One of the strange ironies of the Southasian immigration experience to Great Britain was how the near-universal levels of racism in the host community dissipated at the same time levels of religious identity politics and radicalisation became endemic. White racism started to fall back but at the same time secular politicisation receded in the immigrant Muslim community. We are now living in times when the kind of visceral racism we Southasians experienced in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s is at an all time low, but Muslim immigrant communities have organised themselves into political structures which are emanations of reactionary political groups from “back home”, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islam.
The National Secular Society has lodged a complaint against Cherie Booth, QC, (Tony Blair’s wife) for ruling to keep a violent man out of jail because he was “religious”.
Shamso Miah, 25, of Redbridge, east London, broke a man’s jaw following a row in a bank queue.
Sitting as a judge, Ms Booth – wife of former Prime Minister Tony Blair – said she would suspend his sentence on the basis of his religious belief.
Shamso Miah had left a mosque when he grabbed Mohammed Furcan and punched him. The thug ran outside but Furcan chased after him and demanded to know why he had been struck. Miah punched him again.
The National Secular Society claims her attitude was discriminatory and unjust:
The Pope’s abysmal comments urging Catholic bishops in the UK to fight the Equality Bill with “missionary zeal” have been met with a wave of revulsion and rightly so. For the Pope, homosexuality “violates natural law”, which is why it is only natural British citizens should not have to foot the bill (£20 million) for his proposed trip to the UK. The Vatican is a wealthy establishment and there are far more deserving (not to mention beleaguered) British institutions that would benefit from that kind of money.
Fuck the Pope, use protection
So here’s another useful petition worthy of your signature, from the National Secular Society:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ask the Catholic Church to pay for the proposed visit of the Pope to the UK and relieve the taxpayer of the estimated £20 million cost. We accept the right of the Pope to visit his followers in Britain, but public money would be better spent on hard-pressed schools, hospitals and social services which are facing cuts.
Legislation to separate religion from politics has been passed in Bangladesh. And not a moment too soon.
DHAKA (January 05 2010): Bangladesh’s dozens of Islamic political parties must drop Islam from their name and stop using religion when on the campaign trail following a court ruling, the country’s law minister said Monday. The Supreme Court on Sunday upheld an earlier ruling by the High Court from 2005 throwing out the fifth amendment of the constitution, which had allowed religion-based politics to flourish in the country since the late 1970s.
“All politics based on religion are going to be banned as per the original constitution,” Shafique Ahmed told AFP. The verdict does not affect constitutional amendments that made Islam the Muslim majority nation’s state religion in 1988 and incorporated a Quranic verse in the constitution. The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which is allied with two Islamic parties, said it would appeal the verdict.
Joan Smith’s point that the Swiss decision to ban minarets was framed in terms of a false choice, reduced to only two permissible responses, explains why the ensuing national debate has been so fierce and so polarised:
[E]ither you could vote with the right, some feminists and parts of the left to outlaw minarets in Switzerland, or you could vote with a coalition of government ministers, business leaders and churches to allow them. If you want to make a statement that you don’t like conspicuous religious symbols of any sort, Muslim, Christian or anything else, but also dislike the notion of one group being singled out, how on earth would you have voted? I’m sure this conundrum influenced at least some of the 47% of the Swiss electorate who didn’t use their vote, producing a relatively low turnout by Swiss standards.
it has been brought to my attention by my esteemed colleagues here at the spittoon that one of the aims of the “one law for all” campaign, who are organising a rally on saturday 21 november, to “expose the discriminatory nature of religious law” and “put a stop to shari’a once and for all” because “opposing shari’a law is a crucial step in defending universal and equal rights”.
i will reiterate the reasons that i cannot support this:
1. what about jewish batei din and anglican ecclesiastical law?
some might consider this selfish, but shari’a courts must be allowed if the state is not to be guilty of severe double standards in respect of both jewish halakhah and christian canon law. although, obviously, some of the speakers (like the british humanist association and the national secular society) would argue that they would ban the lot and, indeed, maryam namazie herself says:
One Law for All campaign is organising a rally on Saturday 21 November 2009 at 1200pm in London’s Hyde Park. The rally aims to oppose religious laws in Britain and elsewhere, show solidarity with people living under and resisting Sharia, and to defend universal rights and secularism.
Simultaneous acts of solidarity and support for the rally and its aims will take place in countries across the world including Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Nigeria, Serbia and Montenegro and Sweden.
Moreover, winners of the campaign’s art competition exposing the discriminatory nature of religious law and promoting freedom and equal rights will be announced at the event.
Swapan Dasgupta has an interesting article in The Pioneer today. He explores the differences between the recent case of Major Nidal Malik Hasan and that of the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her bodyguards 25 years ago.
The saga of an armed custodian of military power turning roguish, whether out of stress or conviction, is not new. Just 25 years ago, there was the incident of the Prime Minister’s own bodyguards turning their guns on the person they were entrusted to protect. The reason was not any personal dislike of Indira Gandhi but a political (or, if you must, religious) retribution for the military action on the Golden Temple in Amritsar. A few months earlier there were incidents of mutiny among Sikh soldiers unable to digest the desecration of their holiest shrine. In weighing a perceived injustice to their faith with loyalty to the state, individuals exercised painful options — and only a handful involved rebellion.
A Pakistani magazine article from earlier this year.
Soldiers, policemen, factory and hospital workers, mourners at funerals and ordinary people praying in mosques have all been reduced to globs of flesh and fragments of bones. But, perhaps paradoxically, in spite of the fact that the dead bodies and shattered lives are almost all Muslim ones, few Pakistanis speak out against these atrocities. Nor do they approve of the army operation against the cruel perpetrators of these acts because they believe that they are Islamic warriors fighting for Islam and against American occupation. Political leaders like Nawaz Sharif and Imran Khan have no words of solace for those who have suffered at the hands of Islamic extremists. Their tears are reserved exclusively for the victims of Predator drones, even if they are those who committed grave crimes against their own people. Terrorism, by definition, is an act only the Americans can commit.
