Secularism

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. The initiative could not have come at a better time. An important element of the Iranian rulers‚ show down with Bush is their attempt to create a nationalist release valve for...

INTRODUCTION, 2006, TO ARTICLE FROM WORKERS REPUBLIC, SUMMER 1967 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”. The increasingly strange organisation that still, perhaps for old times’ sake, calls itself the Socialist Workers’ Party, welcomed the victory in Palestine of the Islamic fundamentalist party Hamas! It has aligned itself on the side of a world-wide reactionary-Islamist offensive against secularism, liberal civil rights, women’s liberation...

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. What was I to do? Should I send the aubergine to Denmark for publication and risk another half-dozen embassy fires, or send it to Koranic scholars for interpretation? The scholars might decide that it is not an AK-47 after all, but a shepherd’s staff, which would calm...

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. This march will bring together activists of the Iranian women’s movement in exile as well as hundreds of other Iranian men and women who have joined hands to protest 27 years of repression against the women in Iran by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The...

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. It may be that you are unaware of this, and the organisers have enlisted your support by misrepresentation or misunderstanding. In any case, we urge you to withdraw. We should not let the cause of “free expression” be appropriated and defined by the class-warriors of the bourgeoisie, and activists...

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. According to Bhattacharyya, the opposition to civil rights for religious Jewish people by philosopher Bruno Bauer which was the primary target of Marx’s polemic “prefigure[s] the arguments put by some today for downplaying, ignoring or colluding with Islamophobia”. Who is being talked about here...

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. While I raised doubts over the possibility of engaging religious workers if we wholeheartedly support the bourgeois state’s effort to impose irreligion on them, Mark simply accuses me of “joining the motley crew of cultural relativists, numbskull ‘anti-imperialists’ and assorted religious bigots in opposing the ban on the veil”. He nowhere answers my charge that a crude ban on religious symbols will make...

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. It is within this context that the Jyllands-Posten cartoons exist. I simply cannot see how (on any basic understanding of racism as a social, political and economic phenomenon) that a...

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? I think what people knew at the start was probably enough to decide. If I know there’s a cartoon of the prophet’s head with his turban made into a bomb I pretty well can judge what idea is being conveyed without having to see it. I don’t think...