Religion & politics

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. Williams’ ostensible chief rival, the Catholic Cardinal, Cormac Murphy O’Connor, rushed in to defend him. It is yet another example of the pattern which we have...

An 81 year old retired Irish cardinal, Desmond Connell, has gone to the High Court in Dublin for a writ to stop his successor as Archbishop of Dublin from handing over church files on paedophile priests to a state-organised inquiry into clerical abuse of children. He has called on the court to prevent the head of the Catholic Church in the Dublin diocese from handing over information about criminal priests to the government-appointed investigation. He has got an interim writ, freezing proceedings until there can be a full court hearing. He claims that some of the files contain solicitors’...

Archbishop Rowan Williams has proposed that British courts should use Islamic sharia law for family matters among Muslim citizens. It is yet another example of the different religious sects tacitly collaborating to use each others' demands to boost the overall role of religion in society. Similar moves in Ontario, Canada, were defeated by a big campaign. A report by Ontario's former attorney general Marion Boyd had recommended the use of Islamic law to settle issues such as divorce and child custody. Ontario had allowed Catholic and Jewish faith-based tribunals to resolve family disputes on a...

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...

Originally posted 22 May 2004 . The campaign for the 10 June 2004 Euro and local elections by the Respect coalition, set up by the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP) in January, is descending into a shameful scramble to grab the 'Muslim vote'. It is not an effort to win Muslim workers and youth over to socialist ideas while avoiding unnecessary offence to their religious beliefs. Rather the opposite: Respect is functioning as a means to convert the socialists who provide its active forces into advocates of Islamic communalism or Islamism. In London, Respect is circulating a leaflet boosting its...

Fifty-two per cent of people in Britain, asked in a YouGov poll in February 2007, oppose the growth of faith schools in this country. Only ten per cent positively approve. The opposition to faith schools extends across all age groups and income levels. It is higher among men than among women, and younger people are somewhat more likely to say that they neither approve or disapprove, or don't know. But religion itself is markedly shunned by the young. Another poll, recently, showed 40% of teenagers positively disbelieving in God. The YouGov poll shows only 17 to 18% of people aged from 18 to 50...

What follows is a diary, recorded day by day, of the week in 1997 when Britain seemed to go mad. By Sean Matgamna When Our Lady of the Catwalks died In the two weeks following the death in a car crash of Princess Diana, the former wife of the heir to the throne, an out-pouring of grief, mourning and fantasy engulfed millions of people in Britain and beyond. Certainly, it was media orchestrated, but it was much more than that. It was one of the strangest, and probably most significant, things seen in British public life in a long time. It has had a small-scale sequel in the media treatment of...

The working class and its party — the Communist-Bolshevist Party — aim not only at an economic liberation, but also at a spiritual liberation of the toiling masses. And the economic liberation itself will proceed all the more quickly, if the proletarians will throw out of their heads all the crazy ideas that the feudal landholders and the bourgeoisie and manufacturers have knocked into them. How easy it was for the former governing classes to hedge in the workers on all sides with their newspapers, their magazines, handbills, their priests, as well as with their schools, which they had...

“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. There are many issues the Left must address. First is the question of honest polemic. Useful political debate requires clearly presented political positions and an attempt to honestly engage with opponents. And yet Yves Coleman believes that it almost impossible to either ‘catch’ or ‘corner’ Tariq Ramadan. He is difficult to pin down. The reason is...

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...