On Freedom of Speech and Censorship

written in September 2021

I was imprudent enough to bring back from a trip to New York a copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, bought at the UN shop, which I gave to my then eight-year-old son as a present. For the following months, he persecuted me by ‘claiming his rights’ while making unreasonable demands, booklet in hand. While this is a lovely memory of a bright child, many of the demands I now witness being made by individuals – most often on behalf of their ‘communities’ in furtherance of ‘rights’ – are characterised by the same self-centred immaturity.

Beyond a certain age, individual ‘free choice’ within a group, be it family or society, needs to be confronted and balanced with the rights of others. In other words, human rights in general and freedom of expression in particular exist not in abstracto but in specific social circumstances that must be taken into account when it comes to exercising these rights.

The trend is to essentialise human rights today; it is therefore crucial to look into their historical and political construction.

Universalism vs the return of the divine

Human rights, historically, were constructed as protections of the powerless against abuses by the powerful. The 1689 Declaration of Rights protects British citizens against the king’s power. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the brainchild of the French Revolution, with its corollary – secularism, defined as separation of state from religion – protects French citizens against the ‘divine’ power that the king derives from god, for it is the church that is crowning him on behalf of god. This literally makes him the representative of god on earth.

Hence, the development of secularism and the secular laws that are voted on – one man, one vote – by all (male) citizens, rather than decided upon by the king in the name of god. Unfortunately, women were not included, despite protests led by Olympe de Gouges – who paid with her life for her commitment to human rights for all.

The 1948 Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man (which does extend rights to women, although they are seen as represented well enough by ‘Man’ in its title, but which leaves out the ‘citizen’) goes beyond a specific country to extend its jurisdiction to all human beings.
The Universal Declaration was drafted after the two extremely bloody world wars – in other words, European-interest wars – although they involved ‘colonial’ troops while fighting also for domination over non-European territories. It was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December 1948, in Paris at the Palais de Chaillot (hence the designation of ‘Droits de l’Homme’ (rather than ’droits humains’), which till today prevails in French), by resolution 217 (III) A. It was composed at the time by 58 member states, out of which 48 adopted the Universal Charter.

It was thus the responsibility of the newly formed United Nations Organisation (UNO) to guarantee these rights. The Blue Helmets were designed to enforce these rights internationally.

Universal rights today are highly contested and attacked as ‘Western’ values, even though several former colonies – today branded ‘Third World’ countries – were directly involved in drafting and conceptualising the Universal Declaration (1).

Fifty seven countries set up an international organisation that met and notably drafted an alternative Declaration of Rights in Islam, which was adopted in Cairo on 5 August 1990 (2). Although some of its provisions definitely contradict and prove incompatible with those of the Universal Declaration, it is clearly acknowledged and taken into account at the UN level.

This marked the return of the ‘divine’ that plagues and confuses human rights principles. And it sealed a de facto end to a universalist vision of rights. However, there is still little thinking done in regard to conflicting rights.

Human rights vs Politics

Of course, history has now taught us that in many instances, it is allegedly to protect the human rights of others that imperialist invasions have been perpetrated – as was the case in Afghanistan.

Moreover, I have lived long enough to witness the many instances where human rights principles have been trampled, betrayed and abandoned by those supposed to guarantee them; by governments of all shades and colours; by human rights organisations; by the ‘independent’ media; by liberal politicians and others. In fact, I cannot recall a time when human rights have not been instrumentalised by and subsumed to political interests. Let’s look at some examples illustrating this point.

During the liberation struggle of Algeria (1954-62), after the peak of violations by the French colonial troops during what was dubbed the ‘Battle of Algiers’(1956-57), human rights advocates (3) sent two thousand files on cases of ‘disappeared’ people at the hands of the French army – a clear case of extrajudicial killing – to the daily Le Monde. This paper was much-praised for its reliability, integrity and independence but it never published one line about these cases, although defence lawyers who had supervised the elaboration of these files said they could stand in court. Le Monde did not want to risk being banned by the pro-war French government for championing human rights.

More recently, during the ‘war against civilians’ in Algeria in the 1990s (5) that had an approximate toll of 200,000 victims, largely at the hands of extreme right Islamist armed groups (such as GIA, AIS, FIDA, MIA, and more), many citizens and specifically women belonging to women’s rights groups begged international human rights organisations to report extensively on crimes committed by these ‘non-state actors’ (4).
This was in vain: one look at any of their annual reports (6) shows that those violations are barely mentioned, while crimes and violations committed by the state occupy the quasi-totality of the pages devoted to our country.

Moreover, in the late 1990s, the three founding members of the first Amnesty International section in Algiers were expelled from theorganisation without notice, in response to a private letter they had written to the then Paris-based general secretary of Amnesty International. They had written to let him know how Algerian people felt about Amnesty’s one-sided reports regarding the war raging in Algeria and its numerous civilian casualties. They were not even given a chance to meet and explain their concerns, nor did they receive a word of thanks for their years of dedicated work for the organisation. In this personal letter – I still hold a copy of it – they first remind the general secretary that they
are faithful members of the organisation. They introduced themselves as: ‘founding members, members of the executive bureau, coordinators and members of group 1 of the Algerian section of Amnesty’.
They also indicate that they are merely sending ‘some observations’ in their ‘personal capacity’. The observations are made with respect to a report on Algeria published by the organisation as well as the ‘press release that announced the publication of the report’. Their first observation is that: ‘This press release, which is aimed at informing large audiences nationally and internationally, clearly shows an unbalance in presenting the document itself.’

The three founding members then go on to spell out the reason for the unbalance. By ‘giving more space to some parts (state responsibility) and
keeping silent about other parts (the action of armed terrorist opposition groups), this press release shows a lack of objectivity on the part of AI in its
appreciation of the wave of violence that is shaking Algeria’. And they conclude that ‘this press release only reinforces the emphasis already existing in the report, of only condemning one of the parties in conflict’.
They appeal to Amnesty’s principle that ‘partisan interpretations’ should be avoided. Like the head of Amnesty’s gender unit ten years later, they point at ‘the devastating effect that this press release had on public opinion in Algeria, including among those who till then were strong supporters of AI’. They conclude: ‘We feel compelled to inform you of the damaging consequences for the movement as well as for the struggle against violations of human rights that we have been waging till today in our country.’

On 7 February 2010 the head of Amnesty International gender unit was suspended from her job (7). This was hours after the publication of an article in the UK paper The Sunday Times, where she made public – after two years of sending internal reports and analysis to her colleagues in vain – her concerns about Amnesty International’s legitimisation of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee as a human rights defender. This man, Moazam Begg, moved from the UK to Pakistan with the declared intention to join the fundamentalist armed groups in Afghanistan. He has stated: ‘The Taliban were better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past 25 years’ (2007:214).
He was supported by Amnesty far beyond the defence of his fundamental rights not to be tortured and illegally detained. He was accompanied in person by Amnesty’s general secretary during a European tour planned by Amnesty, where he had meetings with European heads of state and prominent political figures – also arranged by Amnesty.
Begg was able to share his views with political elites while the woman who criticised the access he was given to such spaces was silenced.

The selection process that Amnesty, as well as other human rights organisations, uses to decide who to defend and who not to defend and the extension of its mandate to providing fundamentalists with a political platform – rather than just defending their fundamental rights – all amounts to taking a political stand.

In more recent times, not even the Paris massacre of the Charlie Hebdo journalists – whose only weapons were their free pens – not even Professor Samuel Paty’s decapitation while teaching the official curriculum on freedom of expression, had raised unequivocal support from human rights organisations, the media or politicians and democratic governments.
The victims – just for having exercised their fundamental right of freedom of expression – were largely accused of having ‘provoked’ retaliation, of ultimate responsibility for their own assassination.

This is a far cry from how rights defenders on the ground understand ‘freedom of expression’. In the words of courageous Indian Muslim intellectuals and activists gathered on 26 October 2020 to reflect on freedom of expression and Paty’s murder:
We are here to condemn in unequivocal terms, no ifs and buts, not only the man responsible for this barbaric act but all those who had any role in the instigation of the crime as also all those who seek to justify it. We are here not just to condemn the slaying of Mr Paty, but also to demand the abolishing of
apostasy and banishing of blasphemy anywhere and everywhere across the world. (8)
A two-minute silence was observed at the beginning of the webinar as a mark of respect for the slain teacher described by Hassen Chalghoumi, an imam who leads prayers at a mosque in a Paris suburb as ‘a martyr for freedom of expression, and a wise man who has taught tolerance, civilisation and respect for others’. (9)

It is clear enough that human rights organisations pick and choose whose
freedom of speech – and other human rights – they are going to defend. In
that they fail in their commitments and their raison d’être.

A hierarchy of rights

Definitely, women are not high on the priority list of groups that human rights organisations are willing to defend.
For example, throughout the 1990s, armed fundamentalist groups in Algeria openly posted the names of targeted individuals on the doors of mosques – for combatants to take action against. They then issued press releases announcing in advance which specific categories of people (10) they would kill (they used the term ‘execute’, for they claimed to be both judges and executioners). The
declared categories were as follows: ‘journalists’, ‘artists’, ‘intellectuals’, ‘foreigners’, ‘women’… Yes, in the fundamentalists’ own words, in their
published ‘communiqués’: ‘women’. This is not a profession anyone could
leave, as journalists or artists could; nor would there be a country to flee to, as foreigners could. In other words, as in Algeria, fundamentalists everywhere condemn to death women for who they are, not for what they do.

Armed fundamentalists did implement their plans as announced and then went on to publicly claim responsibility for the murders and assassinations they had perpetrated within the said categories. Among the estimated 200,000 victims during this period, there was a substantially high percentage of women (some say more than 50% but I do not have reliable figures) who were mutilated, killed, beheaded, slit, burnt, raped and taken to the fundamentalist camps to serve as domestic and sex slaves (11).

Can the demand that women be secluded, forbidden to learn or to work (as under the Taliban, then and now) or else executed if they transgress the orders, and that democrats, secularists and religious minorities be physically eliminated – can this be considered an ‘opinion’ at all? Does voicing this ‘opinion’ falls under ‘freedom of speech’? Is it not hate speech?
Can a human rights organisation promote – in any way – anyone who publicly supports political movements holding these ‘opinions’ (12)?
Clearly, women’s rights came last in their list of rights to be defended, long after ‘minority rights’, ‘religious rights’ or ‘cultural rights’.

Whose freedom of expression?

So, should we stand for freedom of expression, knowing that political forces, including human rights organisations that dare pretend that they are apolitical, will selectively apply it in ways that have been quite dissatisfactory? Human rights principles were designed as tools for greater social justice. Tools in and by themselves are neither good nor bad: it depends on whose hands they rest in.
Various political forces (including the religious fundamentalist ones) invariably succeed in monopolising rights for themselves to achieve their political aims, while denying similar rights to their political opponents.

Catholic fundamentalists not only oppose reproductive rights for their followers, but they also deny these rights to others who don’t share their faith; moreover, they also deny others the right to even speak about contraceptive methods and abortion. When they are in command in a country, they make laws in accordance with their beliefs and deny others who don’t share these beliefs the right to even discuss the issue. For example, the law of 31 July 1920 in France (13) – a law passed under a government eager to comply with demands of the church to boost population growth after WWI – forbade not only the use, but also access to knowledge of contraception and abortion. Sharing this knowledge was deemed ‘incitement’ to a crime (the law: ‘réprime la provocation à l’avortement et à la propagande anticonceptionnelle’). Anyone
contravening the law could be sentenced to death. The last execution took place in 1943, during WWII. This law plagued French women’s rights and freedoms until 1967, when it was abolished.

When in power Muslim fundamentalists also prevent free discussion of issues they deem ‘un-Islamic’ and severely punish by law those who exercise their right to have different opinions (freedom of conscience) and to express them (freedom of speech). Both can be punished by death sentence. They routinely reflect on their ‘right’ to kill the unbelievers, Jews, gays, atheists and others for blasphemy and apostasy. Ali Belhadj, vice president of the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut or FIS) announced in advance on the eve of the 1991 elections in Algeria that should his party win the elections, there will be no more elections. He argued: ‘If one has the law of God, why should one need the law of the people? One should kill all these unbelievers.’ The FIS won the first round of the elections, but the second round of elections was cancelled by the then government for fear that the FIS coming to power through legal means (elections) will end of democracy in Algeria.
Many dictators in history, such as Hitler, came to power through elections and one could barely say it was for the greater benefit of democracy and human rights.

However, in the case of Algeria when elections were cancelled after Ali Belhadj’s statement, it was the government that was deemed undemocratic by international human rights organisations. Meanwhile women’s organisations, worker’s unions and all democratic and progressive people in Algeria were taking to the streets, begging the government to urgently take this politically difficult decision.

In all circumstances and places where they exist, Muslim fundamentalists say and write that they have a right and duty to eliminate the untermensch (namely Jews, communists, free thinkers and gays). When they are in power, they issue edicts that officially allow for their physical elimination and murder. When they are not in power, they still perpetrate killings according to their doctrine, as has been seen – apart from within our own countries – in the UK and France again and again. Priests and churches have been attacked, synagogues and Jewish schools, secularists, writers, cartoonists, journalists and women who did not conform to their dress and behaviour codes.

Muslim fundamentalists preach in advance what they later act upon and/or inspire others to act. By doing so they exercise their freedom of expression but deny others the same right and all other human rights as well.

In France, both the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris, the attack on a Jewish primary school in Toulouse (where three children and an adult were assassinated within the premises) and the murder of Professor Paty near Paris are good illustrations of the fact that the murderers were sometimes tutored by long-distance-Islamist writings and statements, and thus incited to take action against people – their victims – they had never seen before. The actual crimes are a direct consequence of their instigators and sponsors’ freedom of expression.

Does this make me an opponent of freedom of speech? No. But it is increasingly hard for me to understand how honest liberal intellectuals continue to defend free speech unconditionally, refusing to even reflect on the fact that words – written or spoken – do have serious consequences in real life.

I do think we all have to take our responsibilities in the present situation where we cannot plead naiveté any longer, and we cannot rely on official human rights organisations to acknowledge the difficulties of the actual situations and think of ways to negotiate conflicting rights. The concept of hate speech is an attempt to limit the damages: someone cannot invoke rights to freedom of expression when they are publicly using it to incite violence against a person.

Rights are for protecting persons, not ideas or beliefs

French law makes a clear-cut distinction between attacking a person and attacking an idea: one cannot insult (hate speech) or attack a person; this will be dealt with in court. But one can insult, belittle, criticise or ridicule all the ideas and beliefs (including religious beliefs) of any given person.
For secularism oblige, the state is no longer (since the 1789 French Revolution) in charge of protecting religions and negotiating with their representatives. The state’s charge is its citizens and not their ideas and beliefs, which can be freely debated and contested.

This is different from the UK where a person’s ideas and beliefs must be respected, regardless of their absurdity. This has led to an unbelievable confusion towards what friends in India call ‘the industry of hurt sentiments’. In the UK and its former colonies, which inherited the British concept of secularism as equal tolerance by the state of all religions, this redefinition of secularism is breeding communalism. This involves unequal rights for different categories of citizens through specific laws of personal status, and representatives of different religions competing for more recognition and privileges from the state. This breeds communalism.
Further, it is not ideas and beliefs that are debated any more, but exclusively the sentiments and feelings of those who hold these ideas or beliefs dear to their hearts and cannot take the fact that others don’t share them and dare to say so. How far have we gone that hurt sensitivity can now lead to murder and justify it? And that this is done for the alleged furtherance of rights? As Kenan Malik wrote in ‘Forgetting the Lessons of Free Speech Struggles’:
One of the ironies, though, is that many arguments used today to defend speech restrictions as protections for the powerless are often the same as those once used by the powerful to protect their interests from challenge. When the US abolitionist newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837 by a pro-slavery mob in Illinois, a southern newspaper blamed him for his own death, as he had “utterly disregarded the sentiments of a large majority of the people
of that place”. A century and a half later, we heard the same arguments in calls for the banning of The Satanic Verses or in claims that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were responsible for their own deaths, because they, too, had “disregarded the sentiments” of many Muslims (15).

In Salman Rushdie’s ironical words, in an interview with the New Yorker entitled ‘On Censorship’:
…to say nothing of poor, God-bothered Charles Darwin, against whom the advocates of intelligent design continue to march. I once wrote, and it still feels true, that the attacks on the theory of evolution in parts of the United States themselves go some way to disproving the theory, demonstrating that natural selection doesn’t always work, or at least not in the Kansas area, and that human beings are capable of evolving backward, too, towards the Missing
Link (17).

As a conclusion, denouncing an apocryphal quote from Voltaire

We love and cherish freedom of expression and freedom of conscience, which is a precondition to freedom of expression:
‘Imperfectly free, imperfectly breathable, but when it is breathable and free we don’t need to make a song and dance about it. We take it for granted and get on with our day. And at night, as we fall sleep, we assume we will be free tomorrow, because we were free today,’ Salman Rushdie also said in ‘On
Censorship’ (above source).

However, we have to face the fact that free speech, this wonderful effort towards human emancipation, is only a tool. And it is now being appropriated, misused and perverted by political forces that aim precisely to do away with human rights for all. We see this with Muslim fundamentalists in Algeria attempting to win elections while intending to abolish them in future as soon as they take power.

What is to be done against the enemies of liberty when they use the very tools one designed to set everyone free?

French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher Voltaire is known for his criticism of the Roman Catholic Church – as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. He is often quoted as saying: ‘I disagree with what you say, but I will fight until death for you to have the right to say so’. This quote is apocryphal; British author Evelyn Hall’s unfortunate misuse of quotation marks in her 1906 publication entitled The Friends of Voltaire, attributed to him her own appreciation of his writings…

No doubt that liberals and blind supporters of freedom of speech love this false ‘quote’: for them all ideas are equally respectable. Not for me. Not for those who die because young men and now sometimes women read or listen to terrifying ideas that deny the human rights of others – especially the right to live.

But Voltaire was too intelligent and witty to ignore or underestimate the damage done by the spreading of inhuman ideas such as ethnic or creed
superiority over untermensch. We cannot plead naiveté. We know that the fiercest opponents to freedom of speech are using this very concept as a tool to spread their ideas in order to come to power – and then silence others.

Saint Just (1767-1794) – a very young French revolutionary, political philosopher, member and president of the French National Convention, Jacobin club leader – was a major figure of the French revolution. He was a close friend of Robespierre and served as his most trusted ally during the period of Jacobin rule (1793–94) in the French First Republic. Sitting in the Committee of Public Safety, he sent many opponents of the revolution to their deaths by decapitation, defending the use of violence against opponents of the government. His motto was: ‘no freedom for the enemies of freedom’ (pas de liberté pour les ennemis de la liberté). He was executed at age 27, just after the anti-revolution coup of 9 Thermidor (27 July 1794).

How does one negotiate between liberal freedom for all – whatever the costs and interests that it serves – a concept wrongly attributed to Voltaire, and the drastic silencing of the enemies of human rights advocated by Saint Just?
Is there a space in today’s thinking for going further in limiting hate speech?

At the very least, one should definitely be aware that human rights are nothing but a tool that can have devastating effects in the wrong hands, opposite to its intended effect.

I do not blame anyone for not having the perfect solution to this dilemma, but I do resent the good conscience with which, all in the name of human rights, some people are thrown to the beasts, left to die and rot under the boot of others.

Marieme Helie Lucas, Algerian sociologist, taught epistemology in the social sciences in Algiers University for 12 years. She is the founder of the international solidarity network “Women Living Under Muslim Laws” (wluml.org – no longer alive) and of the network “Secularism Is A Women’s Issue » (siawi.org).

References:

1. Drafters of the Declaration https://www.un.org/en/about-
us/udhr/drafters-of-the-declaration
2. Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Declaration_on_Human_Rights_in_Isl
am
3. My personal testimony submitted along with others
4. Women’s Human Rights Law Clinic and Women Living Under Muslim
Laws, in Shadow Report on Algeria (2000) Available at:
https://www.nodo50.org/mujeresred/argelia-shadowreport.html
Feminist Dissent
197Lucas. Feminist Dissent, 2022, Issue 6, pp. 182-198
5. Karima Bennoune (October 1997) WLUML Dossier 18: SOS Algeria –
Women’s Human Rights Under Siege. Available at:
http://wrrc.wluml.org/node/295
6. Compare the number of pages devoted to crimes and violations
committed by the Algerian state to the number of pages devoted to crimes
committed by fundamentalist armed groups in any of the annual reports
published by Amnesty International during the 1990s.
7. Marieme Helie Lucas and Sabrang India, ‘Conscientious Objection’. (1
March, 2010) Available at: https://sabrangindia.in/node/1787
8. Press release (2020), ‘Muslim intellectuals, activists condemn Paris
beheading, demand abolition of apostasy and blasphemy laws’. Available
at: https://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2020/10/press-release-muslim-
intellectuals.html
9. ibid
10. Thoughout the 1990s, Rassemblement Algérien des Femmes
Démocrates (RAFD) kept a record of these statements.
11. RAFD underground publications.
12. Marieme Helie Lucas, ‘The power of words and ideology: is preaching
of Nazi-like ideology a human right?’ (20 July 2017) Available at: siawi.org
13. Loi du 31 juillet 1920 réprimant la provocation à l’avortement et à la
propagande anticonceptionnelle JORF du 1 août 1920. Available at:
https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000000683983
14. Canadian Woman Studies (2018) ‘Women’s Rights, Secularism, and the
Colonial Legacy’. Available at: http://www.yorku.ca/cwscf/
Feminist Dissent
198Lucas. Feminist Dissent, 2022, Issue 6, pp. 182-198
15. Marieme Helie Lucas, ‘Stand and be Counted’. (19 October 2020)
Available at: https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-10-19/stand-and-
be-counted
16. Kenan Malik, ‘Forgetting the Lessons of Free Speech Struggles’.
Available at: https://kenanmalik.com/2022/02/02/forgetting-the-lessons-
of-free-speech-struggles/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email
17.Salman Rushdie, ‘On Censorship’. Available at:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/05/on-censorship-
salman-rushdie.html#ixzz1uxR5YuAd
18. ibid
19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Friends_of_Voltaire
20. https://fr.wikiquote.org/wiki/Louis_Antoine_de_Saint-Just
21 Begg, Moazzem and Brittain, Victoria, (2007). ‘Enemy Combatant: The
Terrifying True Story of a Briton in Guantanamo’. Simon & Schuster UK

First published on https://www.siawi.org

The post Free Speech or Hate Speak? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Dear friends,

I am following closely the events in Karnataka university/colleges and the controversy about female students wearing various head covering in class – whether hijab, burqa, etc…

Let me first tell you that I realize everyday how lucky I am to be a citizen of a virtually 100% “Muslim” country (Algeria): we were spared attempting to analyze the hijab/burqa conflict (and other similar conflicts) through the majority/minority lens and Hindu perpetrators/ Muslim victims dichotomy. In our case, there was no ‘other’ religious majority oppressing us.

Not that I have any doubt about the ugly reality of massacres led by a rising communal Hindu extreme-right majority attacking minorities, including Muslims in India. This unfortunately has been a blatant fact for decades and recent developments under Modi government only confirm the trend.

But the problem you presently face with the hijab controversy cannot be limited to it, nor should it be blurred by it.

In countries with heavily Muslim majorities, whether in North Africa, in the Sahel, in the Middle East, in the Indian subcontinent as a whole or now even spreading at the moment to Southern Africa and other places, we can witness the very same situation of rising political Islam and the promotion of its most blatant flag: the women covering (in increasing order, from hair/head covering to face covering: scarf, hijab, burqa). In other words: “the veil”. (I will avoid, for the moment, the issue of our diasporas in the West, in order not to go into more political complexities). It is striking that in most places I know, there appear to be a continuum from the mildest covering towards the fuller one. In other words, the head scarf prepares the ground for the hijab, which prepares the ground for the burqa. Interestingly, in most places, none of these outfits were indigenous, rather they have been recently imported from specific places in the Middle East. For decades and sometimes centuries, on different continents,  people have lived as Muslims without feeling the need to dress as if they were middle -easterners.

Let me just for one minute ponder upon the origin of the head, body and face covering and how it came to represent Muslims worldwide – I am intentionally not limiting its representativity to female Muslims but to the entire community whose identity women bear the burden of carrying; nor am I linking it to Islam itself, for this feminine outfit is highly contested by progressive Muslim scholars as being part of religious requirements.

I kept coming regularly to India for long stretches of time for the past more than 40 years. I am an eye witness to the fact that burqa is a very recent acquisition to Indian female “Muslim” fashion.

In your country – like in mine – women for centuries were wearing traditional outfits other than burqa which was unheard of till a few decades ago.

In most places I know, there appear to be a continuum from the mildest covering towards the fuller one. In other words, the head scarf prepares the ground for the hijab, which prepares the ground for the burqa.

I remember flipping with a friend through her before Partition family photo-albums: her grand-mothers, grand-aunts, cousins were all wearing Saris despite being devout Muslims. Women my age and younger were mostly wearing alternatively Saris (for social occasions) and Shalwar-Kurta (for everyday convenience). During our conversation, it became clear that pressure has been mounting on Muslim women throughout the subcontinent – i. e. whether they belonged to the majority community (as in Pakistan and Bangladesh) or the minority one (as in India and Sri Lanka) – to abandon Saris to the benefit of Shalwar-Kurta in a first step, in order to visibly separate religious communities; and then more recently to done the totally alien Middle Eastern Burqa. This trend is equally true in India, in Pakistan and in Bangladesh.

In Algeria, peasant women were wearing colorful dresses with an equally colorful headwear which was perched high on top of their beautiful hair with no purpose of concealing it; and definitely no veil – a far cry from what is now imposed in the name of “Muslim” identity. Meanwhile, urban women did have different forms of veil depending on the geographical area: thin, flowery and transparent, worn openly hanging from the head in the South; black and full body-concealing in the area of Constantine/Ksentina; white, upper body covering but hardly leg covering, with a lace mouth-covering in the region of Algiers; etc…

It is only in the early 70ies, i.e. nearly a decade after independence, that was first introduced in Algeria an “Islamic” outfit consisting at the time of a feet-long beige or grey coat worn with a matching scarf covering hair, head and shoulders, tied under the chin. This oufit was distributed for free to university students by our first openly Islamist groups; they called it at the time: ‘the student’s dress”.

Decades later, it is the black burqa – Iran and Saudi style – which they distribute for free in Algeria.

I remember the first time I saw a tiny little girl who could not have been older than 3 wearing an Islamist outfit in India; it was during the World Social Forum in Bombay (2004) and she was playing with other little girls whose outfits were not identity-laden, at the entrance of the building in a Muslim area where I stayed.

I remember the first time I saw a tiny even tinier little girl in a pushchair wearing a hijab; it was in New York, close to a conservative mosque; the woman who was pushing her, presumably her mother, was burqa clad. That was in year 2000.

I witnessed in the past two decades, the spreading of the black Saudi-style burqa throughout predominantly Muslim areas in Africa and South East Asia, with the progressive disappearance of what used to be women’s local traditional dresses.  To my utter surprise, it seems no one from our cultural rights advocates has taken the task to defend our various cultures by attempting to preserve saris, boubous, sarongs, etc… as valuable elements of cultural diversity – including Muslim cultural diversity. With Islam spreading on all continents, it seems without doubt that there must be a cultural diversity to acknowledge and defend? No one seems worried about the enforced homogenization of a transcultural Islamist (not Islamic) identity which carries so much of a reactionary political program.

In India itself, it seems progressives have been stuck within the fascist Hinduist political program of eradication of minorities and the defense of these oppressed minorities to the point that even suggesting that another reactionary religious political program is also at work within the endangered minority has, so far, not been audible. I have been blasted in New Delhi intellectual progressive circles for decades for doing just that: trying to draw your attention, friends, to the trend I could see easily in your country, for having lived the same process in my virtually 100% Muslim country.

I have witnessed the first burqas appearing in the streets of my beloved Nizamuddin “village” in Delhi, and then their multiplication … My saying so was repeatedly branded as “Islamophobic”. It was just an attempt to share my Algerian experience (and beyond) and to alert you on the rise of what such experiences allowed me to see rising in your country …

Now the question remains: how to defend the endangered Muslim minority against the new Hinduist extreme right without giving-in to the Muslim extreme-right which active political presence within the Muslim community you, friends, have refused for so long to acknowledge?

In India itself, it seems progressives have been stuck within the fascist Hinduist political program of eradication of minorities and the defense of these oppressed minorities to the point that even suggesting that another reactionary religious political program is also at work within the endangered minority has, so far, not been audible.

I do think we have to take a long view and while, of course, protecting and defending the basic human rights and freedoms of the individuals – for instance the hijab or burqa clad women students‘ right to education in Karnataka – , one should also firmly refuse to promote women covering either as a religious right (contested unanimously, may I remind you, by all progressive scholars of Islam on different continents, who paid with their lives their political courage and religious integrity), nor as an individual choice.

Wearing a hijab or a burqa today cannot be seen as an individual choice when we witness the world over how women are induced or coerced into wearing it, and more often than not at the cost of their lives – as was the case in Algeria in the 90ies, more recently in Mali, in Daesh-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq, in neighboring Afghanistan under the Taliban (then and now), and for past long decades in Iran, just to take a few examples. (I do not imply by saying this that burqa clad women in India are aware of the role they are made to play on the global arena. But we must be.)

In all the above-mentioned cases, it must be noted that it is men of their own Muslim community – in fact belonging to an extreme right political force which hides under a Muslim identity – who are pursuing this policy and have become the perpetrators of violations against women’s human rights.

For it must be noted that women are in most cases made to wear a covering – something we Algerians have come to identify as the political flag of an Islamist far-right – in the name of the defense of an oppressed identity.  But how come this Muslim identity is seen as threatened regardless of whether Muslims are in a majority or a minority or represent 100% of the population? Whether “Muslims” are heads of government? And even when laws are said to be derived from Islamic faith interpretations? How come Islam is seen as in danger the world over and Islamists are seen as its only legitimate representatives?

To me, this clearly points at the fact that the defense of the Muslim minority in India must be linked to the fight for secularism: secular laws i.e. common laws for all, and therefore equal rights, for all citizens of India. A landmark legal end to communalism. The replacement of a community identity by a citizen’s identity.

Again, your situation in India makes me realize everyday how lucky I am to be a citizen of a country which inherited from colonialism the best conceptual weapon against communalism: Algeria was colonized by France; you, friends, were colonized by the British. We inherited a different understanding of the concept of secularism.

The French revolution invented the concept of secularism in-so-far as it wanted to free the newly proclaimed Republic from the subjugation to the Vatican and its Catholic Church that had plagued the Kingdom of France. It therefore defined secularism as the total separation of the State from religions: article 1 of the 1906 law on secularism/separation states that citizens enjoy freedom of belief and of practice of their cult; article 2 declares that the State will have nothing to do with private belief systems; it will not officially recognize any religion, nor their representatives, it will not fund them, etc… The State will be totally separated from religions. This legal provision allowed, for instance, to pass laws that the Church disagreed with on the ground that they did not follow (their) god’s rules; this allowed laws on personal status to be voted for all citizens, benefitting all; not granting different legal rights to different unequal categories of citizens, according to one’s religious presumed affiliation, it allowed for citizens not to be forced into a religious or caste identity; it granted equal rights before the law to all citizens; etc… This is the original revolutionary definition of secularism.

Wearing a hijab or a burqa today cannot be seen as an individual choice when we witness the world over how women are induced or coerced into wearing it, and more often than not at the cost of their lives

It is a far cry from the British re-definition of secularism which ultimately aimed at legitimizing the double status of the King/Queen of England as Head of State and as Head of the Anglican Church. It therefore turned the original revolutionary definition of secularism into a situation where the State becomes a sort of arbitrator between religions, which grants equal rights to different religions and keeps the balance between their privileges; not only does it acknowledge and negotiate with self-proclaimed un-elected religious “representatives”, but it funds them, allows them to manufacture un-voted laws of personal status said to be in accordance with the principles of their religion – as interpreted by conservative religious clerics-, and coerces willing or unwilling citizens into a religious and community identity which is declared ‘theirs’ by birth – not by choice.

This is the trap in which far too many progressive people have fallen when running to the rescue of burqa-clad students assaulted by the Hindu right, and more generally all the numerous caste and religious victims of rising extreme-right Hindu nationalism. It seems to me that progressives in India could find a way out of the trap in a French-revolution inspired redefinition of Indian – in fact British colonial- secularism.

The defense of victims of one (majority) religious fundamentalist extreme right should not lead to supporting another (be it minority) one.

The battle for secularism is raging in so many countries today, including in France itself, where successive both Left and Right governments slowly de facto abandon the basic principles of separation between religion and state; and where the British re-definition of secularism as equal tolerance by the State vis-a-vis all religions is creeping, with the active support of the European Union. However, so far, de jure, the legal provisions of separation still stand, as defined by the French revolution and formalized in the 1906 law on secularism.

The bigger threat at the moment in France is the attempted appropriation of “secularism” by the French extreme right for communal purposes – an appropriation which is ardently combatted by progressive secularists in France, including political and human rights exiled and migrants who fled Islamic fundamentalist governments in their own countries.

I hope and look forward for a trans-communal coming together of secularists, both within national contexts and internationally, at grass roots level, to force our unwilling governments to let us make full use of the revolutionary concept of secularism.

The writer is an Algerian sociologist as well as an activist for women’s rights and secularism. She occupied leadership positions in human rights groups starting in the 1980s.

The post Open letter to our secular Muslim friends in India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Assassinations by decapitation or by the sword – which are highly symbolic of all Muslim extreme right organisations (Al Quaeda, the Taliban, GIA, Shabab, Daesh, Boko Haram, etc…) – are not a new phenomenon in France. Several cases have already happened in recent years. It points at the will of the sponsor to not just ‘execute’ the victim for his ‘crimes’, but also to send a chill down the spines of potential next victims, – in this present case anyone who will dare re-publish the ‘drawings of Mohammed’. This is why filming decapitations or taking a photograph of French teacher Samuel Paty‘s head severed from his body is a crucial step. Who will dare teach freedom of speech in French schools after the mid-term holidays? Stand and be counted…

In Algeria too, long before the ‘bloody nineties’ and the ‘war against civilians’ as we called it then, we too witnessed some such public terrifying Islamist war crimes: the first ‘execution’, in the early seventies, was a communist student, who faced an ad-hoc Islamist Tribunal inside the premises of Algiers University where I taught at that time, and was ‘executed’ by the sword then and there.

For it is important to understand that the same scenario which developed in Algeria right after independence and culminated in the nineties is being replicated in Europe: gradually, there was fundamentalist control taking place over women, their dress, their behaviour, their space for choice, etc; there was ‘Islamic punishment’, as they call it, for ‘kofr’ (unbelievers) – generally death penalty – or for ‘un-Islamic behavior’ such as smoking, drinking, not praying 5 times a day, not fasting during Ramzan/ Ramadan, etc…

But who cared for a bunch of women who did not conform, for drunkards or for gays and for unbelievers? The State certainly was not about to endanger ‘social peace’ for these un-important citizens. The French State did not do any better, when the first victims on its soil were young women or isolated intellectuals, decades before the assassination of a teacher that took place a couple of days ago. And France has, so far, not learnt from what followed suit in Algeria.

For  three decades from the 60s to the 80s, violence in Algeria mounted, until by the 90s fundamentalists deemed ‘Kofr’ any citizen who had anything to do with the ‘kofr state’, such as, for instance, sending children to school, getting treatment in government hospitals, or going to any government office for an identity document, etc. For all the critics of the government at that time, , let me remind readers that, in Algeria, education was totally free for boys and girls alike, and so was access to hospitals to all citizens. (Not many European or North American countries could say the same, when poor people still die at the doorstep of hospitals, for lack of resources to pay for their treatment.) In other words, in Algeria, not having anything to do with the ‘kofr state’ was a fundamentalist command that was impossible to comply with, in a country where everything was controlled by the state. The number of victims that received their ‘punishment’ from extreme right Islamist armed groups skyrocketed; the estimated number is 200,000 victims in the decade of the nineties.

In France, Algerian refugees from the nineties, who had already lived through this whole process, kept warning about similar developments in France. We were never heard. Moreover, we were deemed anti-Islam, as if armed Islamist groups were the sole true representatives of Islam; or we were deemed henchmen of the Algerian government, when most of us had already been persecuted by the State for being part of the progressive opposition.

International human rights organisations were at the forefront for welcoming Islamists as the victims of the State and shunning us as ‘Islamophobic’ – a concept quickly coined by the Muslim extreme right, which has now spread worldwide. Human rights organisations will carry the stigma for their inhuman political choice: I am convinced that history will judge.

During the nineties, when ordinary people tried to flee Islamist extreme right violence, they were denied visas to France on the ground that they were not persecuted by the government but by non-state actors. We all bitterly remember that and maintained full files about it – while prominent Islamists, some of them with blood on their hands, were welcomed as political refugees everywhere in Europe and North America.

In a way, France’s deliberate policy of welcoming far right Islamist opponents to the Algerian State now bears fruit. They now have developed into a full political force within France, that shows muscle in order to bend laws and democratic principles to their own theocratic ideology.

Since the nineties, there were many warning signs in France of the rise of a Muslim extreme right (as is clearly the case in the UK, as well as in other European countries); for instance: various attempts by Muslim fundamentalists to change laws, or cultural habits: for instance an attempt to have a clause on the virginity of the bride included in the law as a precondition of the validity of a marriage; several attempts to legalize the total separation of sexes (in education, in hospitals, in swimming pools, etc…); several attempts to change the curriculum in schools ( no art class, no gym for girls, no biology classes unless creationism was taught instead of Darwinism, etc…). Within France, many girls and young women were assaulted and some of them killed since the nineties, for ‘un-Islamic behavior’.

Such warning signs were ignored, despite attempts by anti-fundamentalist Algerian refugees to alert the authorities and the media, and human rights organisations as well. In vain.

Interestingly, progressive people and human rights organisations in Europe explain the crimes and violations committed by the Muslim extreme right by the racism they face in Europe. (In the case of Charlie Hebdo’s journalists and cartoonists, many on the left and within human rights circles  actually justify the killings, shamelessly declaring that they deserved their fate for insulting ‘Muslims’.) Indeed there is racism in France (or in the UK for that matter) and there is clear discrimination at the level of housing and employment; but there are also anti-racist organisations to defend the victims. And the state itself is not racist: there are no discriminatory laws (free education and health benefit all). Discriminatory practices which, of course, unfortunately exist at the level of individuals, are condemned in courts. This is more than what we can offer to foreigners in our own countries of origin, as can be seen with the waves of migrants being terribly ill treated when, on their way to Europe, they cross the North of Africa – where being black is still equated with being a sub-human.

In many ways, we are privileged, those of us coming from so-called Muslim countries: we are spared the justification of the Muslim extreme right’s crimes through racism, and we know for sure that religion per se is not at stake. Take Algeria, where virtually 99% people are officially declared Muslims by virtue of being born in a Muslim majority country, in a Muslim family; where ethnicity (Arab only, till recently), religion (Islam) and citizenship (Algerian) are conflated and virtually synonymous. Like in other countries in South Asia, Middle East or Sub Saharan Africa, it is ‘Muslims’ killing ‘Muslims ‘. Religion is the cover up for extreme right political forces; like nazis with the Aryan ‘race’, the Muslim extreme right believes they belong to the upper religion in the world; like Italian fascists invoking the Glorious Past of Rome, they justify their self-proclaimed highest status with reference to a mythified past: the Golden Age of Islam. Like fascists and nazis, they believe this superiority grants them the right and the duty to physically eliminate the untermensch (the sub-humans), which, strangely  enough – seem quite similar, from WWII to now: Jews and other ‘inferior races’, communists, etc… to which our home brand of fascists and nazis add the Kofrs. Among many other similarities, they all assign women to their place: the kitchen, the cradle and the Church/in our case, the mosque.

One of the many problems in the analysis of crimes such as the one committed day before yesterday in France against a history teacher, whose only crime was to teach the official curriculum on freedom of expression, is the lack of an adequate vocabulary to name the perpetrators. We need to qualify them in political terms, not in religious ones as is currently done in France.

The crimes and violations we witnessed in Algeria during the nineties, which are still currently perpetrated today in so many predominantly ‘Muslim’ countries, could not possibly be defined as perpetrated by ‘Muslims’ in our contexts; we were forced to identify them as political forces of the extreme right.

Naming these political forces is essential. This is the conceptual blessing I wish for France and for Europe, if we don’t want to face here as we did in Algeria, another ‘war against the civilians’. That is why I say, we have to stand up and be counted, now.

Republished with permission of the author.

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Secularism and the colonial legacy –
How it impacts on women’s universal rights and on democracy
An edited version of this article, titled “Women’s rights, secularism and the colonial legacy”, appeared in the Canadian Women’s Studies Journal:
Women’s Human Rights Changing the World Volume 33, Numbers 1,2

Why Secularism is a women’s issue – Secularism vs religious laws – Citizenship vs communalism – Sharia courts vs women’s rights
Marieme Helie Lucas
September, 2016
Content:
Definition(s)
The struggle for secularism
Secularism is definitely a women’s issue

Introduction
The impact of “sharia courts” on women’s rights in the UK cannot be looked at without first exploring what is secularism and how it represents the last recourse for women of migrant Muslim descent, in the protection of their legal rights, that are now endangered in Europe through policies of communalism and cultural relativism. However, we first need to clarify what is secularism, as different definitions in different parts of Europe bring about different consequences for women rights.

1. Definition(s)
There is an increasing trend among English-speaking secularists to adopt the French word ‘laïcité’(1), (which they write ‘laicity’) (2) rather than ‘secularism’, on the ground that these concepts do not refer to the same reality.

Indeed the reality defined by the concept of laïcity and that we can observe under the label of secularism differ. It is quite clear that the principle of laicity, conceived of under the French revolution as separation of Church and State, cannot fit unaltered into a country where the Head of State is also the Head of the Anglican Church (UK), or where the Federal State collects religious taxes through the Landers’ administration (Germany), or where one swears on the Bible in court (USA), etc. Considering that formerly colonized countries in Asia and Africa inherited the British concept of secularism, we can say that very few countries today are laïques.

At a time when Muslim fundamentalist detractors of laïcity now pretend it has been designed to discriminate against Muslims in France, it is worth a little bit of history. During the French revolution and for a long time after it, till WWI, there was no Muslim emigration in France, and it remained statistically insignificant till after WWII. It is thus hard to understand that the latest laws on secularism passed in 1905-1906 anticipate from at least half a century the first numerically important migrations from North Africa (3).

Historically, the principle of laïcity emerged during the French revolution, at a time when the political power of the Catholic Church over the Kingdom of France was overwhelming : in an initial stage, it had been a hard won step forward to, first of all, impose the creation of a representative Assembly to temper the power of the King, and then to limit the power of the Church to enjoying a reservation of only one third in the Assembly which was then composed of three categories at par, the nobility, the clergy and a specific category of citizens- the ‘Tiers Etat’. ‘Separation’ then meant an essential component of the emancipation of the political power from Vatican’s imperialism, and it was a matter of survival for the emerging democracy in France. In later developments, the modalities of this ‘separation’ between Church and State were codified, over more than a century, till the laws of 1905-1906 which gave French democracy its secular legal frame, as we know it today.

This legal framework allows for equality between all citizens (religiously inclined or not), rather than equality between religions:
The secular recasting of the state, initiated in France with the acts of 1881 and 1886, then the Act of separation of Church and State of 9 December, 1905, corresponds to some sort of evidence enclosed in the very etymology of the word: the Res Publica addresses everybody, believers, atheists and agnostics alike and cannot therefore favor anybody… In that sense, secularity is akin to universalism, which is the essence of the republic. But it could not occur spontaneously. There had to be a movement to emancipate the current law from any submission to some specific religious persuasion. Hence, the republic is neither atheistic nor religious: it no longer arbitrates between beliefs but arbitrates between actions and is devoted only to the general interest…/…At the same time, the ethical liberty of the private sphere is guaranteed. No conception of what the good life is can monopolize law or illegitimately extend the normative function of the law beyond the interest of the community of citizens (4).

Having completed over more than a century the arduous task of expelling the Churches from political power, the secular state undertook to securing the individual right of citizens to develop their own personal forms of spirituality – religious or not. Considering the abundance of articles in English, including scholarly ones, that –today in the wake of rising Muslim fundamentalist political forces – display an unbelievable degree of ignorance about secularism in France, it is worth looking at the law in some detail.

In its article 1 and 2, the 1905 law grants and protects individual rights to belief and practice:
The 9 December 1905 act opens on two indivisible articles, grouped under the heading, «Title 1. Principles“.”Section 1: the Republic shall ensure freedom of conscience. It shall guarantee free participation in religious worship, subject only to the restrictions laid down hereinafter in the interest of public order. Section 2: the Republic may not recognise, pay stipends to or subsidise any religious denomination. Consequently, from 1 January in the year following promulgation of this Act all expenditure relating to participation in worship shall be removed from State, region and municipality budgets.“Hence grouped under the same heading, the two first articles of the law are obviously inseparable and are clearly referred to as principles. Religious freedom is but one version of the freedom of conscience (article 1) and is viewed only as a particular illustration of the freedom. Having to coexist with the freedom of choosing to be an atheist or an agnostic, the freedom of opting for a religion obviously belongs to a more general category which is the only one mentioned by the law. Insisting on”religious freedom” is in fact preserving the privilege of a spiritual option when the law henceforth rejects all privileges. This is why section 1 is inseparable from section 2 which stipulates that the Republic does not recognise any religious denomination. This strictly means that it has passed from recognising certain denominations (before 1905, Catholicism, Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism and Judaism) to renouncing all recognition. It is not passing from recognition of some to recognition of all, as a multireligious or communitarist interpretation would have it, but from a selective recognition to a strict non-recognition. This principle of non-recognition is to be understood in its legal sense as confirms the fact that no stipend or direct subsidy may be paid to any church by the State…The 1905 Act does not just stipulate that all churches are henceforth legally equal. It extends this equality to all spiritual choices, whether religious or not, by dispossessing the Churches of any public law status. Assigning religions to the private sphere entails a radical secularization of the State. It henceforth declares itself incompetent in matters of spiritual options, and has not therefore to arbitrate between beliefs nor to let them encroach on the public sphere to shape common norms.(4)

According to the 1905 law, religious belief is a personal option just as agnosticism or atheism. Hence the law does not grant ‘religious freedom’ specifically , but freedom of conscience in general; for the first time, the law considers beliefs other than that of the dominant Catholicism at part with each other. Personal stands are equally respected and none is privileged over the other, but neither religions nor the absence of religion (atheism) are granted any public privilege by the state: the state will simply not interact with the official representations of organised religions – it declares itself incompetent in religious matters, it states that religion is not within its mandate – , so that politics will not be instrumentalised by religion, nor will religion be instrumentalised by politics. Indeed, the history of Europe has largely shown how dangerous such instrumentalisation may be (5).

Secularism is not just another belief, at par with religions; it is clearly defined as exclusively a legal and administrative provision through which the role and place of religions in politics is regulated and limited.

It is in this context that one should understand the secular rule in France that civil servants when they are in contact with the public should not wear any sign of their religious or political affiliations, nor should teachers, administrative staff and pupils in secular state schools. All of them stand in these circumstances as equal citizens of a secular republic, not as members and representatives of any community. However, it is useful to reiterate here that what these citizens do outside these functions is their personal choice in which the state will not interfere. One can easily understand that the decision of UK to grant each citizen permission to be received by a representative of his/her religious or ethnic community when s/he goes to a police station, for instance – stands exactly at the other end of the political spectrum in matters of secularism: the entire society is being communalised.

Secularism/i.e.laïcité is understood in this article as separation between religion and the state. I do not consider that there exist several definitions of secularism (as is the common belief in the UK), but rather that there are presently many near-successful attempts at undermining laicity by redefining it as secularism in ways that allow the states to still continue granting religions political power. We are still, and may be more than ever before, in a struggle for secularism. It may hearten us to remember here and now that secularism is a hard won right and that people always had to fight for it. What we face today with the rise of new religious-Rights*, in particular the Muslim-Right*, is not unlike what earlier secularists had to face.
*(In order to facilitate the reading, I will use a capital letter for political affiliation – extreme-Right, religious-Right, etc…—, and the lowercase for rights as in: people rights, human rights, women’s rights, religious rights, etc..)

2. The struggle for secularism
Nowhere, not even in the birth place of laicity, has this right be an easy conquest; everywhere it has been a long, hard and on-going struggle – and it continues to be so today.

To this day, the reactionary struggle never stopped in France against the eviction of – then – the Catholic Church and – now – religions in general from direct access to political power through an undemocratic mode of representation (6); it took different forms at different moments in history, from open war to the more modern attempts to dissolve and melt the principle of ‘separation’ into the muddy waters of multiculturalism. While the Catholic Church has apparently taken a back seat, the anti-secular struggle in Europe is now led by Muslim fundamentalism, i.e. a far-Right movement working under the cover of religion, with the active backing of the Catholic and Jewish religious authorities.

One of the many attempts to undermine secularism is to reformulate and redefine it. The UK – quite logically considering the confusion it entertains between Head of Church and Head of State – promotes, under the apparently neutral principle of equal tolerance by the state vis à vis all religions, a formal recognition and representation of religions within the state, thus planting the seeds of ‘communalism’. (I am using here the concept developed in South Asia to stigmatise the adverse effects of separating people and fellow citizens into communities). Moreover, the UK is playing a leading role within European institutions insofar as its redefinition – switching from separation to equal tolerance – is now largely adopted by Europe: more and more pressure is put on France to abandon the historical definition of secularism and to adopt the Anglo- Saxon one, in the name of human rights and religious rights.

This also had consequences throughout Asia and Africa as British colonialism propagated the ‘equal tolerance by the state’ definition throughout its former Empire. In the same line of attacks on secularism, we recently witnessed in France various attempts by the Right-wing to add adjectives to the word secularism in order to modify its meaning and bring it closer to the British redefinition, such as ‘open secularism’, ‘inclusive secularism’, ‘plural secularism’, ‘positive secularism’, etc; all are intended to corrupt the concept. (7)

The major political consequence of this redefinition is ‘communalism’: while laïcity considers only individual citizens, UK “secularism” gives birth to communities and communalism i.e. division among citizens and competition between different religions for political representation within the state:
The denominational neutrality of the republic cannot be assimilated to a vague ethico-political relativism…/…Secularity was actually introduced in the law with the acts of emancipation from religious supervision of school, public institutions, and then of the State. It is by essence a separation of State and Church, which rules out all Concordat regimes. The official recognition of certain worships involves a double exclusion: that of other worships and that of non-religious figures of spirituality. It encroaches on the public sphere, alienating it to the domination of religions. It makes no difference to recognize several religions: the alienation of the public field to religious persuasions is none the less patently obvious (4).
In a globalized world where people, not just in richer Europe and North America but also in Africa and Asia, are increasingly mobile, hence of mixed origin in the same location, i.e. from diverse religions and cultures, there is an equally increasing urge for a political and legal frame based on universal principles, beyond and outside the religious and cultural norms of these different categories of populations; only secularism can avoid competition between religions for public privileges and political power, and competition between citizens for imposing one’s own norms over others’. It implies that universalism should prevail and that laws common to all should be freed from the religious norms and restrictions specific to one category of citizens. The absence of ‘separation’ between States and Churches/Religions, especially in matters of law and education, is incompatible with equality of rights between all citizens. (8)

The consequences are heavy on women in formerly colonized countries, where the British colonizers imported their own definition of secularism: they are trapped into the colonial legacy of ‘community rights’ which limits their access to universal rights, even in the eyes of their own independent governments.

As for women of migrant descent who are now citizens of European countries, they may be further trapped into abandoning their voted rights as citizens in the defence of un-voted ‘community rights’ imposed by ‘community leaders’. They are made to choose between two loyalties: to women’s rights or to ‘community ‘ rights. A double bind indeed.

In fact, what we are witnessing in this moment of history is the increasing trend to abandon the principle of ‘one law for all’, and to adopt different laws for different categories of citizens on the basis of their –often presumed – religious affiliation, thus creating an inequality of rights among individuals otherwise supposed, under the official Constitutions of most countries, to be equal before the law. This can be observed throughout the world, with a visible long-lasting influence of former colonizing countries’ definitions of ‘laicity’ vs ‘secularism’ on their former, albeit now independent, colonies.

It can be observed in Britain with the recognition of the so-called Sharia-courts, in fact arbitration courts which do not apply the law of the land but whose judgments are legally binding under the 1996 Arbitration Act: the religious court’s decisions can then be enforced by the county courts or the High Court (9). Similarly, Jewish Beth Din courts have handled civil legal cases for more than 100 years in Britain on a similar basis, and now operate under the 1996 Arbitration Act (10). This is the ground on which Muslim fundamentalists claimed equality of treatment, not between citizens who are, in fact, denied equality, but between religions.

In the past three years, there were several attempts by Muslim fundamentalist groups in the UK (11) and in the USA (12) to enforce sex segregation in public universities (against UK gender equality rules) and in the UK to promote ‘sharia compliant’ (13) wills (which denied “Muslim women” equal share, and excluded non-Muslim wives and adopted children from the rights to inheritance otherwise guaranteed to all under the law of the land).

It is worth noting that – at least for the time being, although such demands may later come about – demands for accommodating religiously inspired laws or practices do not focus on criminal law and huddud punishment (such as stoning for sex outside marriage or cutting out the hand of thieves), but they are limited to personal status laws (also called family codes): these laws affect primarily women through regulating marriage, polygamy, repudiation, divorce, custody of children, alimony, inheritance, etc.. Under the guise of identity politics, it is women – and their subordination by the males in their communities – which are the primary – and in fact the exclusive – targets of communal demands.

Abandoning democratically voted secular laws in order to accommodate communalist demands for separate un-voted religious laws, amounts to trading women’s rights for temporarily appeasing fundamentalists through a highly undemocratic process. Abandoning secular principles and trading women’s rights for the sake of appeasing reactionaries and traditionalists is a policy that has been practised by colonial powers; and till today women pay the price for this legacy. It is ‘British India’ which codified what passes off today as ‘Muslim law’ in India (14) and it is the French secular colonial power which codified in the ‘overseas French provinces in Algeria’ the ‘Indigenous law’ (15) that became the basis on which was designed what is today known as the infamous family law of independent Algeria (16).

These colonial often syncretic re-invention heavily weight on today’s feminist struggles. Indeed, under the pretext of respecting indigenous mores, colonial powers did want to maintain colonized people into their supposedly ontological ‘difference’, – as this was the basis for not granting them equal legal rights at par with the colonizers. Is this any different philosophically from what is being done today in Europe to citizens of migrant descent, in the name of respect of their religions and cultures?

Just like the revolutionaries of the French Revolution were not revolutionary enough to think that women too could enjoy the rights that men just conquered (17) and discriminated against them, ‘secular France’ during colonial times was obviously not secular enough to accept the idea that colonized Algerians too may enjoy the right to define their future away from clerics. Algerian women still struggle to get rid of the family law that was initially, under colonization, presented as a symbol of cultural indigenous resistance to colonization (alas, Fanon seems to have fallen into the trap), while it was in fact the instrument of colonizers to control the resistance by throwing men some crumbs: power over ‘their’ women.
Indian feminists still struggle today to get rid of separate family laws for Hindus, Christians and Muslims, although these laws trap women into either defending their rights as women or defending their community from the attacks of the dominant religious group, and although these laws clearly prevent from moving forward on the rights of women within the family.(18). It is worth noting how the shying away from defending secular laws was detrimental not just to the advancement of women’s rights in family matters, but also to the unity of the women’s movement in general. After the Shah Bano case which granted alimony to a repudiated old woman, feminists of Hindu majority background feared to be seen as anti minority-Muslims (or as would be said now: ‘Islamophobic’), while rights-demanding women from Muslim minority background feared further rejection from their ‘community’ – and, if they persisted in their demands for rights, they also feared that their Hindu background feminist counterparts would not even stand by them… Isn’t it exactly what rights-demanding feminists of Muslim heritage today are facing in Europe?

‘Divide and rule’: whether it is India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, or Sri Lanka, the region is plagued with the fragmentation of citizens into religious identities, which is inherited from the colonial era and the British definition of secularism as equal tolerance by the state towards religious communities.

The same applies to African countries formerly colonized by Britain: in all of them, specific family laws (or Personal Status Laws) apply to different religious communities (19); hence the law discriminates against women as citizens, granting rights to some women citizens that are denied to others, by virtue of being born into a Christian or a Muslim or an Animist family. Some countries, such as Senegal, still give the woman the final ‘choice’ between, for instance, a monogamous or a polygynous marriage; this has to be set once and for all at the time of the marriage civil registration; one could ponder on the logic of giving anyone the choice between ‘more rights’ vs less rights’… Moreover, numerous firsthand reports show that husbands-to- be who promised that – of course ! – they would opt for a monogamous marriage change their mind at the very last second and request a polygamous marriage in front of the registrar; the ‘choice’ left to the brides is either to swallow their tears in wake of this first betrayal, or to create a scandal in front of both extended families and numerous invitees – something that they can hardly face. ‘Choice’, when granted to the powerless, generally amounts to supporting the most powerful one.

In the early years 2000, we also witnessed in Canada (20) attempts to introduce discriminatory legislations that would have deprived specific categories of the population (the ‘Muslims’) of rights enjoyed by all other citizens, in the name of their geographical origin, hastily equated with a presumed religious faith. Interestingly, the Left and feminists in Canada were not unanimous in standing against such propositions of law, which were presented as respectful of minorities’ difference, while in fact they would have deprived women of Muslim migrant descent of the legal rights enjoyed by all other Canadian women. Although many Canadian women of Muslim origin openly opposed the bill (21), it took external solidarity to enrol the support of majority women’s organisations in Canada; in solidarity with Canadian women of Muslim descent, the network Women Living Under Muslim Laws organized a speaking tour in Canada, featuring women from Algeria, Iran, India, South Africa, Bangladesh, etc…(22) The aim was to explain in detail to Canadian feminists what minority women will face if they did not enjoy any longer the protection of the law of the land; and why feminists in Canada should support secular laws, which were democratically voted by the people and could thus be changed by democratic means, rather than adopt supposedly divine laws interpreted by conservative men, hence unchangeable. Each of us gave multiple examples of the rights we lost when our countries moved to so-called sharia law. The pattern of the Left and ‘majority community women‘ shying away from supporting the universal rights of citizens of Muslim descent under secular laws has been replicated on many occasions, in the name of respect for their unsurpassable otherness.

More examples of the global trend to erase secular laws and replace them with religious ones specific to each ‘ community’ can be given even from secular France. Since the 1980s, numerous attempts have been made by Muslim fundamentalists to alter laws and mores and to outlaw secularism, which they branded discriminatory against minorities.

Let me give a few examples at random: They demanded the annulment of a civil marriage on the ground that the bride lied about being a virgin, ‘an essential quality’ of the marriage (23); it took the government to step in and appeal against the first instance court decision to grant the annulment (a very rare legal procedure) on such slippery grounds, rather than a simple divorce (which was immediately granted). They demanded that a court hearing be postponed on the ground that the accused was fasting during Ramadan (24). They demanded not just halal meat to be served in school canteens but also that all food served be halal, otherwise it would be contaminated by the proximity of non-halal food. They demanded that the curriculum in national state-run secular schools (where education is entirely free from primary school to university) be altered so as to eliminate biology (for the reason they teach evolutionism rather than creationism), graphic arts and gym for girls. They demanded segregated time for ‘Muslim women’ in swimming pools. (25) They demanded that women in hospitals be exclusively approached by female personnel from cleaner to doctor (26). They demanded that religious signs be allowed in state secular schools (it is in this context that the demand for headscarves for girls, which made the headlines of the international media, should be understood) (27).

Analyzing these examples leads us to more general political comments. The above mentioned demands are not made at random: Muslim fundamentalists target the very secular principles which are the foundation of the French Republic: in their views, secular schools, civil marriage laws or justice are to be amended so as to recognize the existence and pre-eminence of religious opinions. The demand for annulment of a marriage is different from a request for divorce: while the second solves the dispute between a couple, the first indents into marriage laws which do not include acknowledging ‘virginity as an essential quality of the bride’, as does Muslim marriage law in many countries; it is therefore a legal encroachment of religious views into secular laws. The question is not to just ‘accommodate’ specific demands, but to abandon founding principles about the place of religions and religious laws in a secular political system. All these requests are geared towards making religion, at the very least, visible, and at worst to treat it on par or even to allow it to supersede secular principles, – thus presenting secularism, like atheism, as just another ‘religious’ opinion or way of life.

Those are presented as demands from “Muslims” in the name of “Islam”, while progressive citizens of Muslim descent (both believers and unbelievers) and progressive theologians of Islam loudly voice their dissent regarding demands made in their name (28). Progressive citizens of Muslim descent and progressive Muslims love and openly defend secularism (29). Cultural relativism as it prevails in Europe today actually promotes the idea of a totalizing transcontinental uniform a-historical Muslim religion-cum-culture and excludes progressive people from it. It recognizes only the most reactionary opinions as legitimately representing Islam and Muslims. Hence the Left and feminist supporters of cultural relativism de facto support, in ‘the Other’s community’, the very Rightist forces that they would fight within their own ‘community’.

Moreover, by locking citizens, including dissenting ones, into an imaginary Otherness (30), they create ex nihilo a falsely homogeneized ‘community’ that fits the negative stereotypes that the far-Right openly displays about ‘Muslims’ but that the Left and feminists usually disapprove of as racist – what a contradiction.

Secularism does not erase differences between individuals; but it definitely avoids essentializing difference, the trap in which both human rights organisations, the Left at large and too many feminists have fallen into in the past few decades in Europe. By unduly accepting the ideological construct of homogeneous communal identities without ever asking who speaks for this community with what legitimacy: by essentializing Otherness and forcing individuals into a group identity, by virtue of their birth place, without their consent; by allowing the unelected self-appointed representatives of these groups to have a say in and to weight on political decisions, cultural relativists have actually abandoned the hard won rights that secularism granted all citizens.

Economic liberalism tends to favour communalist policies, as opposed to secular ones, because communalism plays a determinant role in the fragmentation of the people: when migrant workers in the UK were initially seen as all ‘foreigners’, they used to regroup and fight collectively for their rights as workers at par with the indigenous British workers; then they were partitioned as South Asians, Turks or Africans and encouraged to create their own communities, highlighting their cultural differences, with the consequence of inevitably affecting the earlier common struggle for rights. Now they are further divided along religious lines (South Asians, for instance, have been split into ‘Hindus’, ‘Muslims’, ‘Sikhs’, etc…) to the point that human rights organisations now even speak about ‘Hindu human rights’, or ‘Muslim human rights’, etc. Both Capital and fundamentalist Right-wing organizations cannot dream of a better situation to further their ends. Additionally the cultural relativist Left and feminists undermine their own political forces by failing to ally with and support progressives voices among citizens of migrant descent and by cowardly cowing away from the potential accusation of “Islamophobia” – a concept forged by fundamentalists to silence dissent.

Secularism is definitely a women’s issue
There is no denying that, historically, secularism per se, secularism alone, even within secular states, has not automatically granted full rights to women. Detractors of secularism have always been fast in pointing at all the inequalities that still remain between citizens even after the separation of organized religions and state had been declared: women were not always included as equal citizens in revolutionary attempts to impose equality and equal rights, nor were the colonized people in Africa and Asia during the previous centuries, nor are today’s sexual minorities in many countries in Europe and North America for instance.

However, what secularism does do is to regulate and limit undemocratic political representation of “Churches”. This is not a small achievement and we should hold on to it. My generation may have believed for some time that this struggle was one of the past, with the decline of the Catholic Church, but we have been quickly awakened to the fact that it was replaced by Muslim fundamentalism, as the spear head of religious claims to political power during the second half of the XX° century. Concomitantly, women’s rights have suffered many new assaults, in the name of gods, with the rise of identity politics.

In other words, if secularism is not a sufficient condition to ensure women’s rights, it is a necessary one, even an indispensible one. Because it favours the rights of communities over the rights of individuals, communalism induces a hierarchy of rights in which women’s rights come last, after religious rights, minority rights, cultural rights. And organized religions in general have been instrumental to the oppression of people and specifically of women.

Many so-called ‘Muslim countries’ experienced and still experience today the rise of fundamentalist forces that pretend to dictate to the state and to citizens their own interpretation of a supposedly divine law. In the words of Ali Belhadj, the then vice president of the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, announcing on the eve of the December 1991 elections that, should FIS win these elections, it will be the end of parliamentary democracy and there will be no more elections under FIS rule: “If we have the law of God, why do we need the law of the people? One should kill all these unbelievers.”(31)

When the laws are not voted on by citizens any more but are ready-made in conformity to a supposedly divine prescription, this is the end of democracy, i.e. the hard won power of the people to formulate, express and change their laws according to their will, by voting. And when the laws are religiously inspired and binding, they deny citizenship agency not only to agnostics and non-believers, but also to believers who read their religion with progressive lenses, and to followers of other non-recognised creeds. In such a context, women demanding rights are quickly labelled kofr, and anti-Islam by fundamentalists. The situation is similar in countries of emigration: while secular laws today defend women’s access to universal rights, communalism induces a ‘choice’: just like in colonial situations, women have to position themselves between defending their rights or defending community rights – i.e. mores and rules defined by conservative men. We will not dwell here on the contentious issue of ‘choice’ and agency, but simply note that only secular systems free women from this double bind situation.

Secularism keeps religions and religious institutions at bay from infringing on democratically voted legal rights. However, the secular system does not force individual women who are Roman Catholic believers to practice contraception or recourse to abortion; it simply denies the Vatican the right to enact a law forbidding reproductive rights in the name of god. It prevents the Vatican to forbid you and me from buying contraceptive devices at the nearest drugstore. Catholic women can still go through as many pregnancies as they feel they have to in order to fulfil their religious duties. The secular system does not force an individual woman who is a practicing Muslim to accept an equal share to inheritance at par with her brothers, it denies Muslim clerics the right to make inequality in inheritance part of the law of the land. A Muslim woman will still be able to donate her share to her brothers if she believes this is her religious duty.

Secularism gives rights, it does not force rights down one’s throat. As we all experienced, pressure can be exerted on individual women by other individuals who have moral authority or influence on them in order to make them renounce their legal rights. Let’s not add to women’s plight by forcing them to permanently have to ‘choose’ between the law of the land and ‘religious laws’ or ‘cultural rules’ at the risk of exclusion from their family and social group. Secular laws are women’s most efficient (necessary albeit not sufficient) guarantee against religious or cultural oppression.

This explains why so many women of migrant Muslim descent (both believers in Islam and atheists) in Europe and North America are now on the forefront of the struggle for laïcity, i.e. total separation between religions and states and against the introduction of separate laws for different categories of citizens in places where governments abide by the redefinition of secularism as equal tolerance of the state vis a vis all religions. We found them in the USA, in Canada, in France, in the UK, in Germany, etc. (28). Similarly we find women at the forefront of secular struggles in the countries of the former Soviet block, where various denominations of Christianity have infringed on the laws of the lands and reintroduced religious restrictions on women’s rights (starting with reproductive rights), such as in Poland, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Croatia, in Serbia, etc.

While France’s Left intellectuals slept for a long time over their glorious secular past, it is women of Algerian descent who first blew the whistle regarding the dangers of forceful Muslim fundamentalist groups challenging the foundational secular laws. Ahead of most Left thinkers and theorists who ignored the fundamentalist danger for far too long and held the views that the priority was the anti-imperialist struggle, women of migrant Muslim descent insisted that struggles against capitalism and imperialism and struggles for secularism and against extreme right religious fundamentalist forces should be led simultaneously, without prioritizing one over the other. For this reason, anti-fundamentalist women secularists in Europe have been repeatedly accused of betrayal by the Left. Running across the tide, a poem entitled ‘I was shot by my secondary enemy’ points at the probable outcome of the main enemy theory, for so long cherished by the Left: ‘Totally caught into my struggle against the main enemy,- I was shot by my secondary enemy, /-Not from the back, treacherously, as his main enemies claimed, /-But directly, from the position it had long been occupying , /-And in keeping with his declared intentions that I did not bother about, thinking they were insignificant’ (32). May be these ‘declared intentions’ were seen as ‘insignificant’ for the simple reason that fundamentalists smartly target women’s rights first, and that the Left is still dominated by male thinkers?

Like most revolutionaries before them, they do not automatically include colonized people or women into the beneficiaries of equal rights, through democracy and secularism.

Because they have been made aware of the dangers of religious fundamentalism in the countries of origin of their families, and of the value of secularism in their countries of immigration, women of migrant Muslim descent are today playing a major role in the defence of secularism, secular laws and secular values against Muslim fundamentalists in Western Europe. Numerous new organisations are emerging, very often atheist ones. The two first Ex-Muslim Councils were set up in Germany and the UK by women of Iranian descent. These are organisations which denounce the acceptance in Europe of the concepts of blasphemy, heresy and apostasy; as indicated in their name, they uphold the rights of leaving the religion one has been brought up in, without being condemned to death and executed for doing so. In Canada, the defence of secular laws was initiated by the progressive women’s organisation ‘Canadian Council of Muslim Women’, led by practicing believers, and by the ‘No Sharia campaign’ which was led by an atheist Iranian woman. This was an illustration of the fact that believers and atheists can stand together for secular laws. Many believers want their faith to remain a private affair and want to prevent the religious-Right from infringing on the laws of the land. Similarly, it is women who lead the struggle for secularism in Eastern Europe, with the pro-Choice movement in Poland, the Coalition for Secularism in Serbia, the Femen in Ukraine, etc.

Relentlessly calling on the Left to defend secular laws, and denouncing its unholy collusion with fundamentalist religious-Rights movements, secular women are also playing a major role in the enlightenment of the Left in Europe regarding the extreme right wing political nature of religious fundamentalist forces (33). Prominent left thinkers are still a long way away in the analysis of Muslim fundamentalism, with notable exceptions: ‘The control of capital over bodies, its strong will to reveal their market value, does not at all reduce their control by religious law and the theological will to make them disappear. The ways of oppression are as numerous and inexhaustible as those of god are mysterious. The poor dialectic of main and secondary contradictions, forever revolving, already played too many bad tricks. And the “secondary enemy”, too often underestimated, because the fight against the main enemy was claimed to be a priority, sometimes has been deadly’ (34).

If these views gain ground and if a philosophical and political shift takes place in the Left in this respect, it will be thanks to the efforts of secular feminists and to their activism on the ground. We must admit that, at the forefront of this struggle worldwide are the women of Muslim heritage, as the adverse circumstances they face are of a magnitude that is nowhere to be found. In our countries of origin, they are facing not just unfavourable changes in the laws but death, enslavement, torture, at the hands of armed religious militia; not just in one country, but on at least two continents. This is what explains that those of us in the diaspora relentlessly denounce the early warning signs of rising fundamentalism and confront the Western Left when it does not take up the defence of secular values.

It is even more important today to make efforts towards the Left, when the traditional xenophobic extreme right tries to hijack the concept of secularism, equated to ‘Western values” by the National Front in France; just as the Hindu right in India had been supporting Indian women demands for secular family laws, provided the secular law was aligned on the Hindu family law. As we know, this unfortunately resulted in the abandonment of the struggle for a uniform civil code by Indian feminists. We do not want similar pretext of not feeding into the extreme-right in Europe – where they are everywhere on the rise – to be used against women’s rights to secularism. The biggest danger we now face is the adoption of ‘equal tolerance by the state’, as a perverse European definition of secularism vs laicity. But, so far, although it is a hard struggle, it is not – not yet – a lost battle, for feminist secularists can stand on the vast body of conceptual work, inherited from the Enlightenment era.

If we can agree that secularism alone is not enough of a guarantee for women’s rights, we must state that definitely is a necessary condition without which ‘divine’ laws are undemocratically forced upon women citizens. Whether it is the Vatican, the Orthodox Church or the Evangelists throughout the Americas, Africa and Eastern Europe; or Daesh, Boko Haram, the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Shababs, the GIA, etc.. throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East and now in the western diasporas; or at a much smaller scale the Hindu right or the Buddhist right in South Asia and South East Asia – religious fundamentalists have again started the conquest of political power: democracy and women’s rights have everything to lose in the process.

Notes
1. The word ‘laïc’ comes from the Latin word laicus, which itself comes from the Greek word λαϊκός, laikos; it means ‘common, from the people’ (Laos) i.e. someone who is not part of the clergy, hence, although a Christian who follows the Church, someone who is ignorant in theological matters; it is opposed to κληρικός, klerikos (clerc), a man who received religious education and is part of the clergy. Secularism comes from the Latin word saecularis .‘Secular’ is what belongs to the world – i.e. not to the Church.
2. Taslima Nasreen uses the term laicity since 2009 Also see: http://frenchwindows.hautetfort.com/archive/2008/01/02/what-is-laicite.html
3. The 2005 law on secularism, passed under Sarkozy’s presidency actually weakens the 1905 law; it moves from ‘no sign’ of religious affiliation to (no ostentatious signs’. This allows for interpretation.
4. Henri Pena Ruiz, ‘France: Secularity and the republic. A secular recasting of the state: principles and foundations’
5. From the religious wars like the massacre of Saint Barthelemy (massacre of Protestants during several days in 1572 in Paris then extended to more than 20 cities in France), to the murder of Giordano Bruno (born in Italy in1548, a Dominican monk and a philosopher well informed of Copernic thesis, accused of heresy and atheism tortured and burnt to death by the Inquisition), or of the assassination of Chevalier de la Barre (accused of heresy and sacrilege – blasphemy was not any longer punished by death – for refusing to uncover his head when a religious procession was passing by and owning the ‘Dictionnaire Philosophique’ written by Voltaire, he was tortured and burnt to death in 1766 at age 19 – despite attempts by Enlightenment philosophers to save his life; the outcry that followed his ordeal and execution are believed to be one of the factors that sparked the secular revolution of 1789).
6. It has been a long struggle to come to the Secular Republic. After a brief separation of church and state in 1795, Napoleon re-establishes the Catholic Church as the state religion with the Concordat of 1801. Today this provision still exists in the region Alsace-Moselle and there are still many demands for the suppression of this exception to laicité. Article 10 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen states that
“No one may be disturbed on account of his opinions, even religious ones, as long as the manifestation of such opinions does not interfere with the established Law and Order” .The 1871 Paris Commune proclaims state secularism on April 3, 1871; but it is cancelled after its defeat. From 1879, the French state establishes a national secularization program in order to eliminate the still very prominent influence of the Church in the education and health systems which since the Middle Ages have been running charity institutions: the state takes charge of these institutions by organizing the funding, training and staffing in these crucial sectors, and by the removal of priests from the administrative committees of hospitals and boards of charity, and the substitution of lay women for nuns in hospitals. Jules Ferry, under the Third Republic, in 1881–1882 purges from any religious instruction all the state-run and state-funded secular schools. In 1886, the secularization of the teaching staff of the National Education system is established. Divorce and civil marriage become legal despite the Church opposition; civil marriage must be celebrated prior to any religious marriage, as it is the only one the Republic recognizes as legal, although the state does not interfere in the celebration of additional religious ceremonies. Seminarians loose the privilege of being exempted from conscription. Public prayers at the beginning of each Parliamentary Session are abolished, all religious actions and emblems are banished from the courts, the schools, the army and all public buildings. All these struggles lead to the laws of 1905 and 1906 that codify secularism as we know it today.
7. In 2007, there was an outcry in France against the Discours du Latran in which the president Nicolas Sarkozy ( excerpts in French below) used the concept of ‘positive laïcité’ and stated that a secular teacher will never be able to convey to the students the same morality standards than a religious one. He also speaks of France’s Christian roots which should be most valued.http://eucharistiemisericor.free.fr/index.php?page=2012074_sarkozy -La laïcité ne saurait être la négation du passé. Elle n’a pas le pouvoir de couper la France de ses racines chrétiennes. Elle a tenté de le faire. Elle n’aurait pas dû…/…Nous devons …/… assumer les racines chrétiennes de la France, et même les valoriser…/… Le temps est désormais venu que, dans un même esprit, les religions, en particulier la religion catholique qui est notre religion majoritaire, et toutes les forces vives de la nation regardent ensemble les enjeux de l’avenir …/… Le fait spirituel, c’est la tendance naturelle de tous les hommes à rechercher une transcendance. Le fait religieux, c’est la réponse des religions à cette aspiration fondamentale…/… Or, longtemps la République laïque a sous-estimé l’importance de l’aspiration spirituelle…./… Ce n’est qu’en 2002 qu’elle a accepté le principe d’un dialogue institutionnel régulier avec l’Eglise catholique. Qu’il me soit également permis de rappeler les critiques virulentes dont j’ai été l’objet au moment de la création du Conseil français du culte musulman…/… Et puis je veux dire également que, s’il existe incontestablement une morale humaine indépendante de la morale religieuse, la République a intérêt à ce qu’il existe aussi une réflexion morale inspirée de convictions religieuses. D’abord parce que la morale laïque risque toujours de s’épuiser ou de se changer en fanatisme quand elle n’est pas adossée à une espérance qui comble l’aspiration à l’infini. Ensuite parce qu’une morale dépourvue de liens avec la transcendance est davantage exposée aux contingences historiques et finalement à la facilité. ../…C’est pourquoi j’appelle de mes vœux l’avènement d’une laïcité positive, c’est-à-dire une laïcité qui, tout en veillant à la liberté de penser, à celle de croire et de ne pas croire, ne considère pas que les religions sont un danger, mais plutôt un atout…/…Dans la transmission des valeurs et dans l’apprentissage de la différence entre le bien et le mal, l’instituteur ne pourra jamais remplacer le pasteur ou le curé../…
http://www.voltairenet.org/article154954.html -Réponse au Discours de Latran
http://www.unsa-education.org/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=1339 – Accords Kouchner Vatican, l’UNSA dénonce un passage en force
8. See also: Henri Peña-Ruiz: Dieu et Marianne ; philosophie de la laïcité (Presses universitaires de France).
9. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1055764/Islamic-sharia-courts-Britain-legally-binding.html#ixzz41YSGVWAF
10 . ‘UK: One legal system? http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article1088386.ece
‘Revealed: UK first sharia courts’, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/ ;‘Sharia law spreading as authority wanes’,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1535478/Sharia-law-is-spreading-as-authority-wanes.html;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2957428/Sharia-law-courts-operating-in-Britain.html
11. http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie/2013/12/10/sex-segregation-in-uk-universities-a-step-forward-for-the-muslim-religious-right/
marieme helie lucas: Sex segregation in UK universities – a step forward for the Muslim religious-right, December 2013
12. Why I Said No To Gender Segregation at York | Paul Grayson
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/paul-grayson/j-paul-grayson-york-professor_b_4611750.html
13. http://www.southallblacksisters.org.uk/law-society-withdraws-sharia-wills-practice-note/
Law Society withdraws sharia wills practice note – Southall Black Sisters, Nov 2014
14. Islamic Law and the Colonial Encounter in British India, by Michael Anderson, WLUML occasional paper n°7, June 1996
15: Reform of Personal Status Laws in North Africa: A Problem of Islamic or Mediterranean laws? , by Ann Elisabeth Mayer, WLUML occasional paper n)8 July 1996
16: Listen to “ouech dek” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNkHmEN0IlI
A beautiful protest song, written and performed by 26 women artists in the three languages currently spoken in Algeria, confront the religious judges who drafted the 1984 family code that confirm the inferiority status of Algerian women by denying them adulthood status: “Hi judge ! what’s wrong with you?!”
17. As we all experienced, neither revolution, nor secularism automatically grant rights to women. A pioneering feminist, Olympe de Gouges demanded in vain equal rights for all citizens including women , during the French revolution. She paid it with her life. Born in 1748, she was executed in Paris on November 3, 1793. On the model of the revolutionary Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen ‘ she wrote a Declaration of the rights women as citizens which proclaims equality of sexes in civil and political rights, as women’s birthright taken away by prejudice. She wrote: ‘ If women have a right to be executed, they should also have the right to speak up’(« La femme a le droit de monter sur l’échafaud ; elle doit avoir également celui de monter à la Tribune. »). On January 2016 the then French Minister of Justice (a woman) gave the name of Olympe de Gouges to the building hosting her Ministry.
18. http://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2012/06/the-shah-bano-case-a-landmark-case-in-indian-family-law/
After the Shah Bano case, the Indian feminist movement abandoned the struggle for a secular uniform civil code, for fear that this demand be hijacked by the Hindu-right, and manipulated against the Muslim minority; similarly, there are feminists in France today who step back out of the battle for secularism because the National Front is attempting to hijack the concept.
http://www.lokniti.org/women_indian_politics_for_csds.php
“An important concern that such communalisation creates for women’s movement, is that the conservative forces employ women themselves to counter the argument for women’s protections and rights. For instance this argument for protection of personal laws was also used to protest the banning of Sati (widow immolation). Women activists opposing Sati were deemed as western and elite and a large counter procession was organized by women seeking the protection of their right to commit Sati”
19. For instance, African countries such as Cameroon, Nigeria, the Gambia, Senegal, etc… and the whole of the Middle East, have separate family laws according to individual citizens’ presumed religion. See details on what rights these religious laws deprive women of, in: “Knowing Our Rights – Women, family, laws and customs in the Muslim world”, WLUML, 2003. It is interesting to note that in former British colonies the plurality of legal systems is directly justified by ‘ secularism’ (defined as ‘equal tolerance’ for all religions – in which case colonized people are at par with colonizers), while in former French colonies, as was the case in Algeria or Senegal, it is the racist assumption that colonized people (“les indigènes”) do not – yet -deserve benefitting from laicity and may access to it later, when they will be more civilized. For the time being, they can be left with their customs. A reasoning very similar to the one Olympe de Gouges denounced in the male revolutionaries vis à vis women revolutionaries, at the times of the French revolution. It can also be found in the Whites’Enlightenment discourse over Black people.
20. See: Summary of the Marion Boyd Report (.pdf file, Website of the Attorney General)
21. http://ccmw.com/what-we-do/projects/no-religious-arbitration/
22. www.nawl.ca/ns/en/…/ReligArb_WLUML05_en.rtf
The report celebrates the opportunity “to learn from the experiences and legal realities of women in the Women Living Under Muslim Laws Network (WLUML), living in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Algeria, the United Kingdom, France and other parts of Europe and the Arab world”.
See also: http://www.wluml.org/action/canada-support-canadian-womens-struggle-against-sharia-courts
The 1991 Arbitration Act allowed for the use of ANY laws in arbitration. It did not differentiate between areas such as commercial or family, and so the Act was permissible for religious communities.There were no Christian groups using the Act for family matters. The Jewish Beit Din -religious tribunal- did use private legally binding arbitration for commercial matters and in a year we heard that there were 2 family issues when the arbitration act was used. There were no records of any other arbitral awards.
According to the Canadian Council of Muslim Women ( private communication, April 13, 2009), the Arbitration Act allowed for the use of private legally binding arbitrations and there were only two Jewish instances that came forward in their research. The CCMW went for NO religious arbitration. Now of course no religious laws are recognized by the courts.
wluml.org: 7.04.2005:Urgent Action Alert ‘Support Canadian women’s struggle against sharia courts’. http://www.wluml.org/english/actionsfulltxt.shtml?cmd[156]=i-156-180177
Muslim women say no to sharia courts,
http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-4781841_ITM
Muslim women embrace Canada as home but…
http://www.wluml.org/english/newsfulltxt.shtml?cmd per cent5B157 per cent5D=x-157-546887
Sharia law comes to Ontario, Muslim women lead protest
http://www.thepolitic.com/archives/2004/06/08/sharia-law-comes-to-ontario-muslim-women-lead-protests/
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=123 – Homa Arjomand
and : http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/002103.php – Alia Hogben
23. I looked in vain for a decent article in English on this landmark case, but was discouraged by their bias (including calling a civil marriage between two Muslims a ‘Muslim marriage’ ! It is hard to believe but it is true) . Please use an automatic translation of the French articles:
http://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/societe/l-annulation-d-un-mariage-pour-non-virginite-en-appel_572726.html
See also:
http://www.siawi.org/article339.html -annulation de mariage pour non virginité, texte du jugement et reactions
http://www.siawi.org/article344.html – les tribunaux sous pression du religieux, – Caroline Fourest, Le Monde 6 juin 2008
http://www.siawi.org/article338.html – law and religion clash in France, Katrin Bennhold,
International Herald Tribune, June 2, 2008
http://www.siawi.org/article333.html – mariage d’une épouse non vierge annulé, Libération, 31 mai 2008
http://www.huyette.over-blog.net/article-20139426.html -par michel huyette sur l’annulation du mariage pour mensonge sur qualité essentiielle
http://www.siawi.org/article338.html – annulation
24: We note that none such request was ever made in Muslim countries where courts don’t stop during fast.
http://www.wwrn.org/article.php?idd=29278&con=2&sec=33
Anger over ‘Ramadan’ trial delay : ‘Critics say the decision is a breach of France’s strict separation of religion and state. The trial of seven men for armed robbery was due to start on 16 September in Rennes. But last week the court agreed to a request from a lawyer for one of the accused to put it off until January. In his letter asking for the delay, the lawyer noted that if the trial were to start now, it would fall in the Muslim month of Ramadan. His client, a Muslim, would have been fasting for two weeks and thus, he said, be in no position to defend himself properly. He would be physically weakened and too tired to follow the arguments as he should. ‘
25: Gymnases et pîscines: les communautés font des vagues
http://www.topchretien.com/topinfo/view/39409/islam-en-france-piscine-et-gymnase-les-communautes-font-des-vagues.html
.La mixité à l’école écornée en douce , Libération 2 Juin 2008,,
http://www.siawi.org/article332.html
26. A testimony at the Stasi Commission: “In normal circumstances, one can choose one’s medical doctor, but what about emergencies? In Montreuil as in Lyon, the medical staff has to take issue with some husbands who refuse a coesarian cut on the ground that it would performed by a male doctor. “ This is streeful, especially when one is facing threats and insults” said docteur Pierre-Yves Barrier, gynecologist in Villefranche hospital, in Gleizé (Rhône). Seven years ago a husband refused that he performed a cesarian cut on his wife. Three days later he learnt that she gave birth, elsewhere, to a still born baby”. “
“En consultation ordinaire, chacun peut choisir son médecin. Mais en urgence? A Montreuil comme à Lyon, les soignants expliquent qu’il leur faut parfois parlementer avec des maris qui refusent une césarienne, parce qu’elle sera le fait d’un homme… “C’est stressant, surtout quand on reçoit des menaces ou des insultes”, soupire le docteur Pierre-Yves Barrier, gynécologue à l’hôpital de Villefranche, à Gleizé (Rhône). Il y a sept ans, un mari a refusé qu’il accouche par césarienne sa femme. Trois jours après, il apprend qu’elle a accouché ailleurs d’un enfant mort.” “
Témoignage auprès de la Commission Stasi; http://www.bladi.net/forum/11728-lhopital-confronte-radicalisation-pratiques-religieuses/
http://www.casafree.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7579 – les gynécologues français face aux musulmans intégristes
http://www.vaunage.net/mailsansintoxext2.htm -Témoignages inquiétants sur des «manifestations d’intégrisme», hier devant la commission Stasi.«Il arrive que le mari refuse que la patiente ait accès à la péridurale.» Christine Picot, sage-femme «Aujourd’hui, on voit une burqa par jour.» Christine Picot est sage-femme depuis une dizaine d’années à l’hôpital intercommunal
André-Grégoire de Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis). Avec Claude Dagorn, le directeur de cet établissement, elle a été auditionnée, hier, par la Commission sur la laïcité présidée par Bernard Stasi. Et elle a témoigné de l’apparition de «manifestations d’intégrisme musulman» chez les patients. Des scènes, hier, rarissimes. «A l’hôpital, dans la maternité, on voit un renforcement du port du foulard, jusqu’à la burqa, avec des gants, a-t-elle ainsi raconté. Beaucoup de ces femmes arrivent, elles n’ont pas droit à la parole. L’explication avancée, c’est qu’elles ne parlent pas français. Mais c’est faux, elles sont pieds et poings liés à la volonté du mari.».De plus en plus souvent, certains musulmans demandent ainsi que leur épouse soit soignée par une femme.
«C’est faisable en consultation, commente la sage-femme. Mais c’est plus complexe lors de l’accouchement ou en cas d’urgence.» Il arrive alors que «le mari refuse que la patiente ait accès à la péridurale», et jamais la femme ne va «contre la volonté de son mari». Lors de l’accouchement, «certains maris sont là pour surveiller qu’aucun homme n’entre dans la salle de travail».
27. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=989066 – Karima Bennoune, Secularism and Human Rights A contextual analysis of headscarves religious expression and women’s equality under international law
28. Soheib Bencheikh, ‘Marianne et le Prophète’, l’islam dans la France Laïque’, Grasset 1998, p 144 : ‘Ce sont les musulmans qui devraient expliquer à leurs coréligionnaires qu’il faut éviter de ridiculiser Dieu dans l’interprétation de Sa parole. Si le Coran a recommandé le voile, c’est dans le seul objectif de préserver la dignité et la personnalité de la femme selon le moyen disponible à l’époque de la Révélation. Si, aujourd’hui, le même moyen ne réalise plus le même objectif, il ne faut pas s’attarder sur ce moyen mais le chercher ailleurs. Paradoxalement, ce qui préserve aujourd’hui la personnalité et assure l’avenir de la jeune fille, c’est l’école. C’est en s’instruisant que la femme peut se défendre contre toute atteinte à sa féminité et à sa dignité. Aujourd’hui, le voile de la musulmane en France, c’est l’école laïque, gratuite et obligatoire’.
Also see: http://m.slateafrique.com/97015/linvention-du-voile-religion-machisme
Le voile, un symbole de 3.000 ans de machisme religieux, by Mohamed Kacimi
Also see: Soheib Bencheikh, Separation does not weaken religion, WLUML dossier 28, december 2006
29: The Struggle for Secularism in Europe and North America, edited by Marieme Helie Lucas
http://www.amazon.com/struggle-secularism-europe-North-America/dp/1907024220/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1412354804&sr=1-1&keywords=Marieme+Helie+Lucas
30: Marieme Helie Lucas: ‘What is your tribe? Women’s struggles and the construction of Muslimness’; in: C. Howland (ed), Religious Fundamentalism and the Human Rights of Women (New York: St Martins Press, 1999).
31. See: A. Belhadj, Alger Républicain, 5 April 1991./ A. Belhadj, le Matin, 29 October 1989./ A. Belhadj, Horizons, 29 February 1989./ A. Madani, Algérie Actualité, 24 December 1989. /A. Belhadj, ‘Open letter to Mudjahidin’, 2 October 1994.
32. Erich Fried, in Cent poèmes sans frontière, Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1978 (Poem translated by Marieme Helie Lucas, from ‘A hundred poems without borders’
33: For more examples of the role of women in promoting a secular analysis, see: The struggle for Secularism – note 29; it gives many examples of the leadership of women in secular struggles.
34. Daniel Bensaïd, “La République imaginaire”, Chapter 2 in ’Fragments mécréants. Mythes identitaires et république imaginaire’, Editions Lignes et Manifestes, Paris 2005. (Quotation translated by Marieme Helie Lucas)
 

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