Thursday, March 02, 2006

Anti Islamism Manifesto

There is a certain irony in this manifesto one of the signatories Maryam Namazie who emailed this to me is a member of the Workers Communist Party of Iran, WPI.


And because of this lowest common denominator popular frontism, this Manifesto is also being distributed on blogs on the right, and I am sure they don't realize that some of the signatories are on the left. Opps.


Ah well. I am sure that this guy won't be supporting the Manifesto no matter how much of an Iranian democrat he claims to be.

I have seen a kindered politics in the Workerist Marxism of the WPI and the WCP of Iraq. They have focused on important issues such as womens and union rights in the Middle East. And I have appreciated their non dogmatic marxism. Which is why they can criticize Stalinism. On the other hand this popular front approach of aligning with secularists whose criticism is the need for enlightenment liberalism is problematic for those who call themselves Marxists.


While rejecting cultural relativism they embrace it by calling for acceptance of the enlightenment. The enlightenment is NOT socialism, nor a socialist morality, it was and is the values of the bourgoise, to see a Marxist party calling for such a lowest common denominator politics is not only disappointing but smacks of opportunism.


One signature that is missing is Tariq Ali a long time critic of Fundamentalism and a Pakistani Marxist. And that is problematic. Since Ali says this about the whole cartoon issue from whence this Manifesto arises.


This is the real outrage

Amid the cartoon furore, Danish imams ignore the tragedies suffered by Muslims across the world

Tariq Ali
Monday February 13, 2006
The Guardian

 The latest round of culture wars does neither side any good. The western civilisational fundamentalists insist on seeing Muslims as the other - different, alien and morally evil. Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons in bad faith. Their aim was not to engage in debate but to provoke, and they succeeded. The same newspaper declined to print caricatures of Jesus. I am an atheist and do not know the meaning of the "religious pain" that is felt by believers of every cast when what they believe in is insulted. I am not insulted by billions of Christians, Muslims and Jews believing there is a God and praying to this nonexistent deity on a regular basis.


How many citizens have any real idea of what the Enlightenment really was? French philosophers did take humanity forward by recognising no external authority of any kind, but there was a darker side. Voltaire: "Blacks are inferior to Europeans, but superior to apes." Hume: "The black might develop certain attributes of human beings, the way the parrot manages to speak a few words." There is much more in a similar vein from their colleagues. It is this aspect of the Enlightenment that appears to be more in tune with some of the generalised anti-Muslim ravings in the media

But for the WPI to promote this as they are doing, is a shift to alliances with the bourgoise, something that they have not done before. And it does not bode well, for their independent Marxist critique of the Middle East. Such alliances in the past have led to the disintigration of workers organizations into electoral political parties, something the WPI has opposed in favour of direct action and workers councils.


The following manifesto on the new totalitarian global threat – Islamism - has been signed by myself and Salman Rushdie, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Taslima Nasreen, Chahla Chafiq, Caroline Fourest, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Irshad Manji, Mehdi Mozaffari, Antoine Sfeir, Philippe Val and Ibn Warraq. Please feel free to reprint.

MANIFESTO

Together facing the new totalitarianism

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

The recent events, which occurred after the publication of drawings of Muhammed in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field. It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism of West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

We reject « cultural relativism », which consists in accepting that men and women of Muslim culture should be deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secular values in the name of respect for cultures and traditions. We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia”, an unfortunate concept which confuses criticism of Islam as a religion with stigmatisation of its believers.

We plead for the universality of freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on all continents, against all abuses and all dogmas.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of Enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

12 signatures

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Chahla Chafiq

Caroline Fourest

Bernard-Henri Lévy

Irshad Manji

Mehdi Mozaffari

Maryam Namazie

Taslima Nasreen

Salman Rushdie

Antoine Sfeir

Philippe Val

Ibn Warraq

Presentations for the press

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from Somali origin, is member of Dutch parliament, member of the liberal party VVD. Writer of the film Submission which caused the assassination of Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist in November 2004; she lives under police protection.

Chahla Chafiq

Chahla Chafiq, writer from Iranian origin, exiled in France is a novelist and an essayist. She’s the author of "Le nouvel homme islamiste, la prison politique en Iran" (2002). She has also written novels such as "Chemins et brouillard" (2005).

Caroline Fourest

Essayist, editor in chief of Prochoix (a review that defend liberties against dogmatic and integrist ideologies), author of several reference books on « laicité » and fanatism: Tirs Croisés: la laïcité à l’épreuve des intégrismes juif, chrétien et musulman (with Fiammetta Venner), Frère Tariq: discours, stratégie et méthode de Tariq Ramadan, et la Tentation obscurantiste (Grasset, 2005). She received the National prize of laicité in 2005.

Bernard-Henri Lévy

French philosopher, born in Algeria, engaged against all the XXth century « ism » (Fascism, antisemitism, totalitarism, terrorism), he is the author of La Barbarie à visage humain, L'Idéologie française, La Pureté dangereuse, and more recently American Vertigo.

Irshad Manji

Irshad Manji is a Fellow at Yale University and the internationally best-selling author of "The Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith" (en francais: "Musulmane Mais Libre"). She speaks out for free expression based on the Koran itself. Née en Ouganda, elle a fui ce pays avec sa famille musulmane d’origine indienne à l’âge de quatre ans et vit maintenant au Canada, où ses émissions et ses livres connaissent un énorme succès.

Mehdi Mozaffari

Mehdi Mozaffari, professor from Iranian origin and exiled in Denmark, is the author of several articles and books on Islam and Islamism such as: Authority in Islam: From Muhammad to Khomeini, Fatwa: Violence and Discourtesy and Globalization and Civilizations.

Maryam Namazie

Writer; TV International English producer; Director of the Worker-communist Party of Iran's International Relations; and 2005 winner of the National Secular Society's Secularist of the Year award.

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen is born in Bangladesh. Doctor, her positions defending women and minorities brought her in trouble with a comittee of integrist called « Destroy Taslima» and to be persecuted as « apostate ».

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine novels, including Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses and, most recently, Shalimar the Clown. He has received many literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Germany's Author of the Year Award, the European Union's Aristeion Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Premio Mantova, and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et Lettres, an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T., and the president of PEN American Centre. His books have been translated into over 40 languages.

Philippe Val

Director of publication of Charlie Hebdo (Leftwing French newspaper who have republished the cartoons on the prophet Muhammad by solidarity with the Danish citizens targeted by Islamists).

Ibn Warraq

Ibn Warraq, author notably of Why I am Not a Muslim; Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out; and The Origins of the Koran, is at present Research Fellow at a New York Institute conducting philological and historical research into the Origins of Islam and its Holy Book.

Antoine Sfeir:

Born in Lebanon, Christian, Antoine Sfeir chose French nationality to live in an universalist and « laïc » (real secular) country. He is the director of Les cahiers de l’Orient and has published several reference books on Islamism such as Les réseaux d’Allah (2001) et Liberté, égalité, Islam: la République face au communautarisme (2005).





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1 comment:

Lept said...

Okay, so even non-theoreticians like myself were able to spot certain weird and wacky combinations in the list of signatories:
Ayaan Hirsi Ali (ex-labour with some strange right wing additives)
Bernard-Henri Lévy (questionable philosopher and seemingly efficient self promoter)
Irshad Manji (god knows what refusenic but effective with great popular appeal - my catholic honourary-mother-in-law loved her book)
Salman Rushdie (enough said)
etc...
The combination is an interesting collection of egos making it probably difficult to burble over much more than a sort of apple-pie concept of Enlightenment.
What disturbs me is their implicit adherence to the new orthodoxy (even when calling for non-violent solutions): they are uniting around an accepted, labelled and targeted OTHER.
The real threat is an overall revival of superstitious fundamentalism and the easy polarizations that come from such mental rigidities.
Given that our species seems to need it's regular religious fix, I suspect that when talking about Islam (but same thing applies to other organised superstitions) it is more important to try and look to the more sensible streams: sufism for example and to be much more vocal in pointing out the origins of the strength of the (saudi funded) wahhabi fanaticism.
And of course all the direct connections to America's bush defined addiction.

6:46 AM

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