SECULARISING ISLAM
by Allan Muir
I recently attended a meeting, at Conway Hall in London, of The Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, my attention having been drawn to this by a flyer included with the Newsletter of the British Humanist Association (BHA). I was surprised and intrigued to learn that such an organisation existed, given the ultra-violence against apostates which I’d come to expect from Muslim fundamentalists.
I confess to having very little knowledge of Islam. As a humanist whose struggles to extricate himself from religion had involved agonised tussling with the precepts of Christianity, the thought of trying to learn details of this alternative system of belief appeals to me as much as deep study of the Aramaic Bible without the help of a dictionary. So any statements I make here about Islam must be taken with a pinch of salt as large as Lot’s wife; I’m merely drawing attention to some developments which I believe readers should themselves pursue through the webography I give below*.
I’d always resisted the usual opinion of our press, and the apparent source of our government’s policy, that the choice of who rules Islamic countries was between military dictatorship or joyless religious bigots. I thought there must surely be intelligent life struggling to continue, somewhere deep under the violence or ignorance offered by these alternatives. I knew sufficient of the early twentieth century efforts to create secular societies in the Muslim world, so I’d always argued that the only proper position from which a humanist should try to counter religious fundamentalists was by locating and encouraging fellow non-believers within countries where zealots held power.
But I reckoned that any Muslim, in the present climate of intolerance, would need the death wish of Jesus Christ to declare themselves disaffected with their Islamic birthright. To find that there were brave people ready to state publicly their criticisms of Islam, from personal knowledge of those societies, was exciting; I felt I was observing something of the courage which has not been necessary in this country since people were still judicially tortured and/or murdered for heresy.
The meeting was part of the celebrations for International Women’s Day this year, so the platform speakers were all women. This had particular piquancy because women in Islamic societies are those most afflicted by the overt and vicious intolerance to be found there. The new organisation of ex-Muslims in Europe was started in Germany with a campaign against the hejab by one of the speakers, Mina Ahadi, who was awarded the title Secularist of the Year 2007 by the National Secular Society (NSS). This led to the formation of the Council of Ex-Muslims in Germany which has spread to other parts of Europe, particularly Scandinavia and Britain, where it was launched on 21st June 2007 by another speaker Maryam Namazie, who is on the staff of BHA – and NSS Secularist of the Year 2005. Support is emerging daily, though necessarily covertly, from the Islamic countries themselves.
As exiles from Iraq, Iran and Kurdistan, the speakers were well placed to link feminism with secularism; moreover, given that the principal secular opposition to the politicisation of Islam has in the past come from the radical left, of which they are part, they were arguing the necessity of a three-fold basis – feminism, secularism and radicalism – for opposition to political Islam. They advocate a Third Way between US imperialism and fundamentalism, with the struggle against what they appropriately term sexual apartheid as the core component of their activity.
Finally, I draw attention to the Manifesto of the Council of Ex-Muslims as a rich source of principles for tolerant secularism, well deserving of discussion.
*www.ex-muslim.org.uk
http:atheistmohammed.blogspot.com