Secularism

The Connolly Association and its work: a critical memoir

There are striking parallels between the SWP's attitude to Islam over the last period and the way the Communist Party used to relate to Irish Catholic immigrants in Britain. I had some experience of that. For a while, over forty years ago, I was involved in the work of the Communist Party among Irish people of devout Catholic background in Britain, people from the nearest thing to a theocracy in Europe, where clerics ruled within the glove-puppet institutions of a bourgeois democracy. Hundreds of thousands of us came to Britain from small towns, backward rural areas, from communities of small...

LAMENT FOR AN UNEXPECTED DEATH

LAMENT FOR AN UNEXPECTED DEATH God God God God! My God That God is dead! Though God is dead God lives in my deep self, In the buried mind of a hard old Red, A grieving cosmic orphan strung alive To echoing cavernous voids inside my cheated head: A wised-up Irish God-fed man, limed to social certainties, — "No balance, frame or sense in life but life" — Infinities of emptiness, my tendrons trailing there, Beneath my will for finite crusted truth still lie A deep archaic hunger, fed And starved in my subconscious, Sustained by buried lies. God is not dead: I live — He lives! The void in my head...

WHEN THE VIRGIN MARY CAME TO ENNIS

ROADS TO ENLIGHTENMENT The Virgin Mary came to Ennis When I was a little boy, And yet, religious as you will see, I wasn't fooled — and why? I could not believe she really came, I could not, would not, agree, That she'd come to see some other child And pay no heed to me: I knew with jealous certainty That this absurdity could not be!

One secular law for all!

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...

Equality before the law! No religious interference!

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...

Political Islam, Christian Fundamentalism and the Left Today

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...

Defend Malalai Joya!

By Amina Saddiq AT 28, Malalai Joya is Afghanistan’s youngest member of parliament, one of only a handful of women MPs. And Joya is a consistent fighter for women and girls. She has taught literacy classes and ran an orphanage and health clinic. She has spoken out against the continuing dominance of the warlords, religious fanatics and drug traffickers in Afghanistan’s stitched up and botched together post-Taliban parliament. For this, for being a brave fighter for the oppressed, Joya has now been suspended by her “fellow MPs” from Parliament. Joya has also received many threats on her life...

Separate religion and the state!

Solidarity Editorial: When King Charles The Second was dying in 1685, after 25 years on the throne, Catholic priests were smuggled in to accept him into the Church and give him the comfort of the last rites of the “one true Holy and Apostolic religion”. Both Charles and the priests believed that he was, so to speak, having his passport put in order to ensure, after he died, a quick and smooth journey to Paradise. Charles lived in a comparatively simple intellectual and emotional world. The age of scepticism, which succeeded the long Protestant-Catholic religious wars in Europe, was dawning...

The left and the ‘veil’

by Pat Yarker Some on the left argue that Muslim women have taken to wearing the ‘veil’ (used here to mean such attire as the niqab or burqa) as a political act with a positive content. They read in veiling” a statement of support for anti-imperialism, and an expression of solidarity with co-religionists under attack. They point to aspects of Frantz Fanon’s writings about the Algerian war of independence against the French as a vindication of this position. Conscious of my own identity as a white atheist male, I want to argue that there are problems not only with citing Fanon in relation to...

Police fail ‘honour’ crime victims

BY Sofie Buckland As the Organisation for Women's Freedom in Iraq campaigns against honour killings in Kurdistan (see www.workersliberty.org/node/8491), news of honour killings in Britain has been splashed across the press. Centring on the case of Banaz Mahmod, a young Kurdish women, whose uncle and father have just been convicted of her murder, British press coverage exposes the failure of police to take this kind of violence seriously. Banaz told police on at least four separate occasions that her family were trying to kill her. Her transgression was to leave an unhappy arranged marriage and...

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