Category Archives: Secular

Secularists have nothing to fear from women wearing headscarves

Posted on by Bob Pitt

“Secularism, a cherished principle with as many believers as non-believers, does not – should not – preclude the assertion of religious identity. It is a robust enough idea to hold the ring, as a secular state has done in the deeply religious US and India. Secularism can accommodate religious identity, as Turkey is showing by modifying Ataturk’s authoritarian secularism. What remains to be seen across western Europe is whether secularism is hijacked by a racist far right to become a rallying cry, or whether it can find its own way to adapt and modify its traditions to new identities.”

Madeleine Bunting in the Guardian, 25 February 2008

‘When religion means death’ (according to Maryam Namazie)

Posted on by Bob Pitt

namazie and racist placards 2Maryam Namazie of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran offers her thoughts (we use the word in its loosest possible sense) on the death sentence imposed on Parwiz Kambakhsh in Afghanistan. She writes:

“Many have rightly come to his defence and must keep the pressure on. But to defend Parwiz by saying he did not ‘intend’ to blaspheme misses the entire point. This is exactly what the likes of the Muslim Council of Britain say in order to conceal the responsibility of their political Islamic movement. For example, the MCB ‘greeted’ the release of Gillian Gibbons (the British schoolteacher who was imprisoned in Sudan for allowing her 7 year old students to name their class teddy bear Mohammad) by saying she had not ‘intended to deliberately insult the Islamic faith’.

“What they are basically saying is that victims and their ‘intentions’ are to blame for the injustices and barbarity of Islamic law. Moreover, they are implying that if someone knew they were blaspheming, or if their actions or statements were so clearly blasphemous that they should have known better, then the death penalty or calls for their death are permissible – or at the very least understandable. The smokescreen of ‘intent’ aims to conceal the real issue at hand, which is Islam in power….”

New Statesman blog, 5 February 2008

In fact, the MCB did not merely “greet” the release of Gillian Gibbons but declared that her prosecution was “a disgraceful decision and defies common sense” and called for the charges to be dropped. Like many self-styled defenders of the Enlightenment, Namazie doesn’t allow objective evidence to interfere with her own prejudices.

‘The screaming minarets of Oxford’

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Central Mosque OxfordA small metal cross in Oxford’s Broad Street marks the spot where one of the worst acts of religious bigotry in English history was perpetrated: the burning of bishops Latimer and Ridley – the Oxford Martyrs – during the reign of Mary I, Bloody Mary, the last Catholic ruler of England.

Four hundred and fifty years on, a row has now flared in the city which threatens to pitch Muslims and a few Christian allies against an outraged coalition of both secular and non-secular figures. The issue in question is whether the cry of Muslims being summoned to prayer should be allowed to resound over Oxford’s dreaming spires.

The row blew up after the Oxford Central Mosque said it would apply to the city council for permission to broadcast the call to prayer from loudspeakers in the minaret in a newly built mosque, three times a day.

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Joan Wallach Scott in London

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Politics of the VeilPublic Lecture

FRENCH GENDER EQUALITY AND THE ISLAMIC HEADSCARF

with Professor Joan Scott

Date: Thursday 24th January 2008
Time: 6.30 pm – 8.00 pm
Venue: New Theatre, East Building, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE

Professor Scott takes a critical look at one aspect of the ban on Islamic headscarves enacted in 2005 in France. She will examine ‘a clash of gender systems’ as a way of trying to understand some of the force of the reaction to Islam there. Joan Wallach Scott is a Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Politics and History at Princeton, NJ. She is author of Gender and the Politics of History and, most recently, The Politics of the Veil. The event will be chaired by Professor Anne Phillips. Free admission and open to all. Entry is on a first come, first served basis.

For more information please contact:
Tel: 020 7955 6043
E-mail: events@lse.ac.uk

‘Balls steps back from faith schools plan’, Torygraph claims

Posted on by Bob Pitt

The spread of faith schools across the country has been shelved because ministers fear they could help create a new generation of Muslim extremists, it was claimed last night. In a Commons committee on Wednesday, Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, appeared to take a step back from plans to create more. He said ministers had no ideological commitment to faith schools, in which children are admitted on the basis of their parents’ beliefs.

Last night it was claimed the Government may have woken up to the potential dangers of Islamic schools. At present, there are seven state-run Muslim faith schools and more than 100 in the independent sector. Keith Porteous Wood, the director of the National Secular Society, said that the Government now appeared willing to consider the negatives of faith schools.

He claimed the Government may have abandoned its drive for faith schools in general because of concerns about Muslim schools in particular. “This Government has gone down the faith school route and they find it very difficult because there will be pressure for them to have Muslim schools,” he said. “I hope that they have the courage to say ‘no more faith schools’.”

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families insisted that the Government had not changed its policy on faith schools of any denomination.

Daily Telegraph, 11 January 2008

In fact Ed Balls stated back in September last year that the government had “no policy to increase the number” of faith schools.

What the government’s 2007 report Faith in the System does do is recognise that “in relation to the overall size of their populations there are relatively few faith school places in the maintained sector available to Muslim, Sikh and Hindu children compared to the provision available for Christian and Jewish families”. The report goes on to commit the government to “encourage independent schools to enter the maintained sector in their existing premises”.

So what we are likely to see in the immediate future is not more faith schools as such but rather some of the hundred-odd independent Muslim schools being brought into the state sector. We can undoubtedly expect campaigns by anti-Muslim bigots against this process. And it is equally predictable that these campaigns will win the enthusiastic support of the National Secular Society.

Quebec union leaders call for hijab ban

Posted on by Bob Pitt

Claudette CarbonneauMONTREAL — No public servant – including Muslim teachers and judges – should be allowed to wear anything at work that shows what religion they belong to, leaders of Quebec’s two biggest trade union federations and a civil-servants’ union told the Bouchard-Taylor commission Monday.

“We think that teachers shouldn’t wear any religious symbols – same thing for a judge in court, or a minister in the National Assembly, or a policeman – certainly not,” said Rene Roy, secretary-general of the 500,000-member Quebec Federation of Labour. “The wearing of any religious symbol should be forbidden in the workplace of the civil service … in order to ensure the secular character of the state,” said Lucie Grandmont, vice-president of the 40,000-member Quebec union of public employees.

Dress codes that ban religious expression should be part of a new “charter of secularism” that the Quebec government should adopt, said Claudette Carbonneau [pictured], president of the Confederation of National Trade Unions. Such a charter is needed “to avoid anarchy,” Carbonneau said Monday, presenting a brief on behalf of the federation’s 300,000 members at the commission’s hearing on the integration of immigrants in Montreal. That’s the same point of view as the 150,000-member Centrale des syndicats du Quebec, which includes 100,000 who work in the school system, the commission heard.

The unions’ anti-religious attitude – especially the idea to ban hijabs on teachers – got a cold reception from groups as disparate as a Muslim women’s aid organization and the nationalist St.-Jean-Baptiste Society of Montreal. “What that would do is close the door to Muslim women who want to teach,” said Samaa Elibyari, a Montreal community radio host who spoke for the Canadian Council of Muslim Women. “It goes against religious freedoms that are guaranteed in the (Quebec) Charter of Rights.”

Elibyari said Muslim women routinely face discrimination in the workplace. They don’t need unions on their back, too, she said. “When a young teacher calls a school to see if she can do an internship, and is asked on the phone straight out: ‘Do you wear the veil?’; when a cashier at a supermarket is fired and her boss tells her ‘The customers don’t want to see that,’ referring to the veil; when a secretary gets passed over for promotion even if she succeeds in all her French exams, and is told ‘take off that tablecloth’ – is that not discrimination?” Elibyari asked.

Canada.com, 10 December 2007