Religion & politics

Against the "my enemy's enemy is my friend" binary: an interview with Meredith Tax

Meredith Tax has been a prominent feminist voice and political activist since the late 1960s. She is the author of several books including The Rising of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880–1917 , Double Bind: The Muslim Right, The Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights , and A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State , as well as two historical novels, Rivington Street and Union Square . Her 1969 essay “Woman and her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life” helped influence the US women’s liberation movement. In 1986, Tax and Grace Paley initiated the PEN American...

"We, the democrats and feminists from Muslim backgrounds, have been deleted"

Anissa Hélie is an assistant professor at John Jay College in New York. Her articles include “Multiculturalist Liberalism and Harms to Women: Looking Through the Issue of the ‘Veil’” and “Policing gender, sexuality and ‘Muslimness’” in the book Sexuality in Muslim Contexts: Resistance and Restrictions , which she co-edited with Homa Hoodfar. This interview was conducted by Andy Heintz, a freelance writer based in the US Mid West who writes about US foreign policy, universal rights, gender equality, and social movements. He has been published in progressive outlets like Foreign Policy in Focus...

Secularism is a women's issue: an interview with Marieme Helie-Lucas

Marieme Helie Lucas is an Algerian sociologist and the founder and former International Coordinator of the “Women Living Under Muslim Laws” international solidarity organization. Helie Lucas also is the founder of “Secularism is a Women’s Issue.” Helie Lucas has long been a critic of Western human rights organizations’ sole focus on the crimes of the state as opposed to the crimes of non-state actors. She is a fierce champion of secularism in governance and a harsh critic of all forms of religious fundamentalism. She was previously interviewed by Workers’ Liberty here . This interview was...

The partition of India and the Indian bourgeoisie

In August 1947, when  Britain left India, the country was partitioned, creating independent Dominions of India and Pakistan (now Pakistan and Bangladesh). In the process the provinces of Bengal and Punjab were also split. This article from 1947, by Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) Trotskyist Colin De Silva, discusses the stance on partition by the main bourgeois political groups in India — the Congress Party and the Muslim League. A terrible rupture and violence followed partition when 10-12 million people were displaced along religious lines. The present political situation in India is governed by two...

A tale that is close to home

When the dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, its author, Margaret Atwood, was concerned about the growing strength of Christian fundamentalism in US politics. Unfortunately her story is still very relevant, in fact more relevant, thirty years later. In 1985 Ronald Reagan was in the White House. His attitude to the Christian right (which in fact has a long tradition in US politics) was one of containment. Yes, Reagan campaigned to reverse a ban on school prayers, and he himself was a nasty anti-abortionist. However, concerned about keeping a broad base of Republican...

The DUP: the really nasty party

The Conservative Party’s loss of their parliamentary majority has left Theresa May reliant on Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a hard-right organisation which has 10 MPs in the House of Commons. So who are the Tories’ new unionist bedfellows? The DUP has its roots in a politicised form of evangelical Protestantism which arose again in the 1950s and 60s, but has a long tradition in the Protestant areas of Ulster. In these years, the future DUP leader Ian Paisley was involved in a myriad of fringe loyalist organisations, which existed to protect Protestant supremacy in...

Letters: Socialism is not just 99% versus 1%; Women need equality in law!

I am grateful to Martin Thomas for his response to my letter ( Solidarity 439).Rather than seeking to avoid measures which would invite “a counter revolutionary reaction”, I was attempting to point out the very tight limits of social-democratic reformism, i.e. if you try and raise really serious amounts of revenue from the rich to pay for your reform programme, such a government will very quickly run into serious trouble. I wasn’t suggesting we reduce our ambitions for governmental power, but that these need to be much more radical and make at minimum very deep inroads into the wealth and the...

Religious practices should not be banned

An Indian socialist presents a view different from Solidarity ’s on an attempt to get the Supreme Court to rule unconstitutional the practice of triple talaq (where a Muslim man can divorce his wife in minutes by saying the word talaq three times). In India, banning has become the response to anything that goes against the state. But the practices of nikah halala [women entering second marriages as a precondition for remarrying a first partner] and triple talaq should never be considered for banning because they are derived from religious laws which have roots stretching back 1,400 years. As...

Underground tomb found at Irish “mother and baby” home

A Commission appointed by the Irish government to look into the mass burial of infants at a former “mother and baby” home has confirmed “significant quantities of human remains” have been found in the grounds of the home. The Commission was appointed in 2015 after historian Catherine Corless found death certificates for babies born at a home in Tuam, County Galway, but no burial records. The commission will look at how these babies died, whether they can be identified, and how dead bodies were disposed of, at up to 70 other similar homes. The statement from the Mother and Baby Homes Commission...

As we were saying: Oppose the fundamentalists! Defend free speech! (1994)

“Half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through its total incapacity to understand the march of mod ern history". This description of reactionary, feudal "socialists" in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 fits Hizb-ut Tahrir perfectly. The reactionary Muslim fundamentalist sect Hizb-ut Tahrir (Party of Liberation) is currently locked in a series of campus conflicts with the Union of Jewish Students (UJS). They hate the modern world. The decadence...

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