” castes have been fiercely repressed and police has been called within the premises of the university in Delhi. In protest, university teachers now organize...

Eurocentrism as a fig leaf, and the art of conjuring in politics

Facts: On New Year’s Eve 2015, simultaneous coordinated sexual attacks took place against women in public space in about 10 cities, mostly in Germany, but also in Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland… Several hundred women, to this day, filed a case for sexual attack, robbery, and rape. These attacks were perpetrated by young men of migrant descent (be they immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees, or other) from North Africa and the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, reactions were: Dissimulation of facts, of their international coordination, of their magnitude for as long as could possibly be...

“Universities should be bastions of freedom of thought”

On Monday 30 November a meeting at Goldsmiths University, London, with the Iranian-born secular, ex-Muslim, feminist and socialist activist Maryam Namazie was seriously disrupted by individuals from the University’s Islamic Society (Isoc). They accused Namazie of Islamophobia and were trying to “no-platform” her. On the day before the meeting the president of ISoc called for the hosts, the Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society (ASHsoc) to stop the meeting. The Feminist Society and LGBTQ Society publicly backed that stance as Namazie’s presence on campus violated the Student Union’s Safer...

The 13 November attacks in Paris: the terror of the Islamic State, the state of emergency in France, our responsibilities

Pierre Rousset and François Sabado are prominent members of the Nouvel Parti Anticapitaliste (New Anticapitalist Party, NPA), France's largest far-left party. They are both veterans of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist League, LCR), the Trotskyist group which founded the NPA and then dissolved into it. This article was originally written for the Spanish-language site Viento Sur, and is online here . It was also reproduced on the Secularism Is A Women's Issue site, here . Workers' Liberty also republished Rousset's comments after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo...

Listen to the secular!

Pretty much all the left press other than Solidarity has denounced the election court decision against Lutfur Rahman, mayor of Tower Hamlets in East London, and most of the left has backed Rabina Khan, Rahman's ally, for the new mayoral election on 11 June. Does the left press reckon that Rahman didn't do what the court disqualified him for doing? Or that he did do it, but it was all right? It's hard to tell. I don't know if the writers in the left press even read the judgement. If they did read it, then probably, like me, they were annoyed by the style of the judge, Richard Mawrey - pompous...

Restore secular politics in Tower Hamlets

I don't like the idea that a privileged, conservative judge ousts Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman for alleged electoral malpractice, rather than a tribunal of the people he is supposed to serve. I also don't know whether all the accusations against Rahman upheld by the judge are true or not. I am not going to take the judge's word for it. I am also not going to take the word of former councillors for George Galloway's Respect group that he is not. The residents of Tower Hamlets, of which I am one, have plenty of reasons to want Rahman and his communalist politics out. Some left-wingers are...

Challenging fundamentalism: Workers' Liberty in further conversation with Marieme Helie-Lucas

In March 2015, Algerian sociologist and revolutionary socialist-feminist Marieme Helie Lucas spoke to Solidarity , the newspaper of Workers' Liberty, about the Muslim far-right, and the struggle for secularism, women's rights, and socialism (click here ). Here, we continue the conversation. Workers' Liberty: You argued that the "religious"/"Islamic" character of Islamism is dubious. You pointed out that often, Islamists twist religious doctrines to suit political ends, and that Islamism should be understood politically as a far-right, populist phenomenon, similar to fascism. This all makes...

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