On 26 September 2023, the X handle of Pakistan’s Aurat March tweeted: ‘It’s important to keep in mind that menstruation is a biological process & biology is different from gender (which is socially constructed). Not all those who have a uterus are women & not all women have a uterus. Reducing a woman down to a uterus is misogynistic.’

Aurat March, or ‘Women’s March’, is an umbrella group led by feminist activists, which organises demonstrations across Pakistan’s major cities on International Women’s Day, and engages in other forms of rights activism across the rest of the year. Aurat March’s tweet sparked the customary backlash against the group in Pakistan, but also led to more constructive critiques from certain quarters, including a BBC Urdu article. The article cited concerns raised by certain women over Aurat March’s tweet on the grounds that it erased the biological reality of women, while also quoting the Aurat March organiser’s defence of their message.

Aurat March’s message echoed the claims of gender identity ideology, which are at present the subject of bitter disagreement in the West. The ideology claims that a person’s gender, unlike the biological sex they are born with, is down to that person’s own feelings and hence entirely subjective and a matter of self-identification: as Aurat March’s tweet puts it, that gender is ‘socially constructed’.

While evidence of gender dysphoria, and individuals identifying outside the male and female binary, can be found across human history, consolidated transgenderism emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century. Western gender identity ideology differs from clinically diagnosable variance, or the earmarking of a third gender used to categorise individuals who do not fit the binary across the world. Instead, it seeks to synonymise those born in a particular sex with those identifying as such from the opposite sex, while paradoxically allotting them separate ‘cis’ and ‘trans’ labels respectively. Perhaps its most contentious assertion remains that ‘trans women are women’, which is the essence of the above-cited tweet by Aurat March and of narratives upheld by many women’s rights organisations in the region, such as Feminism In India.

It should be self-explanatory why ‘trans men are men’ never became the transgender rallying cry: quite simply, biological men are less likely to be concerned about invasion of their spaces. As the philosopher Alex Byrne put it in an interview for the Freethinker, ‘Generally speaking, men could not give a fig about whether trans men are included in men-only sporting contests or use men’s changing rooms or are in the male prison estate.’

On the flipside, regardless of where one stands on the gender debate, modern-day transgenderism quite evidently clashes with hard-earned sex-based rights that women activists have toiled for over the past century. In the West, concerns over female physical and reproductive integrity, and the desire to retain women-only spaces, have transformed bathrooms, prisons, and sports competitions into gender ideology battlegrounds. But while the simmering debate over the clash between transgenderism and sex-based rights is founded over a largely egalitarian bedrock in the West, the thoughtless imitation of gender identity ideology has much more perilous repercussions in the Indian subcontinent, with its predominantly patriarchal culture.

Attitudes to women and the opportunities available to them differ between the South Asian states. However, as a regional bloc, these states are among the lowest ranked on global gender indices. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2023, six of the seven SAARC states, namely India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Maldives, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, ranked lower than 100 in the 146-country rankings; India did so despite staking a credible claim to being a global power. Across South Asia, institutionalised gender disparity, upheld by state-backed radical religionism, as well as skewed cultural norms, and ethnic, racial, or casteist divides, has made it more critical than ever for local feminists to take up a united front against the patriarchal forces which are still very much alive. However, the influx of gender identity ideology has polarised subcontinental feminism to a point where, in a bitter irony, violent misogynists have a clearer understanding of who or what a woman is than organisations dedicated to safeguarding women.

I spoke with over 100 feminist activists across the Indian subcontinent to discuss the influence of gender identity ideology on South Asian women’s rights movements. The investigations have unveiled ominous patterns. Most activists in leadership positions tended to be proponents of gender identity ideology: this reflects the almost unanimous espousal of this ideology across major feminist organisations in the region. For instance, veteran Indian women’s rights activist Urvashi Butalia, co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house, insists ‘trans women are essential to Indian feminism’.

Many gender critical feminists whom I spoke to preferred to remain anonymous, fearing backlash within their organisations and movements. What was also evident was the urban-rural divide in the endorsement of narratives, with many from smaller towns critiquing the predominantly Western-educated feminist leaders for enforcing ‘foreign ideas’ that were detached from the ground realities of these countries.

In fact, it is simply not possible to initiate an egalitarian debate on gender identity in traditional rural communities like those scattered across southern Asia. In these communities, there is institutionalised gender inequality. Their religionist laws render women insignificant or unequal in familial matters, or half as worthy as men in legal matters. Indeed, the entire course of your life may be predetermined if you are born female. In such communities, women are second-class citizens. Given this codification of gender disparity, the idea of campaigning for the right of men to identify and be legally treated as women would simply be met with incredulity.

On the other hand, in the current legal landscape, there are good reasons why women might want to identify as men: so as to receive better treatment. Many gender critical feminists I spoke to insist that this is happening already. The Indian film maker Vaishnavi Sundar covered the topic in a 2021 documentary on the effect of gender identity on women and girls, especially in developing countries, entitled Dysphoric: Fleeing Womanhood Like a House on Fire. Some feminists I spoke to in Bangladesh also said that women are being encouraged by sexist Islamic inheritance laws to identify as men, given the sharia provisions tilted in men’s favour. Of course, there are then complications when trans people want to detransition – but that is another story.

This does not mean that an idea or ideology should be rejected in south Asian countries simply because it has its origins in the West. Doing so would simply pander to the hypernationalist or religionist rhetoric that labels all foreign ideologies that differ from a local community’s values as a conspiracy that aims to destroy their religious or cultural beliefs.

This consideration has led to a dilemma for gender critical feminists in South Asia, who want to challenge the sweeping enforcement of Western gender identity ideology, while at the same time being determined not to ally themselves with religionist bigots who advocate violence against marginalised communities at home. Making dissent even more complicated is the fact that even those South Asian feminists who have criticised the gender ideology pervading left-leaning Western media have used a religious or cultural relativist rationale to justify their position. For instance, they have deployed oxymoronic terms like ‘Islamic feminism’ to advocate for movements more palatable to the masses. Yet the idea that a religion that is explicitly misogynistic by modern standards could be inherently feminist is ludicrous.

Put simply, gender equality is widely considered an unpalatable foreign idea in South Asia. When faced with two unpalatable foreign ideas that conflict with each other – gender equality and gender identity ideology – feminists, in their efforts to resist hyperconservative backlash, are truly between a rock and a hard place.

My investigations have further exposed the role played by the plight of South Asia’s hijra or khawaja sara community in the acceptance of the prevalent transgender ideology in progressive circles. The hijra have been institutionalised as the ‘third gender’.

In South Asia, the ‘third gender’ has historically denoted intersex individuals and eunuchs, and has therefore been grounded in biological reality. However, both historically and today, many biological men and some women have also identified as the third gender, which also overlapped with homosexuality. In short, the ‘third gender’ has been used as a broader umbrella term to incorporate all identities that did not align with the heterosexual male or female. Critically, however, it has never clashed with sex-based rights or gender critical feminism, since it has not attempted to impinge on the categories of male and female gender. In contrast, Western transgender ideology negates this idea of a third gender, insisting on self-identification even for the determination of who a man or woman is. Yet having a third category actually helps to address many of the conflicts within genders and movements, not least because the hijra or khawaja sara community do not stake a claim to women’s spaces.

Surprisingly, numerous local feminists interviewed for the piece were unaware of western transgender ideology; instead, they equated the term ‘transgender’ with the indigenous hijra or khawaja sara. This tendency to identify the foreign concept with the local one also explains the passage of transgender rights legislations in some South Asian countries, even though homosexuality is still criminalised or violently punished in those countries, and many crimes of conscience are still punishable by death. In Pakistan, for instance, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act 2018 was passed as a codification of the fundamental rights of the hijra community as a third gender. However, its phrasing, which endorses the right for anyone to identify as a man or woman, regardless of their biological identity, led to it being struck down by the Federal Shariat Court as ‘un-Islamic’ on the grounds that it ‘promotes homosexuality’, which is criminalised in Pakistan.   

For many South Asian liberals, to question transgender ideology would simply be to endorse the brutalities and discrimination that LGBT people of all kinds continue to face in South Asia, ranging from taboos surrounding their existence to gruesome murders. In the light of the physical threats faced by the local transgender or khawaja sara community, even gender critical feminists have been forced to reconsider their critique of transgenderism.

In this turbulent context, it is easy to view Western transgender ideology as simply another cause that is trampled on by local prejudice, along with homophobia and misogyny. However, in reality, doing so can muddy the waters still further.  

Many activists, especially those outside South Asian urban centres, insist that the ideological polarisation imported from the Western culture wars needs to be countered by movements that are clear and cognisant of the differences that shape communities in the Indian subcontinent, and which channel their activism accordingly.

‘The gender debate has indeed polarised not only the West but [societies] all over the world. The conflation of the hijra community with the transgender identity [is a] complex issue. It is crucial for organisations to recognise and address the unique challenges faced by the hijra community [and] emphasise the importance of nuanced understanding,’ says Dr SN Sharma, the CEO of the Rajasthan Samgrah Kalyan Sansthan, a human rights organisation based in Ajmer, India, which is dedicated to supporting the marginalised.

In a 2017 BBC documentary, Inside Transgender Pakistan, members of the khawaja sara community expressed their condemnation of western transgenderism as a threat to their right to identify as the third gender. Today, that hard-won identity is being labelled ‘problematic’ in progressive circles in South Asia itself, from Nepal to Bangladesh. Prominent hijra activists in the Indian subcontinent now are echoing western transgender narratives. One explanation for this, which is perhaps pragmatic rather than idealistic, is the growing support for transgender rights as a whole among non-governmental organisations, which often rely on Western funds for their sustenance. The funding and its concomitant influence from the West are a critical factor for such organisations in the region, especially those geared towards fighting for human rights. This necessary influence inevitably aligns the activism compass of feminist movements to the West as well.

This alignment with human rights values in the Western tradition largely results in important work being done on the rights front. Yet at the same time, it inadvertently puts the urban Western-educated elite at the helm of local progressive movements. Many working class feminists and senior women’s rights figures whom I spoke to underlined the fact that, in the past, rights activism was often voluntarily undertaken by women in parallel with full-time jobs or family lives. Today, however, rights activism has become an entire profession and a livelihood for many individuals. This situation reaffirms the stranglehold of the elite over human rights in India, Pakistan and elsewhere. These urban, Western-educated leaders face little challenge from less Westernised subordinates, often from smaller towns, who are unwilling to challenge narratives dictated from the top, out of fear that it might jeopardise their own position – and employment.

‘Not only narratives, they also promote fellow feminists from their urban inner elite circle,’ journalist and activist Tehreem Azeem, who has worked for numerous rights organisations, told me. ‘They are Western-educated and follow woke ideas and this reflects in their narratives, especially on social media. We often don’t know who is making organisational decisions, you are not allowed to enter that circle.’

This takeover of the Westernised elite results in indigenous rights movements even echoes Western language, often quite literally. One prominent example is that many feminist organisations across the subcontinent ask participants at events and trainings to list their preferred pronouns in the English language. This, many feminists from smaller towns insist, is a regular practice even in rural areas where English is not as commonly understood.

‘In many workshops and conferences they would ask participants to introduce themselves and then share their pronouns, which I always felt was extremely bizarre, given the context of our setting,’ says Azeem. ‘Even if you are importing something from the West, you can try to bring it in the local context.’

More than the categorisation of preferred pronouns, the fact that this exercise is done almost exclusively in the English language is perhaps the biggest giveaway in identifying the disconnect between the values of the human rights elite and the masses. The most commonly spoken languages across the Indian subcontinent, including over a hundred regional languages and Hindi and Urdu (the most widely understood), are intrinsically gendered and devoid of gender neutral pronouns and phrases once conjugated with the subject. Those displaying English language pronouns, especially those who are not transgender themselves, seem less invested in founding ungendered language at home than they are in finding commonality and acceptance within elite Western circles.

Many feminist workers told me that the leaderships of their rights organisations feel a need to align themselves with foreign narratives, because a large proportion of the funds for such groups comes from Western countries. Some workers said that it is pressure from Western donors that compels local organisations to align their narratives accordingly. Others argued that even though the foreign funders never explicitly dictate the ideology of local groups, there remains competition among organisations within the same country to win Western grants: this pushes a need to find connectivity and validation among them, not least by speaking their language and swallowing their values whole. Furthermore, the South Asian political left is virtually camped in Western institutes: they are educated in the West, have lived there, and spend a considerable amount of time in Western leftist circles.

This inevitably results in an inflow of West-centred arguments. Ironically, many of the postcolonial narratives are churned out by universities based in former colonising countries such as the UK, and readopted by the university-educated elite in their former colonies. 

People in South Asia who condemn feminist organisations from the outside, such as influential  figures like Jagadish Vasudev or Zakir Naik, predominantly come from a position of opposing women’s rights movements as a whole, preferring to enforce patriarchal norms. A different type of challenge to feminist organisations is posed by dissenters within their own ranks.

In India and Pakistan, as in the UK and the US, gender critical feminists who advocate sex-based rights are targeted – and with the same weapons. ‘Terf’, or ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’, is now a slur being deployed to silence gender critical voices in South Asia.

These types of allegations were, for instance, also made against one of the Indian subcontinent’s most prominent feminist activists, Kamla Bhasin. Bahsin, an activist, author and social scientist who passed away in 2021, had decades of women’s rights work under her belt, the last 20 years of which saw her found Sangat, a network of South Asian feminists.

I spoke to thirteen members of Sangat about the allegations that Bhasin faced months before she passed away. Bhasin was accused by various feminist groups, including Feminism In India, of being a ‘transphobe’, because she was critical of the gender identity narrative and endorsed a biological definition of ‘woman’. For these members of Sangat, the treatment of Bhasin was a reminder that even half a century of women’s rights advocacy was not enough for one of its leading activists to be given the space to dissent against gender identity ideology. Most of the Sangat graduates whom I spoke to believed that while disagreements with some of Bhasin’s views have always existed among the network, the unified public backlash against her over her gender critical views came as a shock. This backlash further silenced many feminists into acquiescence over the general direction of the movement.

Even so, many South Asian feminist voices still decide to go public with their dissenting views on gender identity ideology, often at personal cost. Among these is Thulasi Muttulingam, the founder of Humans of Northern Sri Lanka. ‘The wider networks of feminists – it’s a small country and we know each other [and] have networked together on various issues – have cancelled me,’ she says. The backlash, she stresses, came three years ago when she first began questioning the animosity against JK Rowling over her gender critical views. Muttulingam, a member of women’s rights organisation Vallamai, says her women’s day speech was boycotted this year, because she chose the theme of transgenderism and sex-based rights. ‘It was the Social Scientists Study circle and their monthly meetings are usually well attended,’ she said. The poor attendance ‘told me how much the liberals were scared off by the topic. Then a network of diaspora and Tamil feminists held a Zoom meeting to misrepresent what I said and denounced me as a bigot [and] transphobe.’

Natasha Noreen, the founder of Feminism Pakistan, saw a similar backlash when she shared gender critical views on her Facebook page which endorsed Rowling’s position on womanhood and insisted that biological men cannot become women simply by identifying as such.

‘The cancellation campaign began. Activists from Islamabad and Lahore started bashing me,’ she said. ‘I was invited to an online session, where I was told it was going to be a neutral talk, while four other participants and the host all were on one side just humiliating me.’ Noreen, like others critical of transgenderism and its denial of sex-based spaces for women, has been removed from social, professional, and activist groups.  ‘Fellow [women’s rights] activists have stopped talking to me. Pakistani feminists were my tribe, my people.’

Vaishnavi Sundar, meanwhile, was not just cancelled in India but also in the US, where the scheduled New York screening of her documentary on workplace harassment, ‘But What Was She Wearing’ was stopped owing to her views on pre-operative trans women. ‘Why are you cancelling an Indian woman [in America] for something she tweeted on her private Twitter? I just wanted to preserve women-only spaces,’ she told me. Since then Sundar has been blocked out of many feminist initiatives and groups and has had to focus on working independently. ‘People just stopped responding, stopped talking, stopped doing a lot of things that they used to before,’ she said. ‘I used to be one of those go-to people on things concerning women. Because I’ve researched on this for so long. It’s as if I made this observation on the trans ideology and suddenly my expertise and my films don’t matter anymore, because I have committed the cardinal sin of saying trans women are not women.’

It is important to underline here that many of these South Asian feminist voices cancelled as ‘transphobes’ have been long advocates of gay rights and the rights of the traditional hijra community in South Asia. Much of the critique of modern transgenderism made by such gender critical feminists aims to distinguish biological sex, and to use that scientific reality to reaffirm the importance of women-only spaces. It is certainly not intended to support the persecution of individuals.  

Wherever one stands on the divide between Western transgender activists and gender critical feminists, there are two irrefutable and vital facts that need to be taken into consideration. First, that there is a clash between advocates of gender identity ideology on the one hand, and, on the other, advocates not just of sex-based, but also of gay rights, and those defining their sex or sexuality based on the human anatomy. The second fact, especially critical to the Indian subcontinent, is that modern transgender ideology is very novel to the region, where individuals not considered male or female have historically been assigned to a third, broader gender.

Faced with these realities, the silencing of gender critical feminists, especially among the urban women’s rights groups, is bound to be detrimental not just to women’s rights, but to the well-being of all groups that these organisations are claiming to protect.

This point cannot be stressed enough. The proponents of gender neutral language on issues that overwhelmingly concern the female sex insist that all historically considered ‘women’s issues’ are no longer in fact women’s issues. If their approach is adopted without question, then for all practical purposes there is no exclusive women’s rights movement, and in turn no feminism.

What exclusive women’s issue would Feminism In India be concerned with, if feminism is redefined to concern every type of person except the cisgendered heterosexual male? Why would ‘Aurat March’ continue to use the ‘Aurat’ prefix and not call itself Insaan, or ‘Human’, march? This type of attitude from Western transgender activists and ‘allies’ has made it all too easy for patriarchal, conservative and misogynistic detractors of feminism, especially in South Asia, to insist that there is no such thing as exclusively women’s rights. Feminist groups in the Indian subcontinent are practically making the same argument as their conservative opponents – ostensibly in the name of progress.  

Local movements that had begun to put forth the notion that a woman should not be limited by her anatomy are now upholding the idea that a woman is not defined by any particular anatomy at all. Similarly, where the purpose of challenging gender was to oppose gender roles and stereotypes, now those who purport to challenge gender stereotypes either use those very stereotypes as evidence of transgenderism, or try to eradicate or deny the idea of gender altogether.

Tasaffy Hossain, the founder of the Bangladesh-based organisation Bonhishikha, which uses the tagline ‘unlearn gender’, argues that much of the conversation in South Asia on transgender rights is still based on the realities of the West, and that it is critical to uphold the concerns of all groups and all identities in the region. ‘There is the issue of what feels safe for whom, what is triggering for whom, which is a deeper conversation. Cis women would have a different concept of what is safety to them. Trans women would have a different idea of what is safe to them. Even within the queer spaces we have seen, it’s not always safe just because everyone is queer,’ she told me.

Hossain echoes pretty much every South Asian women and gender rights organisation, those advocating gender identity ideology and its critics, when she says that ‘not enough conversation has been had’ over these concerns. However, many of those leading feminist organisations in the Indian subcontinent, who lament the lack of such conversations, have done little to allow an equal opportunity to share opposing ideas within feminist circles, and have in fact predetermined the conclusion of discussions that are yet to be openly had.

The failure to acknowledge the distinguishing characteristics of different identities, and in turn the exclusivity of their concerns, is creating rifts within minority movements that have only just begun to reverberate at the grassroots level. This is only emboldening the misogynistic forces within South Asia, such as religionist groups and ultra-conservative politicians, who are successfully exploiting the gaping hole between insufficiently dissected gender ideas and the depressingly patriarchal, religious-supremacist realities on the ground.

To counter the regressive forces that are targeting marginalised communities in the Indian subcontinent, it is important that South Asian rights movements embrace the dissenters within their communities, and appreciate the distinctions that they want to make. This is the only way that they will be able to address their different concerns, which are grounded in the unique realities of individuals, subgroups and the region as a whole. Similarly, it is time for Western advocates of gender identity ideology to acknowledge the negative impact which their ideology is having on the rights of violently marginalised people across the world, such as the women and hijra in the Indian subcontinent. For the problem with absolutist ideologies is that they are theoretical and totalitarian – and as such, they always risk becoming inhumane.  

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The post South Asia’s silenced feminists appeared first on The Freethinker.

As the Israeli bombardment of Hamas hideouts in Gaza continues, killing thousands of Palestinians, protests against Israel have erupted worldwide. The demonstrations in the Muslim world have been typically volatile, with Israeli flags and effigies burnt, and genocidal chants against Israel and Jews redoubled. Meanwhile, the hundreds of thousands protesting in support of Palestine in major Western cities have not focused their energies on ensuring respite for Palestinians, and addressing the plight of the Gazans, who are currently facing a gruesome existential crisis.

Any sort of resolution to the conflict, in my view, would only be achievable via reconciliatory movements, such as rallying for a two-state solution and demanding the release of Israeli hostages, in the same breath as calling for a ceasefire or condemning the Judaeophobia on display across the rallies. Instead, the pro-Palestine protesters appear more invested in demanding the erasure of Israel by freeing Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’.

Many gullible Western liberals have demanded that solely a Palestinian state exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Strangely, they do not appear to see anything anti-Israeli, nay anti-Semitic, in this demand. Of course, these protesters vociferously accuse Israel of erasing Palestine, without blinking an eye at their own position on the elimination of the Jewish state.

More critically, as thousands are being killed in Gaza, it takes a special ideological fixation, and indifference to human suffering, to peddle self-serving inflammatory narratives, fuelled by the blood of the Palestinians whom one claims to be defending. It should not require lengthy reflection to realise that championing Israel’s destruction, especially without any practical means to carry it out, is not exactly the best way to convince that state not to inflict harm on others. But it is precisely this symbiosis between Palestinian suffering and calls for Israel’s destruction that has helped sustain both the Islamist and leftist dogma on the conflict. Instead of adducing the death of Palestinians as an argument for destroying Israel, the cause of peace and safety for both sides would be better served by building bridges.

Nowhere was this clearer than in the reactions to the 7 October massacre orchestrated by Hamas, in which over 1,000 Israelis were murdered, the highest number of Jews killed in an attack since the Holocaust. Islamists have loudly glorified Hamas’s Judaeophobic jihad – fuelled by animosity against the Jews on the basis of religion – and claimed it is consistent with Islamic scriptures. At the same time, the ideological left’s exuberant celebration of the mass murder of civilians is almost exclusively reserved for Israeli citizens and not any other country’s citizens.

Those hostile to Israel often refuse to differentiate between Israelis and Jews in general. Yet even the most raucous anti-Western voices on the left would take a courteous pause before linking attacks on Jews in the US, the UK or France to ‘colonialism’. In contrast, when gruesome massacres of Israelis were being carried out, the left’s instinctive reaction was to celebrate, as they have continued to do while hostages remain in captivity with Hamas. Even Western parliaments, such as the one in Scotland, refused to fly the Israeli flag, while the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) did not even mention Israel in its moment of silence for the ‘loss of innocent lives’.

Of course, the left’s celebratory or at least exculpatory attitude towards the killings in Israel would hardly be adopted towards the numerous states empirically more guilty of crimes similar to those attributed to Israel, from Turkey to China. Even from a Muslim-centric lens, many times more people have been killed in wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen since the turn of the century than during the entire history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Similarly, the suffering of Afghans, Iraqis or Syrians at the hands of external forces is not generally used as an apologia for the Taliban or ISIS – at least not to the same degree as with Hamas.

Those deeming Israel an ‘artificial state’ might want to look at the arbitrary nature in which the vast majority of the postcolonial states came into being, without consideration for locals’ consensual aspirations. For instance, 80 percent of the borders in Africa were simply based on longitudes and latitudes. The Muslims of many Indian states had little in common with what is now Pakistan, the doppelganger of Israel whose creation they rallied for in the 1940s, with significantly more displacement and human suffering. Indeed, the creation of Pakistan involved the largest mass migration in human history. While Jews have always lived in the Israel-Palestine area, Muslims from Uttar Pradesh or Bengal in India had as much connection to the Balochistan or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces in Pakistan as someone in Poland would have with Portugal.

Today, too, it is Mizrahi Jews of Middle Eastern origin who constitute the largest percentage of Israeli Jews, owing to the mass expulsion of Jews from Muslim-majority states. This fact is consistently ignored by Israel’s opponents in those countries. The attribution of war crimes singularly to Israel is determined by the rulebook put forth by the same global establishment that created Israeli and Palestinian states in the region. Paradoxically, the Jewish-majority country has been required by its critics to treat territories captured in war in a manner unlike that in which any other victorious power ever has done in history. 

Despite all this, one can still attempt to make sense of the ideological left’s fixation with Israel, given the historical military and economic support provided to the state by the Western powers, under the leadership of the US. This fixation has been further augmented in the present crisis by the majority of Western governments’ backing for Israel and the predominant media support for their narrative on the conflict.

The rise of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government in Israel, which has exploited its own religionist rationale to bulldoze Palestinian rights, has also encouraged those on the left to condemn the stance of Western powers and criticise their role in the conflict. This condemnation is undoubtedly crucial to keeping a check on Israeli far-right manoeuvres, and to the possibility of an eventual compromise. Not only have growing Jewish settlements on the West Bank shrunk Palestinian control over the territories, but the current Israeli regime’s open support for the settlers is encouraging violence against Palestinians who have nothing to do with Hamas or anti-Israel jihad.

It is also essential, for anyone who recognises the clear role of religion in the conflict, to delegitimise any canonical justifications of exclusively Judaic claims to the land in the Old Testament, just as it is to highlight the Judaeophobia in the Quran and Hadith. Yet to condemn the settlements on the West Bank, and the Israeli government’s policies, requires by the same token the acceptance of Israel’s legitimacy as a state. A sweeping assertion of Israeli illegality is not only counterproductive, but also inconsistent with the international law usually cited to delegitimise Israeli action in the West Bank.     

However, the most ominous hypocrisy, and one that is especially damaging to any quest for Palestinian freedom, stems from the Muslim left. For one thing, they deceitfully refuse to acknowledge the Arab and Muslim imperialism at the heart of the conflict; for another, they refuse to acknowledge the Judaeophobia rooted in Islamic scripture as the driving force behind the Muslim world’s murderous obsession with Israel. The genocidal rhetoric against the Jews with which Islamic scriptures are brim-full, and which is often echoed at Palestine protest rallies even in the West, is the predominant motivation behind Muslim animosity towards Israel. In Hamas, this animosity finds its most bloodthirsty expression. The leftist postcolonial apologia of their actions provides the cover of victimhood that sustains Islamist violence.

Even so, what makes support for Hamas by self-identified ‘pro-Palestine’ sections truly bizarre is that the jihadist group is not just indirectly responsible for Gaza’s plight, nor is it merely using civilian inhabitants of Gaza as human shields. Rather, Hamas has actively killed Palestinians to maintain its stranglehold over the population. From gunning down supporters and members of political rivals Fatah to brutally massacring dissenters in Gaza, the group has thrived on Palestinian dead bodies.

Furthermore, like many other jihadist groups in the Muslim world, the rise of Hamas was facilitated by Western powers and indeed Israel itself at the tail end of the Cold War, in order to counter groups with Soviet sympathies. Thereafter, through funding from the oil-rich Arab world, Hamas leaders have enriched their bank balances, and many, like the current chairman Ismail Haniyeh, are orchestrating Israeli and Palestinian bloodshed from the comfort of Qatar. Hamas, together with its fellow jihadist outfit, Islamic Jihad, has been duly supported by Iran, where the leaders of both groups met this June to plot the ‘most efficient way to end the more than 75 years of occupation’ along with the Shia jihadist group Hezbollah in Lebanon. The plan that ensued, punctuated by the gory events of 7 October, was designed to derail the ongoing normalisation of ties between Israel and the Arab world. As recently as September, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman had underlined that official diplomatic ties were ‘closer’ than ever. Tragically, the present conflict has dealt a blow to these diplomatic efforts.

In addition to the glorification of jihad against Israelis, what also binds Hamas and its leftist apologists is their condemnation of the diplomatic recognition of Israel on the part of Arab and Muslim states, a move initiated by the Abraham Accords in 2020. For over eight decades, since the 1937 Peel Commission report suggested the creation of a Jewish homeland, the violent Arab rejection of it has superseded any endeavour to form a Palestinian one. Even until the Six-Day War in 1967, the West Bank and Gaza were under Jordanian and Egyptian control; the idea that a Palestinian homeland might be created in those territories, even one that was temporary and conditional to future expansionary ambitions, was never promoted.

At the heart of the ongoing conflict in the region is the fact that different religious groups are claiming exclusive control over much of the same territory. These opposing claims are irreconcilable. However, one way to resolve the dilemma might be to allow Muslims and Jews to share collective control over certain parts of the land, most notably in Jerusalem, while holding other parts exclusively. I suspect that this will indeed be the means of resolution in the long term – though not until more blood has needlessly been spilt.

The collective Arab-Muslim acceptance of Israel has long been the sure move that would ultimately ensure Palestinian freedom. Unfortunately, it is the puritanical proponents of ‘free Palestine’, whether the jihadists or their apologists, who have rallied, politically or militarily, to practically deny any bid for that freedom by denying Israel’s right to exist. Even among the more reconciliation-minded of these ideologues, it is the rise of the Israeli right and its repudiation of the two-state solution that they view as the deal-breaker, and not the fact the Jewish state has been surrounded in the region by those propagating their own genocidal version of a single, Arab state.

In this way, the Islamist and leftist dream of Israel’s extermination, which symbolises the salvation of their respective ideologies, has long treated Palestinian lives as fodder – no matter if treaties signed by Egypt and Jordan with Israel underlined the potential of peace deals in the region. Today, both Jordan and Egypt are likelier to welcome Israelis than Palestinians, with King Abdullah II refusing to take refugees and Egypt having sealed its border with Gaza since 2007. The lack of even a whisper of condemnation of Egypt or Jordan in rallies for Palestine makes it easy to understand how such rallies can be interpreted as being targeted specifically at Israel, and at Israel alone.

Even so, despite the hysterical ideologies at the heart of the long-running Israeli-Arab conflict, and the existence of countless volumes underlining the complexities of the conflict, the solution is still set to be as arbitrarily imposed as the problem was. While the Hamas-initiated war might postpone the Saudi-led acceptance of Israel, the deal will happen soon. As has long been maintained by Mohamed bin Salman, this deal is likely to lead to the creation of an autonomous Palestine as well, especially since Riyadh wants to maintain its leadership over the Muslim world.

Unfortunately for the Palestinians, what they will eventually get is likely to be a fraction of what they could have attained decades ago through reconciliation, while a wish for such reconciliation is scarcely detectable in the rallying cries of those claiming to be the well-wishers of Palestine. Reconciliation and a two-state solution are also likely to come in the aftermath of a torpedoed Gaza and an enormous loss of Palestinian lives. Meanwhile, those on the ideological left, along with the Islamists, persist in their hate-mongering rhetoric, unwilling to acknowledge how their disdain of compromise is contributing to the bloodshed of Palestinians and Israelis alike.  

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President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan triumphed in a closely contested election in May, ensuring another five years in power and extending his two-decade-long reign over Turkey. As he edged out his opponent, Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, 52 per cent to 48 per cent, in the first ever presidential runoff in the country’s history, Erdoğan reaffirmed his control over a Turkey that is more divided than ever.

There are many reasons why the opposition missed out on arguably its best opportunity to oust Erdoğan in recent years, including the regime’s use of the state machinery to influence election results. However, a major cause behind Kılıçdaroğlu’s defeat was his abandonment of the Turkish secularism that was rooted in the founding principles of the republic.

Turkey, and the CHP, were both founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, based on the ideology he propounded, which has since become known as Kemalism. The latter is best illustrated in his thirty-six-hour-long speech, Nutuk, delivered to the party’s second congress in 1927. Kemalism is often summarised using six bullet points, and depicted as six arrows on the CHP’s flag. One of these is laicism. 

Atatürk took up the task of creating a Turkish republic from the remnants of a long-decaying Ottoman Empire, where Islamic dogma had reigned supreme and was, indeed, a critical contributor to the realm’s downfall – despite the way that Ottoman sultans intermittently toyed with a skewed enforcement of religious pluralism as a means of exercising arbitrary rule over a multiethnic and multireligious realm. Their privileging of Muslim elite over non-Muslim populations, or Sunni over Shia majority regions, eventually created separate, non-Muslim nation states in Eastern Europe and sectarian fault lines within Islam across the Middle East.

Therefore, where secularisation would have been a practical remedy to the religionist quagmire in Turkey, the sheer extent of the Islamist inertia necessitated a state more assertive in its separation from religion. Hence laiklik, the Turkish brand of laicism that echoes French laïcité, was as much an existential requirement for Turkey to loosen its Islamist stranglehold, as it was a reflection of Atatürk’s own modernist worldview.

Yet when the CHP presented a bill endorsing the hijab in public institutions in October last year, Kılıçdaroğlu effectively surrendered his party’s secularist legacy. Turkey’s ban on religious and anti-religious manifestations in state institutions, the bedrock of laicism, had already been lifted a decade ago. Hence this provision of exclusive protection for sexist Islamic headgear was nothing but a comprehensive capitulation to Islamisation, and was clearly intended to win votes.

The CHP’s endorsement of the hijab was also an extension of the frequently regurgitated misinterpretation of laicism as an exclusively ‘anti-Islam’ phenomenon, which has been especially echoed in criticisms of France. The CHP appear to have conveniently forgetten that laiklik was, like French laïcité, equally applicable to all religious displays, such as the Christian cross. The CHP’s prioritisation of the protection of Islamic symbols, while the Turkish government has been busy demolishing, or converting, churches, including Hagia Sophia, represents a categorical abandonment of Atatürk’s vision.

It is not the departure from an individual’s guidelines, no matter how critical their position in any people’s history, that makes the renunciation of ideals damaging for a nation. In fact, the idolisation of Atatürk, which included a sweeping ban on criticising him, has helped foster the Islamist opposition in a country where laiklik has long been collectively treated as one man’s decree and not as the empirically provable foundation of Turkish progress. Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) have managed to successfully channel the religionist backlash, merging Islamist parties under one big umbrella that has now ruled over Turkey for over 20 years.

Many have deemed Kılıçdaroğlu’s legislative endorsement of the hijab a political necessity, since he was leading a wide coalition which included many parties that wanted to demonstrate their support for the Islamic garb. Supporting the hijab could be said to be especially necessary on a political level, given how hotly debated the issue has been in recent years. And yet Kılıçdaroğlu has admirably defended LGBT rights in Turkey, albeit without overtly supporting them, thereby categorically contradicting the beliefs of the same Islamist stakeholders. The CHP’s support for the hijab, including within the party’s own ranks, stems not from realpolitik, nor from an exhaustive endorsement of Islamic injunctions, but simply from its succumbing to the Islamisation of Turkish nationalism. The AKP have long used Islamic headgear as the unofficial flag of this movement.

As the Erdoğan regime has rekindled Turkey’s Ottoman past, using modesty codes as a way of Islamising society, and suppressing non-Muslim emblems as a way of Islamising politics, it has also used a newly found neo-Ottoman soft power to Islamise its diplomacy. Where global Muslims were traditionally drawn to glamorous Turkish soaps depicting lifestyles often violently punishable in their countries, in recent years they have been infatuated by shows narrating fictionalised renditions of Ottoman conquests. After undertaking the Islamisation of Turkey, Erdoğan aspired to position himself as the leader of the Muslim world, boosted by reminders of the Ottoman caliphate and its power over Islam’s holiest sites in the Arabian Peninsula for four centuries.

This is why Erdoğan has been the first to claim a ‘Muslim genocide’ in France over satirical caricatures of Muhammad. By doing so, he seems to be hoping to undermine laicism in France, as he already has in Turkey. Similarly, he has threatened to cut ties with Muslim or Arab states maintaining diplomatic relations with Israel, even though Turkey has recognised the latter since 1949. A similar paradox can also be seen in the way that Erdoğan is still pursuing Turkey’s stalled application for EU membership, while simultaneously aligning the country more closely with the Islamic states that he is wooing. And yet it is precisely Turkey’s alignment with the Islamic states that might have actually cost the country its best opportunity to consolidate its position as leader of the Muslim world.

The lessons from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire were not limited to the Atatürk-led Turkey, but also extended to other parts of the empire, as well as the broader Muslim world, as states in these regions gained their freedom after World War II. In the Arab world, a secular nationalism emerged, albeit under the control of dictatorial rulers, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt. Some were swayed by the western powers that colonised the area: French laïcité, for instance, influenced Tunisia, Syria and Lebanon. By the 1970s, which saw the rise of the socialist and Arab nationalist Baath party in Syria and Iraq, Arab secularism had become synonymous with absolutist regimes. The monarchy in Iran, led by the Pahlavi dynasty, and the republic of Afghanistan briefly proclaimed by Daoud Khan, also demonstrated the way in which secularism was adopted by autocracies in the wider Muslim world. From Algeria to Afghanistan, military regimes became protectors of secularisation because they wanted to quell populist Islamist parties and groups. In Turkey, too, the army was the defender of secularism.

When the region imploded into the Saudi-Iran proxy wars in the 1980s and the jihadist radicalisation that followed, in Turkey, the army stepped in, taking charge of the country following the 1980 coup d’état. Turkey’s membership of NATO helped protect it from the jihadist spillover, because NATO gave it support to resist jihadist infiltration and to fight against the Islamic state, while military rule prevented the Islamisation of the country. Unfortunately, just because secularism was implemented by the army, this only reinforced laiklik as a coerced ideology and further emboldened its Islamist opponents with their long-festering grievances.

Despite this, as jihadism wreaked havoc with the Muslim world at the turn of the millennium, it was Turkey that remained the bastion of Muslim secularism. Its proximity to the West, and its aspirations to join the EU, ensured that freedoms and human rights were provided with much better safeguards, in addition to the long tradition of uncompromising separation between mosque and state. As a result, Turkey remained the constantly cited inspiration for Muslim states that wanted to undo Islamist radicalisation. This became even more evident after 9/11, as jihadism spread around the world, leading to counter-efforts to defuse militant Islamism and reform Islam. Turkey was in the pole position to lead the much needed secularisation of the Muslim world; this would have been bolstered by the country’s transformation into a truly liberal and secular democracy. However, it was at this point that Turkey, under Erdoğan and the AKP, opted instead for Islamisation.  

As a result, the baton for Muslim modernisation has once again been taken up by a few totalitarian Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia. These kingdoms are largely responsible for the global explosion of radical Islam, the economic interests of which now align with selective progressivism centered on the support of these Arab monarchies. The failure to undertake a populist secularisation movement within the Muslim world, compounded by the failure of the Arab Spring, means that Islam, and its deployment at state, regional, or global levels, currently remains under the control of autocrats. And the ideological surrender of the CHP underlines the point that Turkey, formerly a model of secularism in the Muslim world, has conclusively capitulated to Islamisation.

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Official secular states are falling like dominoes into the hands of radical religionists the world over. Many secular Israelis say they would rather cope with anti-Semitic backlash overseas than live under the incumbent ultra-Judaic regime. India, an erstwhile battleground for minority and majority fundamentalisms, is now firmly in the grip of Hindutvaadis (proponents of Hindutva or Hindu nationalism), who control the state machinery. There are demands for death and apartheid for sacrilege against Islam in Bangladesh. Even the US, the ‘leader of the free world’, cannot guarantee anatomical freedom for half of its population owing to the pervasiveness of conservative Christian beliefs about abortion.

In these countries and others, not only have secular spaces been usurped by religion, but the term ‘secularism’ itself has been declared anathema by the religionists. Meanwhile, the self-avowed defendants of secularism – especially the left-wing progressives, depicted as part of the liberal elite by their detractors, who are accustomed to combatting philosophical challenges with condescension more than contemplation – are religiously refusing to accept that their own privileging of regressive ideas is analogous to intolerant religious dogma. The tendency of left-wing progressives to equate satire on Islam with persecution of Muslims, or to conjure up unsubstantiated allegations of ‘Islamophobia’, reveals an embrace of Islamic dogma which is part of a comprehensive failure to strengthen the separation of religion and state.

Amidst all this apparent backtracking, left-leaning progressives of this persuasion have arguably made a pariah out of the only rendition of secularism that actually is uncompromisingly neutral on religion: laïcité.

Every time French authorities treat Islam like other religions, the blame is laid at the door of laïcité. This simple refusal to allow for Islamic exceptionalism might as well be the effective definition of ‘Islamophobia’. Whether it is the anti-radicalism bill, the enforcement of the ban on religious symbols in public institutions, or the 1905 law that laid the foundation of the separation of church and state, none of the French legislative provisions explicitly mentions Islam and all are equally applicable to all religions. If an egalitarian law impacts some groups of ideological adherents more so than others, it only serves to highlight the expansionist and exceptionalist tendencies of those ideologies, rather than any intrinsic discrimination in policy. Yet this remains a blind spot for those Anglo-American progressive secularists, whose treatment of anti-secularist ideas sometimes seems to depend on nothing more than the numerical strength of their proponents.

The fundamental difference between classical Anglo-Saxon secularism and French laïcité lies in the way in which they separate state and religion. Anglo-Saxon secularism aspires to separate the state from the individual, or communal, religious space, while French laïcité aims to separate religion from statecraft. The differences are rooted in the countries’ respective histories of secularisation, and their corresponding sociological evolutions. The US and the UK have sought the post-Enlightenment harmonisation of Christian sects, while France predominantly occupied itself with overturning the monopoly of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century.

The Indian version of secularism is even more passive and accommodationist. Different religious communities have been allowed to govern their own exclusive matters: this in effect creates separate communal spheres which have adopted an apparent commitment, at least temporarily, towards coexistence, in line with the pluralistic, polytheistic, traditions of the Indian subcontinent. However, while today’s multi-religious societies pose a challenge that the Anglo-Saxon and Indian brands were supposedly designed to address, it is French laïcité that offers the best solution, because it would eliminate religion from any level of governance altogether, and so in effect would create more robust checks, both between and within religions.

Paradoxically, by officially distinguishing between communities based on religious beliefs in their bid to maintain harmony between them, both the Anglo-Saxon and Indian brands of secularism actually institutionalise religious separation. This in turn empowers radical ideologues within these communities to uphold their religion’s exceptionalism, because they are able to define its adherents through the narrowest interpretation of their ideology and demand others to respect this strain in the ‘sprit of secularism’. For instance, the Islamic ban on the depiction of Muhammad – a Salafi enforcement which was not originally in other interpretations of Islam – has been dutifully lapped up by many in the Anglo-Saxon ‘progressive elite’, who are terrified of offending ‘all Muslims’. Furthermore, this buttressing of ideological lines abandons minorities and the marginalised within those communities to their fate, as exemplified by the Muslim women being victimised by sharia rulings even in the West.

Elsewhere, secularism and religious heritage are coalescing to forge national identities and ultimately bring about theological takeovers. Unlike the adherents of the other two Abrahamic faiths, secular and even nonbelieving Jews have historically overcome identitarian dissonance by staking their claim to being an ethnoreligious group. However, given that this belief itself is rooted in the orthodox, religious Judaic tradition of matrilineal descent, the transformation of Israel from a state for the (ethnic) Jewish people to one for (religious) adherents of Judaism – especially after decades of the sustained privileging of ultra-orthodox Jews – was inevitable.

In India, the land of Sanatana Dharma, or Vedic religions, which in themselves are scripturally devoid of the monotheistic rigidity of Abrahamic texts, it is the Hindutva, or ‘Hinduness’, that is being peddled by the majoritarian ideologues as an uncharacteristically monolithic definition of an Indian. This in turn elevates Hindu beliefs over others even unofficially. Sri Lanka, meanwhile, has facilitated the rise of radical Buddhists by describing Buddhist heritage as the supreme binding force of the nation in the state’s constitution. This illustrates the way in which the Dharmic religions of the Indian subcontinent too can be weaponised to enforce a nationalistic religious hegemony and erode longstanding traditions of secularism. Myanmar has taken this weaponisation to murderous extremes, prompting the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims.

Laïcité provides safeguards against any consolidation of religious dominance by barring the manifestation of any religion, majority or minority, in public institutions. As such, it in effect treats religion like any other ideology. The fundamental failure of all other brands of secularism is that they allow exceptional behaviour in the name of a religious ideology that they would not allow on the basis of other ideologies, traditions, or individual preferences. Judges or teachers are not allowed to wear the insignia of political parties, because of the suggestion of bias that they would create; the wearing of religious emblems in public institutions should not be treated any differently. To make exceptions for religion where they would not be allowed for political beliefs or personal prejudices is to give religions a truly privileged status, which undermines a state’s claim to be neutral in such matters of conscience.

Laïcité is also often misinterpreted as an exclusively French obsession or colonial hangover, which France has exercised over its Arab or Muslim subjects. But this misinterpretation dismisses the various versions of secularism that have thrived across the world. The tradition of laïcité has sustained secular ideals in Tunisia and Lebanon; secularists in the latter have even organised ‘Laique Pride’ protests to insist that only a more assertive secularism can undo the religious and sectarian fault lines dividing their society. Making the state laico in 2010 helped Mexico to decriminalise abortion last year; as a result, many American women have travelled down south to exercise their fundamental human right to bodily autonomy.  

Albania overcame the Millet institutionalisation of religious communities, an Ottoman remnant, through the creation of shtet laik, ‘laicist state’, and a strict neutrality on religion. The maintenance of shtet laik also helped the Muslim-majority European state overcome the state-sanctioned atheism and religious repression of the Communist era, which has seen an Islamist resurgence in many other Soviet states since the fall of the USSR. The unflinching neutrality emphasised by laïcité, and its many proponents, also extends to anti-religious expressions. It is critical to stress this point, since an active crackdown on religious beliefs undoes impartiality. In other words, privileging atheism above religion, in policymaking and statecraft, is no better than the other way round.

Similarly, it is crucial to note that merely enshrining laïcité in the constitution is no guarantee of sustained state neutrality on religion. The example of Turkey shows how any reversal in staunch secularism, whether in the name of nationalism or misdirected liberalism, eventually paves the way for a religious takeover. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the man who spearheaded Turkey’s Islamisation; Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu is the leader of the Mustafa Kemal Atatürk-founded Republican People’s Party (CHP) that created Turkey on the founding principle of laiklik, or laicism. As the two rivals participated in the runoff election on 28th May – one of the most critical elections of recent times – even a cursory debate on the country’s secularism was not being held. This was because the Turkish opposition had surrendered in advance to the nation’s conservatives, who want more Islam in governance and consider it integral to Turkish identity. Such an attitude has unsurprisingly eroded religious tolerance and subjugated minorities in the country once deemed the benchmark for Muslim secularism.

The reason different versions of laicism have been misconstrued as ‘illiberal’, whether in Turkey or France, is due not least to the general capitulation among progressives to identity politics. This attitude not only reinforces communitarian boundaries, but earmarks certain minorities as designated vote banks. Whether it is the Labour or Democratic parties in the Anglo-American sphere, or the Congress in India, traditionally left-wing parties have, not unlike their opponents on the right, sought to profit from a communal segmentation, with both ends of the political spectrum offering contrasting, but similarly damaging, perversions of secularism. This divisive approach has helped create a world where both the rejection of religious ritualism, and the embrace of religious identitarianism, are simultaneously rising, as demagogues within religious communities successfully exploit the loopholes in submissive secularism. Religious ideologies do not only threaten the principle of equality before the law, but have now mutated into forms of religiously-grounded nationalism. This makes it more critical than ever to confine the manifestation of religion, as of all other ideological manifestations, to its designated sphere.

Where ‘religious tolerance’ has become synonymous with tolerating religious intolerance, a form of secularism that is sustainable and that treats everyone equally can only be attained by making religion irrelevant in all matters of public policy. This is what the supporters of laïcité maintain, notwithstanding various shortcomings in its implementation in states like France. The ideologues who champion the more selective and opportunistic brands of secularism fear that making religion inconsequential might render their own positions irrelevant. It is thus crucial to safeguard secularism from manipulation, whether by progressives, religious ideologues or nationalists. The only way that this can be done is by upholding truly ‘laicist’ neutrality on religion.

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Advancements in scientific research have been overturning clerical hegemony in organised religions for the past two millennia. Religion has dominated the affairs of Muslim communities more than those of other religious groups; thus, in recent times, the challenge of science to religious authority has been a particular problem for the Islamic clergy. However, by limiting the spread of reason, and selectively adopting some but not all of the latest inventions, Muslim clerics have managed to forge a love-hate relationship with science and technology.

As a result, imagery and loudspeakers that were once declared haraam (forbidden) by the Islamic clergy are now at the forefront of daawah (Islamic evangelism). More recently, chatting, social media, Netflix, and the internet in general have faced fatwas (edicts declaring them haraam), while Islamic preaching has exponentially multiplied on the web. The latest frontier to have opened up is artificial intelligence (AI).

Much like the technologies mentioned above, the features of AI that enable Islamic preaching will doubtless be embraced.

In many instances, AI has already been adopted to facilitate Islamic practices: scores of apps have been designed to support Quranic learning, to streamline the timings and direction of prayers, and to browse Islamic TV shows. AI offers automated updates based on location, allowing users to locate their nearest mosque or halaal eatery. A particularly useful app, especially for non-Arabic speakers, is Quran Hero, which not only helps the user learn Arabic, but optimises time management; this is helpful for practising Muslims, who consume a significant chunk of their time in the five-times daily Salah.

In fact, evangelical AI practices are being embraced across religions: compare the rise of robot priests and mechanical sermons. Even though the dominance of clerics in Islam means that mechanised preaching is unlikely to be allowed, the religion too could theoretically incorporate AI in rituals such as Salah, where the imam is designated to perform certain steps and recite surah (chapters) – some of which are randomly chosen from the Quran. These steps could easily be outsourced to machines. The job of the muezzin (who proclaims the call to prayer) has already been co-opted by various apps: with the advent of such technology, the loudspeaker azaan ought to become redundant.

Once those supervising Islamic applications embrace the reality that not all Muslims have exactly the same beliefs and practices, AI can be more pluralistically incorporated. For instance, the vast majority of Muslims do not pray five times a day, because they have other (secular) commitments. Formally accepting this could help programme applications to merge work schedules with only those rituals that the individual believer wanted to pursue, and accordingly set reminders and alarms; in contrast, the loudspeaker azaan is for entire communities, at all times, regardless of the diversity of beliefs and practices. Embracing pluralism could also usher in new apps for progressive Muslims, such as those developed for Christians, which would incorporate beliefs and identities deemed sacrilegious or deviant in mainstream Islam, such as those concerning LGBT people.

Even so, formalising the Muslim rejection of Islamic tenets, and developing technology catering to diverse beliefs, is currently a distant prospect within the mainstream Muslim community, in which celebrated tech practitioners argue that Artificial Intelligence should be regulated according to Islam. Others condemn technological efforts to prolong life, and even the use of ventilators, on the grounds that ‘there’s a certain time for death, and you cannot delay it.’

Where fear of defying Allah even hinders attempts to save lives, the prospect that Islamic injunctions will be capable of being rejected via an app which is sanctioned within the Muslim community remains distant. This situation in turn maintains the Islamic clergy’s stranglehold over mainstream technology.

But has the internet not resulted in a wave of apostasies by Muslims? And if there are perfectly rational fears that an AI takeover might be inevitable, and more menacingly difficult to regulate, shouldn’t Islamic orthodoxy eventually have to make way as well? The problem is that the progress of Islam towards greater liberalism is being hindered both by the duplicity of mullahs and the complicity of Western ideologues. A glimpse of this can be seen through an examination of an AI tool that has made the headlines recently.

A casual conversation with ChatGPT on Islam reveals an artificially programmed reverence for the religion such as is expressed by devout Muslims or those demanding special privileges for Islam. The OpenAI chatbot, the GPT-4 model of which was released on 14th March, is not only well-versed in Islam, but can generate flawless commentary on the religion. There is just one caveat: the Generative Pre-trained Transformer’s knowledge of Islam is derived entirely from Islamic tradition and scriptures.

As a result, if one asks the chatbot about the origins of Islam, it will effortlessly narrate the history according to Islamic scriptures without offering any insights from those who have questioned the authenticity of these claims. Ask ChatGPT about the positive aspects of Islam and a long list is produced with the disclaimer that ‘these aren’t exhaustive’. If you ask it about the negatives, however, the result is disclaimer that ‘as an AI language model, I do not hold personal beliefs or opinions, and I do not intend to promote any religion over another’, followed by some common criticisms that the bot clarifies are ‘not universally accepted’, noting that interpretations vary.

It is true that ChatGPT offers similar disclaimers for other religions. However, further investigation reveals that it does not treat different religions alike. For instance, queries over errors in Bible generate responses highlighting those discrepancies, while the same question over the Quran produce a multitude of disclaimers, most commonly couched in terms of ‘differing opinions’, which the bot also employs in contrasting interpretations of the violent commandments. Similarly, while ChatGPT has no qualms in saying that ‘yes, there is a system of casteism in Hinduism’, it maintains that the question of whether Islam is sexist, or allows child marriage, is ‘a complex one’. ChatGPT can ape Shakespeare or Ghalib, but ask it to take up the Quran’s challenge to imitate its verses, and it refuses.

In short, most questions addressing the problematic aspects of Islam produce a general apologia, which often conveniently includes verse 2:256 of the Quran: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’. If the much-touted ambition of OpenAI was to create a chatbot that generates ‘human-like’ responses, it has been resoundingly successful in creating a machine that churns out only those views on Islam that are acceptable to Muslim orthodoxy.

While ChatGPT has undergone supervised pre-training to generate ‘appropriate’ responses on contentious subjects, including religion, its evident bias when it comes to Islam is also an offshoot of its transformer architecture. This architecture limits the bot’s generative ability to the available dataset, which it is then programmed to use in accordance with the pre-trained language guidelines. Even in the unlikely event that contrasting views were included in the dataset fed to ChatGPT on controversial issues, the algorithmic bias in favour of Islam was always going to be inevitable.

This is because, where texts lambasting casteism in Hinduism, or fallacies of the Bible, are widely available on the internet – often written by members of the communities whose beliefs are being targeted – the unhinged criticism of Islam is predominantly limited to anti-Muslim fora likely to have been flagged in the pre-training phase of ChatGPT. The prevalence of barbaric blasphemy laws in the Muslim world and the skewed ‘Islamophobia’ narrative in the West means there just are no sufficient digitally accessible data for even a theoretically ‘neutral’ generative AI. As a result, ChatGPT sometimes even refers to Muhammad using the reverential phrase ‘peace be upon him’, because of its repeated occurrence in the predominantly Muslim sources stored in the bot’s database.

This has resulted in an algorithmic bias not merely in favour Islam, but in particular in favour of the majority Sunni sect within Islam. For instance, if you ask ChatGPT about Abu Bakr, the first caliph according to Islamic tradition, the results which it provides are couched in terms of acceptance or eulogy, even though Shia Muslims do not accept his rule as legitimate. Asking the bot a question about whether Ali Ibn Talib is the First Imam of Islam – a reflection of Shia beliefs – results in a response that says it is a ‘matter of controversy’. Any question on Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the 19^th century founder of the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, is more focused on explaining why the majority of Muslims do not accept Ahmadis as Muslims. ChatGPT is clear that gay people should have the ‘fundamental human right’ to get married, because this tenet of Western progressives apparently trumps the orthodox Islamic view to the contrary. Yet when asked if Ahmadis should have the right to self-identify as Muslims, the chatbot remarks that it is a ‘complex issue’.

If indeed the AI era has officially been unveiled, it might have come at an inopportune moment for the Muslim world, which still lags behind in self-reflection. This is suggested by the skewed data about Islam that AI is now using to set the bar of ‘acceptability’. AI’s visible algorithmic bias appears to uphold automated Islamic blasphemy codes, and Sunni supremacism within Islam. If this continues, it will only support the relegation of technology by Muslim authorities to the preaching of religion and nothing else. In other words, while there continue to be structural biases in the way that Islam is programmed into AI, this technology will simply continue the 14 centuries-old tradition of censoring Islam’s critics. 

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Religious dogma inevitably hinders progress. Theological codification, in turn, institutionalises societal decay. Today, nowhere is this more starkly visible than in Muslim communities.

Much of what ails the Muslim world today is rooted in Islamic text. From the subjugation of women to violence against freethought, many of the human rights abuses in Muslim-majority countries are justified via Islamic scripture and jurisprudence.

Democracy remains sidelined in these countries, with even aspiring secular states granting constitutional sovereignty to Islam. The glaring lack of modern Muslim contributions to science, technology and global development owes much to the Quranic undermining of the value of life in this world, in turn upholding a fixation with a collectively imagined ‘afterlife’.

Yet merely stating these obvious, not to mention ominous, realities can get critics accused of ‘Islamophobia’, even when the critics themselves come from within Muslim communities. This refusal by the community at large to acknowledge the symptoms naturally hinders any cure for the ailment: the imposition of Islam on Muslims.

Vedic faiths such as Hinduism allow for intrinsic dissenting space within the religious domain, while some Christian and Jewish traditions have been able to forge identities that are not bound by literal adherence to their scriptures. Muslims, meanwhile, are forced to accept absolute Islamic authority, even if they individually lack canonical devotion – leading lives in accordance with the scriptures – or ritual practice. This approach not only sustains Islamic inertia in Muslim communities, it intrinsically views any irreverence of Islam as something alien.

From Taslima Nasrin to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, many of the staunchest critics of Islam from within the tradition have not only had their books banned in Muslim countries, they have been discredited as outcasts. Their own critiques of Islam seem to reciprocate this rejection by betraying the parlance of an outsider, sometimes showing the same disdain for Muslims as they would for Islam. Salman Rushdie, the attack on whom in August was another grim reminder of the price of mocking Islam, has long been pigeonholed as a ‘blasphemer of Muhammad’, despite decades’worth of writings about the Indian subcontinent, including its multi-pronged identity crises.

The security threats facing Rushdie over four decades explain why those Muslim-heritage authors who have focused the entirety of their writings on the rejection of Islam, such as Ibn Warraq and other vocal ex-Muslims, have had to use pseudonyms to dodge Islamic blasphemy codes and the violence that inevitably follows. These authors too are dismissed as unrepresentative voices, even as anonymous atheism escalates across Muslim countries. This has meant that the overwhelming majority of the writing and scholarship on Islam that is produced worldwide, including in the West, continues to be done from within the confines of the religion.

A common theme among these contemporary thinkers arguing for Islamic modernity, including Reza Aslan, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Shahab Ahmed and Mustafa Akyol, is the endeavour to stretch the restrictive boundaries of Islam, but not to erase them. Even when thinkers such as Abdolkarim Soroush challenge scriptural authority, they do so from the perspective of human fallibility, not as a rejection of divinity: in other words, they justify contentious Islamic commandments in terms of the limitations of human comprehension and not in terms of the absence of a supernatural origin. Thus Muslim authors, from Islamists to modernists, continue to treat almost identically held Islamic doctrines as the starting point of their arguments. This is also why the ‘Medina state’, traditionally the first Islamic regime built by Muhammad, continues to be presented as a superlative embodiment of both an Islamic and a secular realm by the ideologically antipodal advocates of the same religion.

The treatment of the much touted ‘Golden Age of Islam’ is no different. There is no doubt of the significance of Arab and Muslim contributions towards science and philosophy between the 9^th and 15^th centuries AD, but that had little do with Islamic scriptures. All attributions of scientific advancement of that time to the Quran or Hadith (the sayings of Muhammad) depend on a kind of ‘Texas sharpshooter fallacy’, with the credit being claimed after the inventions and discoveries had been made.

Meanwhile, many of the practitioners of Islamic thought and jurisprudence, such as Abu Hanifa, Maalik Ibn Anas, Ibn Idrees Shafiee, Ahmad ibn Hambal, Ibn Abi Aqil, and Ibn al-Junayd, continue to be identically venerated as absolute authorities in Sunni and Shia Islam, and much of today’s Islamist hegemony is rooted in their writings and the schools of thought they founded. Yet it was the rationalist, not the religious, philosophy that was the most noteworthy contribution of the early Muslim authors to global thought. For which, many of the humanist Muslim philosophers were targeted as heretics.

A paradigm case is the 12^th century philosopher Ibn Rushd, Latinised as Averroes, who has been dubbed by many the father of Western secular thought. Rushd argued for pluralism in Islamic jurisprudence. His challenge to Islamic orthodoxy resulted in his being banished from Cordoba. Thus, while Ibn Rushd continued to inspire Western philosophy and political thought in the Middle Ages, his works remained largely sidelined in the Muslim world until the 19^th century.

Like Ibn Rushd, many early Muslim rationalists, such as Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi, were deemed heretics. Most notable among their critics were Al-Ghazali and Ibn-e-Tamiyyah – two of the theologians that have had the longest-lasting impact on Muslim thought and continue to be cited to substantiate Islamist politics. Similarly shunned were the Muʿtazila, the rationalists that challenged Quranic literalism and sought to subordinate theology to reason between the 8^th and 10^th centuries in what today is Iraq, inspiring modern liberal theologians like Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd.

Looking at the fate of even those rational thinkers of the time who did not explicitly reject Islam or theism, and who were largely looking to reconcile science and reason, it is clear that irreverent scepticism and freethought were not exactly embraced even in the celebrated periods of Islamic rule.

Today, it is common in the Islamic world to eulogise past empires from the Ummayad to the Ottoman, as well as the ‘Golden Age of Islam’. But this narrative betrays an academic revisionism which enforces an Islamophilic understanding of the Muslim past and present. This reintepretation of history is taking place, while at the same time the cultural relativist narratives of Orientalism and ‘Islamophobia’ are used to silence criticism or enquiry into Islam for ideological reasons. Intellectual progress in the Muslim world is currently hindered by scholarly bias in favour of Islam and its history, where making the obvious link between jihadism and Islam, or probing the veracity of claims in Islamic tradition, is deemed to be targeting Muslims as a whole. To change this, Muslim heritage thinkers not only need to embrace rationalism, but also to rekindle irreverence for Islam. In fact, the long history of Muslim countries contains many examples of irreverence and the questioning of religion.

One notable example was the 9^th-century philosopher, Abu Bakr al-Razi, a deist who criticised Islam and mocked the very idea of Quranic revelations. In Fi al-Nubuwwat (On Prophecies) he challenges the Quranic claim that a text like it cannot be produced:

‘Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly… You are talking about a work [the Quran] which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanation.’

Al-Razi’s contemporary Ibn Al-Rawandi was an outspoken antitheist, described by historians as someone who upheld ‘atheistic ideas, the negation of Allah, the denial of Quranic prophecy, and the vilification of the prophets’. His Kitab al-Zumurrud (The Book of the Emerald) is presented as a theological dialogue in which he is a participant, called ‘the heretic’, arguing that ‘Muhammad’s own presuppositions and systems show that religious traditions are not trustworthy. The Jews and Christians say that Jesus really died, but the Quran contradicts them.’

Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri, a renowned 10^th-century poet and anti-religion deist, used parody and sarcasm in his assault on Islam, even satirising the Quran in Al-Fuṣul wa al-Ghayat (‘Paragraphs and Periods’). A famous couplet of his in Arabic is translated as:

‘Muslims are stumbling, Christians all astray,
Jews wildered, Magians far on error’s way.
We mortals are composed of two great schools
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.’

Abu Nuwas also used satire in his poetry in the 8^th century, not just to target the Abbasid Caliphate, but even to express mockery for Islamic scriptures via homoeroticism. In one exchange he is reported to have used Quranic verses to woo a male lover.

As with much of early Islamic history, there is debate over the accuracy of the reported heresies that many of these dissidents, and others like them, were charged with. Their successors have often attributed their blasphemies to lies made up by rivals, or sectarian attacks, so as to sanitise those critiques that could be reconciled with Islam.

Conversely, there also are question marks over the sincerity – not to mention authenticity – of those rationalists who worked within boundaries of permitted Islam. Conflating deism or pantheism with Islamic characteristics could simply have been a means to avoid being censored and attacked, or even to make their ideas palatable for realms immersed in Islamic theology. The Egyptian philosopher Abdel Rahman Badawi argued in ‘From the History of Atheism in Islam’ that some sceptics steered clear of targeting belief in Allah as a whole, since it made their works likelier to be banished. This was the case with many anti-theistic ideas of the time that have only managed to survive till today via literature that counters those critiques.

Today, the ideological self-confinement of Muslim thought within Islamic boundaries is likewise an exercise in self-preservation and acceptability. Certainly, the attempt to reconcile religion with modernity can aid progress in Muslim countries. For example, it should not require complete rejection of Islam for aspiring Muslim scientists to deny the Quranic description of a flat earth, as long interpreted by Islamic scholars, even as recently as the 20^th and 21^st centuries. However, to seek to confine all intellectual enquiry within the bounds of Islam, however widely interpreted, is to prevent ideological pluralism. This in turn will keep Muslim freethought outside the realms of acceptability. In other words, as long as enquiry in Muslim countries is required to be sanctioned by religion, it will be limited in what it can achieve.

The authorities who hinder freethinking about Islam in this way, whether through sharia enforcement or via the ‘liberal’ denial of space for Islamic dissent, are actively suppressing the progress of Muslim thought. In doing so, they are hindering the intellectual growth of a quarter of the global population. It is only through unabashed irreverence and unapologetic rejection that Islam will find its due place in the modern world. That will finally allow Muslims to collectively embrace secular laws, to make intellectual progress on a par with other advanced countries, and to conduct their lives free from the hindrance of theological doctrine.

Today, however, whether in Islamist theocratic regimes like Iran, the now ostensibly liberalising Arab monarchies, or the heavily Islamised (though officially secular) democracies such as Indonesia, Islam remains a source of absolute power in the vast majority of Muslim states. The first step on the path to Muslim freethought needs to be a root-and-branch reform of the Islamic regimes themselves.  

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The post The need to rekindle irreverence for Islam in Muslim thought appeared first on The Freethinker.

On July 25, Tunisia approved its new constitution via referendum. 94.6 per cent of the voters approved the constitution in a referendum that had a mere 30.5 per cent turnout. The new constitution gives sweeping powers to the president, but has also removed Islam as the state religion.

As a result, the constitution is being touted simultaneously as both a continuation of Tunisia’s recent gains, and a stark departure from them. This paradox is rooted in the country’s being the greatest success story in the Arab world over the past decade.

Tunisia, which eleven years ago saw the first spark of the Arab Spring, is the country that has made the most progress on the secular democratic front, from the revolutions of 2011 – and hence has had the most to lose.

Legacy of the revolution

Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution put an end to the 23-year autocratic rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. While the revolution, historically, was motivated by the gross economic disparity and gruesome living conditions in Tunisia, it eventually paved the way for greater democratisation of the country. The revolution also underscored the potential of the internet, and the infinite scope for free thought and expression it provides, which can mobilise a people towards a collective goal.

The 2011 polls following Ben Ali’s exit resulted in the Islamist Ennahda party coming to power; this party has been a feature in several regimes since then. Ennahda, an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, has long represented the struggle between secular autocrats and popular Islamist parties in North Africa. Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia’s founder and Ben Ali’s predecessor who ruled over the country for three decades, was dubbed the ‘Arab Ataturk’ owing to the influence that French laïcité had over him. Tunisia still bears the remnants of political influence from France, which held the country as a colony for 75 years.

Even so, Ennahda could only form the 2011 government in alliance with the secular El Mottamar and Ettakatol parties. This heralded the possibility of building consensus across ideological divides. The euphoria was short-lived, however: nationwide protests erupted against Ennahda’s Islamisation attempts, including the curtailing of women’s rights. The political crisis, aggravated by the 2013 assassination of secular leaders Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi, threatened to ignite chaos. Eventually, however, the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet, which would in due course win the Nobel Peace Prize, facilitated dialogue and eased the country towards its 2014 constitution and new elections.

Tunisia’s 2014 constitution was one of the most progressive in the history of the region and one of the greatest achievements of the Arab Spring. It sought to establish Tunisia as a secular democratic republic, and to separate sharia from the legislation process; this in turn safeguarded all rights, including women’s, through civic codes not bound by Islamic law. Article 6 of the constitution explicitly banned takfir (excommunication edicts) and the accompanying persecution, which was designed to protect Tunisia from the suppression of ‘blasphemy’ and the accompanying violence that mars much of the Muslim world. The refusal to incorporate Islam-specific limits to free speech, and the provision instead of a more egalitarian ‘protection of the sacred’, was a remarkable compromise that secular parties reached with the Ennahda-led Islamists.

The triumph of the secularist Nidaa Tounes party in the 2014 polls appeared to suggest that the country had decided on a pluralist course. However, the Mohamed Beji Caid Essebsi regime saw the gradual unfolding of Tunisian democracy over the next five years as a result of upheavals, both local and regional, including the rise of the deadliest jihadist outfit of recent times.

Coping with jihad

While Tunisia held its first free elections and was transitioning towards becoming a secular democracy, an ‘Islamic state’ was being formalised in the region by the jihadist group with the widest global reach of any that had formed in the previous decade. Isis, which announced its caliphate in Iraq and Syria in June 2014, saw thousands of Tunisians join the group and many thousands more espousing support for the jihadist outfit. Up to 7,000 citizens joined Isis, making Tunisia the country that provided the Islamic State with the most fighters per capita in the world.

The factors contributing to Tunisians joining Isis were largely the usual, from the ideological lure of jihad to economic deprivation at home. However, everything was compounded by the fact that the populace’s expectations for change were higher than anywhere else in the region, given what had preceded the unveiling of the Isis caliphate; the general disgruntlement with its lack of success was correspondingly severe. This was especially true for the country’s Islamists, who had hoped that governance based on the popular vote would translate into an Islamisation of Tunisia. They then actively paved the way for radical Islamism and, in turn, a surge of jihadist attacks orchestrated by Isis in Tunisia.

As was typical for this sort of ‘jihadist cycle’, the crises that facilitated militant recruitment for Isis only expanded to a much larger scale. The economy tanked, governance worsened, Nidaa Tounes splintered and had to relentlessly compromise with Ennahda. A nationwide emergency was declared to counter the deteriorating security situation. The 2015 state of emergency  continues to be in place today; it has been used to justify abuses of power and to curb human rights, including free speech. Disenchanted with the continuing presence of the usual players, including Ben Ali’s aides, in their country’s protracted transition, the Tunisians voted the outsider Kais Saied into power in the October 2019 presidential elections.

Saied, a jurist and academic who was a part of the committee that helped draft the 2014 constitution, has channelled Tunisians’ political discontents into an unabashed volte-face over the past three years. After taking the first few months of his leadership, up to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, to establish his government, Saied then used the health and economic crises that followed to launch his assault on the Tunisian parliament and the constitution he had helped to draft.

Amid nationwide protests over the deteriorating economic conditions caused by the pandemic, Saied dismissed Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi and suspended parliament on 25 July 2021. A year later he oversaw the formalisation of the constitution that would considerably expand his own powers, trampling on democratic pluralism that the country not too long ago seemed destined to embrace.

Significance of secular democracy

Despite these regressions towards autocracy, there is no doubt that the formal removal of Islam as the state religion in the 2022 Tunisian constitution is a major step forwards. Not only is separating state and religion the first move necessary for the secularisation of any country; for Tunisia to have ratified this via a general vote also makes it unique in the Muslim world. However, a closer look at the new constitution, and Saied’s own vocally espoused beliefs, indicate that the move is part of the president’s political manoeuvring rather than a bona fide attempt to complete the secularisation of Tunisia.

Saied wants to reinstate the death penalty. He has endorsed discriminatory inheritance for women and a ban on the display of public affection by couples. The Tunisian president has also dubbed homosexuality a ‘perversion imported from the West’ and has declared Israel the ‘enemy of Muslims’. Clearly, much of what he stands for is straight out of the Islamist playbook. Therefore, for someone who repeatedly has reiterated the significance of Islam in Tunisian governance, removing it as the state religion could be an attempt to shield himself from Western criticism over his continued power grab, and could even sideline Ennahda’s legislative influence.

When faced with a barrage of women’s rights protests over the rejection of gender equality in inheritance during his presidential campaign, Saied quickly moved towards nominating Najla Bouden Romdhane as the country’s first ever female prime minister. His policymaking, therefore, is a combination of opportunism and tokenism designed to consolidate his power. This is reflected not only in the increased presidential powers included in the latest constitution, but also in the way in which Saied’s rhetoric on Islam is designed to offer a sufficiently Islamic alternative to the country’s Islamist politicians.

In a statement made at the prestigious Zaytuna Mosque last year, Saied said that ‘the Qur’an was directed to Muslims, not to Islamists’. He has repeatedly targeted the Islamists in rhetoric, implying that they have no idea about Islam or the ‘purposes of Islam’. All this ought to be a much needed push by a head of a Muslim state to make Islam a private belief system, but Saied also frequently cites the Quran to justify his denial of women’s rights, especially on inheritance.

Saied’s aspiration is clearly to push out both his Islamist and secular rivals, while using his expansionist presidential powers to leave Islamic interpretations at his personal discretion and so win the conservative Muslim vote. In turn he will doubtless abandon any plans for Tunisia to become a secular democracy.

A need for legal freethought

Whereas Article 1 of the 2014 constitution had maintained Islam as the state religion, Article 2 had stated that Tunisia is a ‘civil state based on citizenship, the will of the people, and the supremacy of law.’ The latter article was designed to ward off any Islamist attempts to include Islamic sharia in legislation to limit the rights of individuals, but it has been scrapped in the new constitution.

Article 5 of the 2022 constitution reads: ‘Tunisia is part of the Islamic Ummah [worldwide community], and only the state shall work to implement the Maqased [principles of Sharia] of Islam in preserving life, honour, money, religion, and freedom.’ This clause not only undoes Tunisian secularism, it quite clearly paves the way for Islamic law to quash civil rights, by leaving it up to the state to decide what sharia is and how to apply it.

Not only should it be no business of a secular state to determine the need for or veracity of any religious law, let alone to implement it, the severely augmented presidential powers give Kais Saied absolute control over the imposition of Islamic sharia in Tunisia. This means that it would now be Saied who would arbitrarily determine the fate of women, the LGBT community, and the extent of freedom of expression and of conscience allowed in Tunisia, according to his interpretation of the restrictive and antediluvian Islamic sharia.

Rather than the values of a secular republic, the latest Tunisian constitution incorporates elements of Islamic theocracies and Islamist states. Iran, too, imposes its repressive hijab laws using the state’s arbitrary powers to implement Quranic mandates; in large parts of the Muslim world there are still violent sharia penalties for ‘sins’ like blasphemy. Tunisia’s constitution, like that of many other states including Islamic ones, alludes to the preservation of life and liberty. Yet these purported safeguards are not only insufficient, they will be ruthlessly trampled upon by the 2022 constitution’s failure to protect rights that are in opposition to, or are perceived to contradict, Islamic law.

Kais Saied’s powerplays have in practice taken sovereignty away from the people and given it to the Islamic scriptures. This not only negates secularism; it also undermines the very foundation of democracy, which requires all citizens to be absolutely equal, regardless of what any religion mandates. The struggles of the Muslim world in adopting secular and democratic ideals are rooted in the failure of the vast majority of Muslim-majority countries to subordinate Islamic sharia to a uniform civil code. The latter would require the adoption of legal freethought instead of an attempt to reconcile the legislative superstructure with Islam.

The counter-Islamist blueprint

Even many of the officially secular Muslim countries have recently succumbed to Islamic radicalism, owing to their failure to truly separate Islam from their systems of governance and policymaking. Islamists have been propagating anti-Hindu violence and demanding Islamic blasphemy laws in Bangladesh. Indonesia allows the Aceh province to implement Islamic sharia, including flogging for ‘crimes against Islam’. Even Turkey, for long the benchmark for a secular Muslim state, has seen its Kemalist ideals being eroded in recent years owing to the rise of the Islamist Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP), led by Recep Erdoğan.

Thus Islamist parties and leaders are damaging secularism even in countries where it is codified. It goes without saying that the prevalence of Islamism in totalitarian regimes derails all efforts and aspirations to evolve into pluralist democracies. Islamism – the idea that Islam needs to be tightly woven into the political and social fabric – inherently contradicts the idea of democracy, which is built on absolute egalitarianism vis-à-vis the participation, shared interests, and independence of the whole population. This is true even if modernist and reformist interpretations of Islam are incorporated in law, since they would still allow room for literalist interpretations should Islamists of any kind come to power.

True political participation in these states needs the consensus of all parties, regardless of where they stand on the ideological spectrum, and it needs collective loyalty towards the constitution. Civic law should be a democratically framed document devoid of any majoritarian biases, religious or otherwise.

For aspiring Muslim democracies this does not necessarily mean a ban on parties like Ennahda that claim to be the flagbearers of Islam, but simply the requirement that their politics would need to focus on the communal interests of Muslims and other citizens, and not betray any ambitions for the codification of Islamic theology. Even in long established secular democracies like the US, where abortion has been struck down as a constitutionally protected right, and India, which is today being envisioned by its Hindutva rulers as a Hindu state, religious beliefs are being allowed to infringe detrimentally on individual rights.

Muslim-majority countries, meanwhile, face both a collectivist Islamist inertia and individual autocratic challenges, barring progress towards the establishment of secular democracy; Tunisia is but one example. What the Muslim world needs is a consensus on separating religion from politics; but this is only possible by collectively embracing freethinking and free criticism of Islam and its role in the state. Unfortunately, leaders of the vast majority of the Muslim countries, and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), continue to globalise their radical censorship on freethought in Islam. Secularisation seems to be a long way away.

The post What the Muslim world can learn from Tunisia appeared first on The Freethinker.

In July, President Joe Biden is likely to visit Israel and Saudi Arabia, as the two countries draw closer towards formalising the ties that have previously remained unofficial. The normalisation process that began with the Abraham Accords in 2020, when UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco recognised the state of Israel, will be extended, through Saudi, to the broader Sunni Muslim world. And Riyadh has been laying the groundwork to formalisation.

In Turkey, despite its seven-decade old relations with Israel and recent collaborations, Recep Erdogan is still capable of using Islamist rhetoric to muster hyperbolic outrage. Saudi Arabia, however, is financially incentivising Turkey to keep this rhetoric in check. It is also offering financial support to the unflinchingly Judaeophobic Pakistan; this should extend the normalisation process from the Middle East to South Asia.

While financial and geopolitical gains were a critical factor in the 2020 Arab-Israeli normalisation, they had to be complemented by a religious rationale for the Accords – hence the nod to Abraham in their title. Saudi Arabia, for long the self-appointed leader of the Sunni half of the Arab world and custodian of Islamic sites, knows that it needs a religious narrative to sell to the Muslim world, since the latter has long been taught Jewish hatred through Islamic scriptures, which display every kind of Judaeophobia, from asking the believers ‘not to take Jews as friends’ to ordering their genocide.

Post-postcolonialism

Since World War II, three generations of global leftist intelligentsia have endowed the Arab-Israeli conflict with immutable postcolonial narratives. The Western powers, which were primarily responsible for enforcing the new world order and the injustices that came with it, created Israel as a haven for the Jews whom it had actively persecuted, or as a colonial base to continue subjugating the locals in the Middle East. At least, this is how, for the past seven decades, the ‘progressive’ argument has gone.

The idea that any land should be allocated to a religious community owing to the claims of its canonical scripture would be preposterous for anyone not believing in that scripture. However, this happened with the new state of Israel, in a part of the world which was surrounded by states ethnically cleansing the very religious community from which it was formed. The same Muslim-majority states actively persecuted other minorities using Islamic scriptures. In a world brimming with religious injustices, only one succeeded in capturing the attention of many of those on the progressive Left, who have then spent decades dismissing suggestions that religion has anything to do with it.

For proponents of this view, Israel is touted as an ‘artificial’, ‘imposed’ nation-state. Yet this is in a region where the very idea of a nation state has been artificially imposed, and where regional borders are delineated according to spheres of control exercised by competing powers. Neither Jordon, Lebanon, Syria or Iraq existed as unified states prior to the interference by the West, which had also seen the African continent sliced up like a cake. Similarly, the parallels between Pakistan and Israel are innumerable: the creation of Pakistan resulted in the largest mass migration in human history, leaving significantly more people displaced than were by the creation of Israel. The fabrication of borders to create these states is as much a consequence of Western colonialism as their Muslim-majority identity is a result of Islamic imperialism.

But just as postcolonial ideologues have artificially expunged religion out of any examination of the Middle East’s difficulties, their narrative has also sought to sanitise Islam and diminish its imperialistic tendencies. For instance, Edward Said, the prophet of Middle Eastern postcolonial studies, in his staunch defence of Islam, castigated Western media for depicting Islam negatively – at the same time as many Muslim-majority states were carrying out gory, antediluvian punishments, such as flogging for extramarital sex and stoning individuals to death for exercising freethought about Islam, in accordance with Islamic law (sharia). Said’s ‘Orientalism’ has evolved into today’s cultural-relativist ‘Islamophobia’ narrative, in which the unflinching protection of 1,400-year-old ideas, which themselves codify violence in large parts of the Muslim world, is deemed the hallmark of intellectual progressiveness.

That many on the progressive Left have chosen to view certain issues through the narrow, selectively opaque lens of postcolonialism seems to have blinded them to the fact that others can be passionately attached to the same cause, but as a result of a completely different set of ideas – ideas which also invoke an ideology that actively seeks the destruction of much of what the progressives otherwise stand for. This has created a bizarre and perilous pact between the Islamists and the Left, who together try to minimise Islam’s role in any conflict in the region, including for the maintenance of the Arab-Israeli conflict and for the refusal to create a Palestinian state.

Religious roots

In addition to Islam, it is important to stress how the two other Abrahamic religions have contributed to the conflict in the Middle East. Just as Islam, from its onset, has explicitly condemned Christian and Jews, and rejected the fundamental beliefs of its predecessors – for instance by calling Jesus a prophet and not the son of God – Christianity too was keen from an early stage to distance itself from its Judaic roots. 

Biblical Judeophobia, which holds the Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, oversaw the persecution and even pogroms of Jewish populations from western Europe to Russia. Pogroms were also carried out under the Ottoman Empire. There were cheerleaders aplenty in both Christian-majority and Muslim-majority countries when the Axis powers were preparing the grounds for the Holocaust. The latter was itself spearheaded by an ethno-supremacist Nazi ideology, the genocidal antisemitism of which was complemented by religionist Judaeophobia.

Yet Zionism, the movement for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the historic land of Israel which emerged amid the escalating Jewish persecution in the 19th century, has found many of its proponents aspiring to recreate ‘land of Canaan’ that would encompass the entire territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The Biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’, today called the West Bank, was captured by Israeli forces after the 1967 war. The West Bank forms a large chunk of the Palestinian territory that was earmarked by the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Yet over the past 55 years, it has been inhabited by nearly half a million Jewish settlers, a vast majority of them Orthodox Jews looking to fulfil the canonical prophecies.

Jerusalem symbolises the common roots, and shared animosity, between the three Abrahamic religions and the expansionist empires that have conquered the city, from the Romans in the first century AD to the Arabs in seventh century. Each conqueror in turn aspired to assert its dominance atop the remnants of the vanquished religions. The Temple Mount is a symbol of intra-Abrahamic antagonism and the tangible religious root of the centuries-old conflict between them.

Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, built atop the Temple Mount, signifies the third holiest site in Islam. According to Islamic tradition, it was the first qibla (direction of prayer) sanctioned by Muhammad and the site of the fable that narrates his flight to Jannah (heaven). It is the Jewish occupation of this holy land that has outraged the vast majority of the Muslim world, and constitutes its main grievance against Israel – more so than Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. The animosity for Jews in Islamic scriptures adds Judaeophobic fuel to the Islamist fire.

Islamic anti-Semitism

While Jewish and Christian progressives largely denounce their scriptures’ contribution to the conflict, Muslim progressives have historically toed the leftist position on Israel: even those otherwise critical of Islamist doctrines have actively disassociated Islamic anti-Semitism from the broader Muslim denunciation of the Jewish state. Many have argued that the anti-Jewish bigotry in Muslim-majority states, which sometimes spirals into conspiratorial hysteria, is in fact rooted in the creation of Israel. This is a convenient, or deliberate, rewriting of the Muslim world’s history. Horrific massacres of Jews were being carried out centuries before modern-day Israel was born – from Hebron, Safed, and Petah Tikva in modern day Israel-Palestine to Damascus, Algiers, and Basra.

As far back as 628 AD, the Battle of Khaybar saw the conquest of Muhammad’s army over Jewish tribes; according to Islamic tradition, this involved the massacre and expulsion of the Jews. The Qatar-produced Ramadan television series ‘Khaybar’ alluded to the battle using the popular Arabic chant ‘Khaybar Khaybar, ya yahud, Jaish Muhammad, sa yahud’ (Jews, remember Khaybar, the army of Muhammad is returning’). This chant is frequently heard in anti-Israeli rallies from the Middle East to Western Europe. There are many hadiths (sayings of Muhammad) that encourage killing of Jews. For instance, a quotation often cited by jihadists and radical Islamists asks Muslims to fight the Jews until the time when trees and stones tell the believers, ‘O Muslim! There’s a Jew behind me, so kill him.’ The charter of Hamas uses many verses from the Islamic scriptures to call for the extermination of Jews.

Over the past century, episodes of ethnic cleansing of Jews have been carried out across the Muslim world from the Middle East to South and East Asia. These have run in parallel with expressions of fear over Israel’s attempted elimination of Muslims in Palestine. The lack of a global Muslim push to establish a Palestinian state in West Bank and Gaza between 1948 and 1967, when the territories were under Jordanian and Egyptian occupation, also suggests that creation of another Arab-Muslim state was not as high a priority as elimination of the Jewish one.

At the end of the 1970s and in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the siege of Mecca, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a schism between Sunnis and Shias, led by Riyadh and Tehran respectively, exploded. A newfound oil hegemony became the economic basis for a proxy jihad between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This led to the radicalisation of Muslim movements from Palestine to Kashmir; even the formerly secular nationalist strains of the movements were purged in favour of a monolithic Islamist narrative. Meanwhile, as Saudi Arabia peddled violent anti-Semitism through mosques and school curricula, it was simultaneously Israel’s ally in the US alliance that pushed anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s. Simultaneously, Iran, the hub of Shia proxy warfare, has actively allied itself with the Sunni jihadist Hamas to maintain its leverage in the Arab world. In turn, the jihadist takeover of the broader Muslim world in recent decades has meant that instead of rallying together over humanitarian grounds, even the officially secular Indonesia and Turkey have condemned Israel in an anti-Semitic way.

An Islamic rationale for Israel

New geopolitical realities, spearheaded by shared animosity for Iran, however, have pushed the Sunni Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, into publicly befriending the Jewish state which they have long threatened with destruction. As a result, the radically Islamised curriculum in Saudi Arabia has been revised to remove anti-Semitic texts. The highest Saudi clerics, who long called for the ‘annihilation’ of Jews, dubbing them ‘descendants of apes and pigs’, have now been increasingly asking Muslims to exhibit kindness to Jews. From TV shows based on Islamic history, to deliberations in academic conferences, there has been a swift turnaround in the Arab narrative on Jews and Israel, eventually culminating in the 2020 agreements. And since the promises of Israel’s demolition were rooted in Islam, so is the rationale for this remarkable volte-face. 

In his 2020 visit to Auschwitz, Mohammed al-Issa, the head of the Muslim World League, passionately vowed ‘this must never happen again.’ He insisted that fighting hatred against Jews is a ‘religious obligation’, and maintained that the Muslim World League would keep challenging anti-Semitism till it ceased to exist. ‘Political outlooks change over time but our values, our morals should never change,’ al-Issa said. And yet that is precisely what has been happening, thanks in large part to religion.

Apologists of the anti-Semitism in Islamic scriptures have long sought to contextualise, or dismiss, explicit calls for Jewish blood in the canonical texts that Muslims around the world are taught. In its condemnation of January’s jihadist attack on a Texas synagogue, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) rejected anti-Semitism. However, it will be unlikely to address its own Judaeophobia and support for antisemitic jihadists like Aafia Siddiqui, who inspired the attack. In the aftermath of jihadist anti-Semitic manoeuvres, Muslim groups like the CAIR point to Islamic passages that urge tolerance and brotherhood, all the while refusing to address the passages that explicitly urge violence.

For instance, Jews are among the Ahl-al-Kitaab(‘People of the Book’) that the Quran refers to 31 times. According to Islamic tradition and jurisprudence, the ‘People of the Book’ were entitled to religious recognition under Islamic sharia, through being given the inferior status of dhimmi (‘protected persons’), which required them to pay jizya (tax) in return for protection. Islamic sharia also allows Muslim men to marry Christian and Jewish women, although not the other way round.

Today, a blend of theological guarantees for the Ahl-al-Kitaab and emphasis on the holiness of Al-Aqsa Mosque are the basis of the Islamic rationale used to justify the Muslim world’s normalisation of relations with Israel. Many even quote parts of the Quran to argue that Islamic scriptures in fact affirm that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews. The ostensible Islamic justification for Israel has been pushed by Saudi Arabia as it draws closer to normalising relations with it. A Saudi-led Arab influence over Al-Aqsa would further bolster Islamic tourism – which has also been spearheaded by Riyadh, as it increasingly looks to find substitutes for its revenue from the oil that is eventually going to run out.

This Saudi push for reformist interpretations of Islam, in other words, is not an offshoot of collective Muslim reflection, but a powerplay designed to reinvent Islam as the geo-economic foundation of an Arab world that is still just as invested in maintaining its totalitarian hegemony over its peoples. The Muslim world’s monolithic attitudes towards Islam, and the geopolitical conflicts where Islam has been imposed, could have evolved organically through permitting freedom of conscience and religion once again, after their centuries of suppression. Instead, however, the new interpretations of Islam are being forged autocratically by leaders, and while maintaining inflexible restraints on free thought among the wider Muslim populations. 

Suppressing free thought

The suppression of critical thinking means that Muslims around the world would have to arbitrarily accept Israel through Islamic legitimisation, just as they were previously pushed to support the Israel’s genocidal destruction through a different interpretation of the same canonical texts. What this also means is that much needed interfaith coexistence, regional peace, and Muslim intellectual progress will continue to be held hostage by the interpretation of Islam that best suits the geopolitical ambitions of the Arab monarchs at any given point. That is why, regardless of how reformist an interpretation of Islam the Arab states might be upholding today, they will not accept any allowance for challenging Islam itself. For instance, while the Hindutva regime in India has been actively targeting Muslims, and while its military has occupied the Muslim-majority state of Jammu and Kashmir, the Arab countries only  criticised New Delhi over the perceived blasphemy by Nupur Sharma, the BJP spokesperson, against Muhammad, when she alluded to the marriage of Islam’s prophet to six-year-old Aisha as narrated in Islamic scriptures.

Whether in South Asia or the Middle East, regional stability and human progress have long been stymied by the interference of religion in policymaking. The millennia-old faultlines between Israel and Palestine, or their respective cultures, have long needed reconciliatory solutions that are based on pragmatism rather than religion. But the progressives who should be spearheading such movements have created an ideology that reflects the monolithism and dogmatism of organised religion.

Historically, the hard Left has cherished the Marxist aspiration of destroying Israel as a way of removing Western capitalism from the region. The ‘anti-capitalist’ movement calling for ‘illegitimate’ Israel’s eradication grew in parallel with Arab monarchies, whose own legitimacy was rooted in the historic triumph of their founders in tribal warfare, and whose fast-accumulating oil wealth gave them disproportionate influence on the global stage. After the dissolution of the USSR, the Left broadly acquiesced to a two-state solution, but its fixation with Israel, often in parallel to the abandonment of human rights abuses elsewhere such as Kurdistan, Balochistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, or Xinjiang, has persisted. While the Marxist-Leninist goal of eliminating of Israel during the Soviet era described the Jewish state itself as artificial and colonial, the heirs of those ideologies use the same labels for Israel, but have moved the focus of their campaign to the territories captured after 1967 depending on the audience.

The hard Left’s doublespeak in its position on Israel – shifting between condemning the occupied territories or the state itself as illegal – is similar to the way in which Israeli leaders and expansionist Zionists allude to the ‘state of Israel’, whose borders vary from the pre-1967 state to ‘between Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea’, depending on the setting of the discussion. Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent his entire political career fighting against the creation of a Palestinian state, before becoming the first leader of the Israeli right to concede the possibility of one in 2009, and then going on to spend the next decade or so in power persisting with his expansionist definition of Israel and rejecting any notion of a Palestinian state.

No one faction has a monopoly on duplicity: some Western media have suppressed free speech about Israel’s war crimes by depicting criticism of Israel as synonymous with anti-Semitism. Compare, for example, their contrasting coverage of Palestine and Ukraine.

Even so, my primary focus in this article has been on Islamists and Leftist opponents of Israel. This is not only because these two factions have bound Palestinians to their respective ideologies, all the while claiming to be their well-wishers, but also because criticism of Western media can be easily found in Western media itself, and denunciation of Israeli crimes in Israeli newspapers. In contrast, the Muslim Left has mirrored the Muslim Right by silencing any dissentient views on Israel, while globally, the ideological Left has suppressed divergent opinions, to the point of facilitating anti-Semitism within their own ranks.

Today, the prohibition on dissent among hardliners on the Left, and their enactment of their own blasphemy codes, can arguably be seen in the ‘woke’ cancel culture that religiously silences any challenge to the ideological status quo. Today, liberal women who express concern over hard-earned sex-based rights are being apostatised out of many progressive circles, and their refusal to conform to fast-evolving gender narratives is equated with bigotry against entire groups.

Unfortunately, this jettisoning of free speech, instead of allowing the open debate of ideas that are deemed ‘wrong’ or ‘offensive’ – the raison d’être of the right to free speech – has restricted their discussion. For the Palestinians, the historical silencing of viewpoints by their friends and foes alike has pushed the region today closer towards having a ‘solution’ arbitrarily imposed upon it. And it is the ‘progressive’ ideologues who have been willing to leave the Palestinians helpless in the face of autocratic religious leaders, and who have glorified the suffering of a minority as a way of legitimising their own puritanic views.

The post Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict appeared first on The Freethinker.

Festivals are an important PR opportunity. When they are religious festivals, they become a way of exhibiting the beliefs that the organisers want to showcase, and the image of the religion that they want to project. In South Asia, such festivals are often grotesque illustrations of majoritarian muscle-flexing.

Ram Navami witnessed a surge in violence against Muslims in India last week. The celebration of Ram’s birth provides the Hindutvaadis in India with the chance to reaffirm the deity as a symbol of Hindu supremacism. Chants of ‘Jai Shree Ram’ (‘glory to Lord Ram’) were weaponised by Hindutva mobs that had been emboldened by the triumphant construction of the Ram Temple on the disputed Ayodhya site. In the 16^th century, a mosque was built on the site, which many conservative Hindus believe was the birthplace of Ram, by the founder of the Mughal Empire; in 1992, the mosque was demolished by radical Hindu mobs.

The weaponising of Ram Navami mirrors a similar weaponisation of the ‘love’ for Muhammad in Pakistan. The Islamic festival of Eid Milad-un-Nabi, the commemoration of Muhammad’s birth, has often been marred with violence against the constitutionally excommunicated Ahmadiyya Muslim community. The latter has been targeted for commemorating any Islamic festival, owing to the community’s belief in their sect’s founder, which is deemed by Islamists as sacrilegious. Ahmadiyya Muslims believe their 19^th-century founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmed, is an Islamic messiah; clerics of other sects deem this belief contradictory to Muhammad’s status as the final prophet of Islam.

Similarly, during the Islamic month of Ramadan in recent years, people have been imprisoned, fined or left to languish in Pakistani jails, or beaten up by Islamist mobs in both Pakistan and the officially ‘secular’ Bangladesh. The Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, and other jihadist groups in the region like Isis, often increase militant activity during Ramadan. They claim that jihad during the holy month is more rewarding, citing the victory in the Battle of Badr in 624 AD. According to Islamic tradition, this battle was the first between Muhammad’s army and the pagans of Mecca. The triumph of the outnumbered Muslims has been attributed by many Islamic theologians to the month of Ramadan.

As Islamic militancy has spawned regionally, and indeed globally, Hindutva radicalism has also caught the imagination of many in Hindu-majority Nepal. Meanwhile, Buddhist extremists are hoping to erase religious minorities in Sri Lanka and Bhutan.

Varieties of supremacism

In comparing varieties of religious extremism in South Asian states, it is important to stress the differences as well as similarities between them. Despite its precipitous anti-Muslim plunge under the Hindutva regime, Hinduism in India is not (yet) as dominant as Islam in Pakistan, where the religion is more brazenly institutionalised. For instance, not only is Islam the state religion in Pakistan, its supremacy is codified in the penal code. Sharia is used both to sanction violent penalties and also to legally discriminate between crimes committed against the majority and minority religious communities, such as blasphemy.

Multiple mosques remain under construction in India, whose constitution still dubs it a ‘secular nation’. In contrast, not a single Hindu temple has been constructed in Pakistan over the past 75 years, while around 95 percent of minority places of worship have been erased since the country was created in 1947.

In Afghanistan, like Pakistan, religious supremacy for Islam is etched in law via antediluvian sharia clauses. Meanwhile, Sri Lanka’s constitution upholds the ‘foremost position’ for Buddhism in the country, codifying the protection of this ideology as the ‘duty of the state’. In contrast, Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan remain formally secular, despite attempts by hardliners to give precedence to the religion of the majority. In Bangladesh, for instance, Islamists are demanding codification of sharia, and using Islam to suppress women’s rights or vandalise Hindu temples. In turn, the government looks to counter the religionist narrative – albeit unsatisfactorily – by issuing reminders of the country’s secular identity or of the fact that it does not have a state religion.

Despite these differences, religious supremacism is a common ailment in South Asia and often manifests itself in similar ways.

Across the region, the elevation of the majority’s religion, whether in law, government narrative, or via unhinged majoritarian radicals, results in its own fragmentation and an internal contest among the divisions to assert their supremacy within the religion. Different factions within the majority’s religion struggle to establish their interpretation of religion as the true one in their country. For instance, just as Islamic extremism in Pakistan has evolved into a quest to subjugate minority Muslim sects, and the millennia-old subjugation of ‘lower’ Hindu castes is upheld by the Hindutva regime in India, so, in Sri Lanka, the propagation of the Theravada strain has accompanied the rise of Buddhist radicalism.

Whenever such a contest erupts within an ideology, especially one that is propounding supremacism, those with the loudest voices are the advocates of a more fundamentalist, radical interpretation of their religion. The result is that minorities even within the majority religion are sidelined, and anyone who does not toe the radical line is shunned by the dominant faction as a ‘traitor’ or ‘blasphemer’ – two terms which have come to be used interchangeably. In a region increasingly in the grip of religious nationalism, allegations of this kind have been used against dissenters in an unrelenting assault on freedom of speech and thought.

Freethought under attack

Examples of the religious oppression of dissenters can be found across South Asia. Perhaps the most punitive cases are found in Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which have blasphemy laws that prescribe death for criticism of Islam. In Pakistan, the blasphemy law encourages vigilante violence against those who offend Islamic sensibilities. A recent example of this was the death of Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan, in the town of Sialkot in December. He was lynched by an angry mob after being accused of removing posters with Islamic prayers printed on them. Bangladesh has also witnessed a witch-hunt against blasphemy: hit-lists have been released of freethinking bloggers, with Islamists forcing atheists and secularists to flee.

At present, India’s blasphemy law treats all religions equally, and does not sanction death for offence to any religion. However, in 2018, a Member of Parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Jannata Party (BJP) introduced a private member’s bill that would have imposed the death penalty for cow slaughter – in other words, a Hindu blasphemy law. Although the bill was rejected after a debate, BJP members have vowed they will seek to introduce it again.

In different parts of India, slaughtering cows can attract various legal penalties, including imprisonment, although in some parts it is not criminalised. However, allegations of selling or consuming beef can still encourage Hindutva mob violence across the country, just like blasphemy accusations in Pakistan or Bangladesh. For example, in June, a man was lynched in Rajasthan for transporting cattle, while another was thrashed last month for ‘suspicion’ of carrying beef in Mathura.  

Sri Lanka, where Buddhism is the dominant religion, has also seen mob violence similarly fueled by claims of attacks on Buddhism. In March, a 600-strong Buddhist mob broke into a church demanding that the worship be halted. While the country has not so far invoked jurisprudential protection for religiously-motivated suppression by the majority in the manner of India or Pakistan, incidents such as radical Buddhists instigating mob violence against minorities are becoming increasingly common.

Religiously motivated mobs form the first line of attack against freethought. Religionist governments use them to intimidate dissenters, while at the same time using the hordes’ extrastate identity to distance themselves from the consequences. The governments of India and Pakistan, for instance, would on the surface urge citizens to not take law into their own hands. At the same time, however, they profit from pressure by vigilantes which practically quash any debate on whether such laws – which effectively protect the intangible sensibilities of the majority’s religion – should even exist.

But dissent is also being silenced via official channels in South Asia. These days, courts in Pakistan have even imposed the death penalty for ‘sacrilegious’ WhatsApp messages. The Indian state is clamping down on all forms of art that a sufficient number of Hindus can claim to be offensive to Hinduism, such as film, theatre festivals or digital streaming productions. Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, the government’s ‘Buddhist Publications/Texts Regulatory Act’ enables the state to dictate what can be published, especially in the realm of religion, including what can and cannot be said about Buddhism and its founder.

There are complex political roots behind the move of these governments to silence criticism of the official religious line. Ethnicism, regionalism, linguistics and a wide array of other factors all support the respective power structures in each state. Overall, however, religion is the binding force that upholds the autocratic machineries in South Asia. The dominance of a particular religious and political ideology in each state is an obstruction to all kinds of freedoms, but above all to displays of conscience which challenge the ideology in question.

The hegemony of religion

South Asia has been a melting pot of organised religions from around the globe, Abrahamic and dharmic, for millennia. Although Islam is Abrahamic in origin, two Islamic strains from the Sunni sect take their appellations from cities in India: the Deobandi and Barelvi. The latter, Barelvi, originated as a syncretic brand of Islam that merged Sufi, Indic and dharmic characteristics. South Asia’s indigenous polytheistic and nontheistic faiths have similarly coopted rigid monolithism; as a result, the principle of religious and philosophical pluralism is being sacrificed at the altar of unyielding homogeneity.

One characteristic of South Asian culture, which was well established long before the arrival of the Abrahamic faiths, is its subservience to superstition and attribution of paramount authority to religion. This culture remains entrenched today in the different states, regardless of which religion is dominant. But while those embracing theocratic constitutions – such as Afghanistan and Pakistan – would have no qualms about flaunting religious authority, even supposedly secular states in the region are more or less subservient to religious hegemony.

Secularism in India, unlike in Western countries, has translated into letting different religions have their own spheres of influence, while the state claims to treat all religions equally. The consequence of this has been that, in practice, religion has increasingly been allowed to interfere in civic life. This can be seen in the way in which cow vigilantes are now forcing everyone to make dietary and ritualistic choices based on Hindu beliefs.

Elsewhere in the region, states are letting religions rule their communities, thereby eroding their claims to secularity. The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka, for example, in a 2007 ruling on a case against mosque loudspeakers, maintained that the country is ‘secular’. However, it has elsewhere conceded that its constitution only mandates the protection of Buddhism, while the minority religions are not similarly safeguarded. This underlines the point that establishing the constitutional supremacy of one religion inadvertently breaches minority rights, even when they might be separately engrained in law.   

The current situation in India demonstrates the way in which allowing different religions to govern communities plays into the hands of the majority. Once the followers of a dominant religion are given the power to impose its rules on their own community, by a religionist ‘mission creep’, they try to extend its authority even to nonbelievers.

Moreover, the custom of creating separate spheres of influence for different religions may ostensibly be designed to safeguard minorities, but in practice, it can hinder social progress. In Sri Lanka, for instance, the minimum age for marriage is 18 years, but the child marriage of Muslim girls is allowed because Islamic sharia governs family law in Muslim communities, since religious laws are allowed to rule domestic matters. This undermines women’s rights. In India, Muslim men were permitted to ‘instantly divorce’ their wives under sharia law until 2019, even though the practice had already been outlawed in neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Allowing religious ideologies to be imposed on different communities inevitably leads to clashes and contradictions within the state. For instance, the court in the Indian state of Karnataka last month upheld the ban on ‘unessential’ religious symbols in secular schools. This led to a gross contradiction in the right to don religious garbs, wherein Muslim girls could not wear the hijab but Sikh boys could continue to wear turbans.

A secular state should not be determining which practices of any given religion are or are not ‘essential’. Instead, the state should uphold a uniform civil code which applies equally to the entire population. Where the adherents of some religions are treated preferentially to those of other or no religions, freedom of thought and expression cannot but suffer in the process.

‘Progressive’ suppression

In some cases, even advocates of liberal and progressive views have felt a misguided obligation to support the religious hegemony. The widespread liberal support for sexist Islamist modesty tools as symbols of ‘liberation’ is a case in point.

But a religion is just another ideology. A truly liberal approach is not to treat schoolchildren wearing religious clothing any differently from those wearing flags of a political party or jerseys of a particular sports team. Where there is good reason for imposing a uniform dress code, such as in a school, no exceptions should be made on the grounds of religion, any more than they would be in the case of manifestations of a political or sporting affiliation.

In India, defending the Muslim right to flaunt Islamic garb could be interpreted as challenging the already skewed religious narrative in the country, since the targeting of Islamic practices, regardless of how regressive they might be, stems from Hindu majoritarianism more so than any adherence to secularism. However, many self-avowed liberals or progressives in the West have called their own countries’ institutions ‘Islamophobic’ for treating Islam like other religions. Once again, secular progressivism should mean that religious beliefs and practices are treated the same as any other ideology. It does not mean that they should be viewed with a misplaced reverence, or especially privileged.

The support for religious dogma by progressives, in misguided defence of human rights, has unfortunate repercussions in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the same dogmas are used as a tool of oppression. The claim that satirising Islam is an attack on Muslims – even in states that allow significantly harsher mockery of the majority’s religion, such as France – is being used as a ‘progressive’ argument in countries like Pakistan, where criticism of Islam is violently suppressed.

This in turn has adverse effects on debate on religion in these countries, where both religionists and liberals seek to ‘reclaim’ religion. In Pakistan, for instance, the goalposts have been shifted so that the question is no longer whether Islamic dogma should have any bearing on whether people should be executed for blasphemy, but on whether blasphemy is, as some liberals now argue, ‘un-Islamic’.

Many progressives, like Pakistani-born American author Qasim Rashid, cherry pick Islamic theology so as to suggest that violence has ‘nothing to do’ with Islam. At the same time, minorities – including Rashid’s own Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Pakistan – are being violently suppressed, explicitly using 1,400-year-old Islamic laws against blasphemy. Opposing discrimination against Muslims should not translate into liberals’ defending Islamic scriptures against their critics, or into propagation of the term ‘Islamophobia’ in countries where fear of Islam is perfectly rational.  

India, which has a long tradition of self-questioning and indigenous criticism of Hinduism, is now seeing staunch secularists lecturing Hindu nationalists on what it actually means to be Hindu. This is a classic ‘no true Scotsman’ argument, since it claims that that anyone using violence in the name of Hinduism is not a bona fide member of the religious community. Such an approach is a cop-out, since it looks to avoid addressing the Hindu roots of Hindutva; it is also a clear surrender to religion, and religious identity, as the undisputed power centre of both the religionist and secularist spheres.

India’s upholding of Hindu traditions as the bedrock of Indian civilisation is mirrored in Sri Lanka’s promotion of Buddhist heritage as intrinsic to its national identity. The association between civilisation and religious tradition has reaffirmed the latter as central to political dynamics in Sri Lanka, where loyalty to the Buddhist heritage was initially codified in the constitution and is now being rammed home by majoritarian mobs.

Altogether, there is less and less room for political discourse in South Asia that does not involve religious frames of reference.

Denying universalism

While adherents of Islamic and dharmic doctrines see their religious beliefs as antithetical to one another, today they use similar arguments to defend their religion’s supremacy. Such arguments have been dutifully propagated by progressives in those countries as well. Where national environments have become increasingly hostile to religious self-reflection, those in power simply label criticism of Islamic or Hindu traditions – especially that originating in foreign countries – as a ‘western’ narrative.

As a result, critics of organised religion are increasingly silenced in South Asia. The unequivocal rejection of religious doctrine or tradition is depicted as a ‘western’ value; thus, anyone who advocates this view can be accused of being disloyal to their community. The criticism of religion is also dismissed as being grounded in an insufficient understanding of religious doctrine. This approach implies that criticism of religion is itself illegitimate; thus only those who believe in the religion, or at least refrain from criticising it, have the right to discuss it in the first place.

But denying the ability to criticise the majority’s religion freely is to deny a tradition which has deep roots both in India and among many Muslim philosophers. Moreover, to label freethought and the criticism of religion as illegitimate is to imply that they have no relevance in South Asian countries. In fact, though, freedom of thought and speech are universal human rights, which ought to be just as inalienable here as in the West.

There is no reason why the practice of thinking and speaking freely need automatically lead to a complete rejection of all theology. The crucial point is that the advancement of a pluralistic, tolerant and liberal democracy is only possible if no one religion is privileged above others, and if criticism of all religions is freely permitted. For that to transpire in our neck of the woods, freethought needs to be wrestled back from the South Asian ideologues who have pushed all matters of social, civilisational, and human significance into the intolerant domain of religion.

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