Fanatics in all the wrong places

On 26 January, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) announced that it had received allegations from Israel that twelve of its employees were directly involved in Hamas’ attack on Israel last October. These employees, some of whom are alleged to have participated in massacres of Israelis, have now been sacked, are dead, or are under investigation by UNRWA. Israel has also accused 190 of the UNRWA’s Gaza employees of being operatives of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

This is not the first time that the UNRWA, founded in 1949 to aid the 700,000 Palestinian refugees created by the first Arab-Israeli War, has been accused of lax hiring practices. Last November, one of the released Israeli hostages claimed he had been held in an attic by a UNRWA teacher.

Now, a slew of countries, including the UK and the US, have stopped their funding for the UNRWA. Combined, these countries contributed over 60 per cent of the UNRWA’s budget in 2022. Whether this is a fair response or not (after all, the UNRWA is now more than ever a lifeline for besieged Palestinians), the allegations are worrying. What hope can there be of a just and stable settlement to this interminable conflict if even the aid agencies of the UN are harbouring violent extremists?

Speaking of fanatics popping up in unwelcome places, Dr Wahid Shaida was suspended by NHS England last month for being the head of Hizb ut-Tahrir in the UK. Hizb ut-Tahrir was itself proscribed as a terrorist organisation shortly before Shaida’s suspension. But just why the head of a woman-hating, homophobic, Islamist outfit, who had openly celebrated the stabbing of Salman Rushdie and the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, was allowed to practise medicine in the first place is puzzling. One ought not to persecute others for their private beliefs, however distasteful, but it strikes me that such bigotry and fanaticism might have an adverse effect on a doctor’s ability to treat his or her patients fairly – particularly the female, gay, and Jewish ones. In any case, with the proscription of Hizb ut-Tahrir, Shaida’s suspension is certainly justified; though he is still, for some reason, registered with the General Medical Council.  

And then there is Mike Johnson, Speaker of the US House of Representatives and second in line to the presidency since last October. Johnson seems to be an avowed Christian nationalist and his pre-Speaker career highlights include advocating for the criminalisation of gay sex and helping Donald Trump’s demented and spurious legal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election. Read about all this and more in a white paper released by the Congressional Freethought Caucus on 11 January.

It is a sad, sad irony that the very nation founded upon Enlightenment ideals by a group of secularists and freethinkers, including the two great Toms (Paine and Jefferson), is home to some of the world’s most backward and most powerful Christian fundamentalists.

Modi’s triumph and the decay of subcontinental secularism

Meanwhile, India’s great secularist tradition continues to decay under Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist rule. On 22 January, Modi officially opened a new temple to the Hindu god Ram in Ayodhya, proclaiming that ‘After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]. I want to congratulate every citizen of the country on this historic occasion.’

With elections on the horizon, Modi’s fulfilment of a long-standing Hindu nationalist dream was obviously a vote-getting ploy. Little, of course, was made of the fact that the temple’s site was once home to a centuries-old mosque destroyed by a Hindu mob in 1992. The mob were convinced that the mosque had originally been erected by Muslim invaders over an earlier temple where Ram had been born. (Leave it to the religious to desecrate the sacred sites of their rivals.) Riots provoked by the destruction of the mosque killed thousands.

So: communal strife, destruction of ancient buildings, the death of thousands—and all thanks to religious fantasy. And now the vandalism and horror of 1992 are being erased because Narendra Modi wishes to stir up his supporters. In doing so, his assault on India’s rich secularist history reaches new heights. Here is the triumph of Modi.

And this prompts a further reflection: from Israel and Gaza to the US and India—not to mention the bloodstained steppes of Ukraine, where Orthodox-inspired and supported Russian troops are trying to destroy a young democracy—religion, in various forms, remains one of the world’s greatest threats to democratic and secular ideals, and to the ideals of peace and freedom. How far we secularists still have to go! And perhaps it really is not too much to say that ‘religion poisons everything.’

The Navajo Nation vs NASA

On 6 January, one of the great crises of our time arose. The White House hastily convoked a meeting, attended by officials from NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration among others, to meet the crisis head-on. For a commercial lunar mission, Peregrine Mission One, was due to launch in a couple of days—and its payload contained human remains which were to be buried on the Moon.

What, you might ask, was the problem with that? It has been done before, and the Moon is quite a beautiful final resting place. Many people, myself included, would feel honoured to be fired out into space to rest forever on the Earth’s closest fellow orb. Allow the Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren to explain:

‘The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology… The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations.’

Yes, really! This is no different from Catholics or Muslims imposing their religious beliefs on others. The only surprising thing is that it was paid such heed. The only proper response to this sort of thing is: Who cares? Or, perhaps, Too bad!

Of course, the reason no such firmly secularist response was given in this case is because the Navajo are a minority and they have faced terrible oppression. Guilt-ridden liberals who would happily scoff at, say, Catholic calls to ban homosexuality, are unable to do the same when it comes to indigenous people staking their own arrogant claims to religious privilege. This is an act of unintentional bigotry. It suggests that indigenous people cannot be held to the same standards as others and that their superstitions, which they are clearly incapable of throwing off, must be indulged.

But as citizens of democratic nations, nobody has the right to make special claims for themselves based on religion, let alone impose their beliefs on others. That is the essence of secularism. It does not matter whether the demand for privilege comes from a powerful bishop or an oppressed minority.

The Navajo case is representative of a more general trend: the indulgence of indigenous superstition in the name of inclusivity. Other instances include the adoption of such superstitions in American museums and the credence given to ‘indigenous science’ or ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ even in such august journals as Science. In New Zealand, meanwhile, where the embrace of ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (in this case, Māori ways of knowing) has gone the furthest, a Māori local district councillor defied the secularist mayor during a meeting and recited a prayer.

If Narendra Modi and Mike Johnson are examples of the religious right flaunting its power, are the claims of the Navajo and the Māori examples of the religious ‘woke’ left in action? At least, the ‘woke’ left tends to support these claims. As ever, the only solution is the secularist one of fairness: nobody, however powerful or oppressed, gets a special pass for their beliefs, nor do they have the right to impose those beliefs on others.

Muslims v Michaela

The legal case currently being pursued against Katharine Birbalsingh’s Michaela Community School by fundamentalist Muslims angry at the school’s restriction of Muslim prayer has stirred up something quite unusual, but also very heartening: an outpouring from across the political spectrum of sympathy for secularism. But, as Megan Manson of the National Secular Society notes, this sympathy is somewhat shallow, given its ignorance (or ignoring) of the UK’s deeply anti-secular education system – never mind its overtly religious political system. Still, who knows? Perhaps the intimidation meted out to Michaela by aggrieved fundamentalists and the wave of public sympathy for the school will inspire the country to finally cast off all the vestiges of theocracy.

Postscript: the Conservative MP Mike Freer has just announced that he will stand down at the next election. Why? He is scared of the Islamists who have been intimidating him for years. He is, in fact, lucky to be alive given that he was in the line of sight of the Islamist who murdered Sir David Amess in 2021. As Rakib Ehsan writes in The Telegraph, ‘Freer’s decision to walk away from British politics for fear of his personal safety is yet another example of the Islamist-inspired erosion of British parliamentary democracy.’

An irreligious king?

On a related note, talk of Prince William’s irreligiousness compared to his father and grandmother caused some speculation that he might cut ties with the Church of England upon becoming King. Alas, such rumours were quickly dispelled, but not before they provoked some amusing grumbling from Peter Hitchens in The Mail on Sunday.

Alongside some thin guff in place of any serious reasoning about the truth of Christianity (never Hitchens’ strong point, and something he usually and wisely avoids), there was one point with which I found myself agreeing: ‘If this stuff is not true, or is marginal, or if we do not really believe it, then there is no purpose in having a King, or a Prince of Wales. We might as well have a President in a nice suit.’ Indeed—and huzzah!

The resurrected exorcist

The Daily Star, citing ‘a recently unearthed interview with [an] obscure Spanish magazine’, says that the Pope’s former exorcist Gabriele Amorth (who left this vale of tears in 2016) believed that the Devil is responsible for political evil and corruption. Even Hitler and Stalin, according to Father Amorth, are to be explained by old Nick’s seductive whisperings. Spooky!

But come now. Aside from its obvious foolishness, this is an abdication of moral and intellectual responsibility. Never mind the hard and necessary work of bothering to explain the evil of a Hitler or a Stalin in rational terms, so that we might understand and stop such men from gaining power ever again. No, no: it was the Devil! Just pray and obey our ancient and constipated moral teachings and all manner of thing shall be well.

Remember: this was the Pope’s exorcist. So, quite apart from the fact that the Pope still believes in exorcism like some medieval peasant, until quite recently his exorcist was a plain idiot. But what do you expect from the Catholic Church? And millions, if not billions, take the Pope’s pronouncements very seriously. The human species is still, clearly, very immature.

Some more wisdom from Father Amorth:

‘I tell those who come to see me to first go to a doctor or a psychologist… Most of the time there is a physical or psychological basis for explaining their suffering… The psychiatrists send me the incurable cases. There is no rivalry. The psychiatrist determines if it is an illness, the exorcist if it is a curse.’

‘I work seven days a week, from morning until night, including Christmas Eve and Holy Week. Everyone is vulnerable. The Devil is very intelligent. He retains the intelligence of the angel that he was.

‘Suppose, for example, that someone you work with is envious of you and casts a spell on you. You would get sick. Ninety per cent of the cases that I deal with are precisely spells. The rest are due to membership in satanic sects or participation in séances or magic.

‘If you live in harmony with God, it is much more difficult for the devil to possess you.’

Well, there you go: harmonise your aura with the Lord above, then that rascal Lucifer won’t be able to get you, and there’ll be no evil in the world! Because, of course, no evil has ever been committed by godly men…

Enter Russell Crowe

Apparently, Father Amorth was the subject of a (highly dramatised) movie starring Russell Crowe last year. According to the summary on Wikipedia, ‘[Amorth] learns that a founder of the Spanish Inquisition, an exorcist, was possessed, which let him infiltrate the Church and do many evils. Amorth also finds the Church covered this up…’ This does not, so far as I know, represent anything done or claimed by the real Amorth, but it does chime with his comments given above—and what an easy escape for the Church! All its many crimes throughout history were just a satanic aberration. It was the Devil all along! Thank the Lord for that. Let us never trouble ourselves again about the Inquisition, or Galileo, or Giordano Bruno, or the Crusades, or child sex abuse, or…

So much for mea culpa, never mind mea maxima culpa, then.

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Further reading:

The Israel-Palestine conflict

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Christian nationalism in the US

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Indian secularism and Hindu nationalism

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

British Islam, secularism, and free speech

Free speech in Britain: a losing battle? by Porcus Sapiens

Secularism and the struggle for free speech, by Stephen Evans

British Islam and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in universities – interview with Steven Greer

Monarchy, religion, and republicanism

Bring on the British republic – Graham Smith’s ‘Abolish the Monarchy’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

‘I do not think you are going to get a secular state without getting rid of the monarchy’ –interview with Graham Smith

The post Faith Watch, February 2024 appeared first on The Freethinker.

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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On August 15, India’s 76th Independence Day, Aditi* and Shrey*, a married Hindu couple, visited Ishrat Kazmi, a retired school principal, at her home in New Delhi. 

It was not an ordinary visit. They were among the 50,000 people who participated in a campaign to unite people of different religions, castes and ethnicities across the country that day.

Religious minority communities, especially the Muslim community, currently find themselves in a dire situation.  

According to the Indian government, the Muslim population in India for 2023 is estimated to be 197.5 million, around 14.2 per cent of the total population.

In the last census in 2011, Hindus constituted the majority in 28 of India’s 35 states and union territories, including populous states such as Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Bihar and West Bengal. However, Muslims dominated the tropical archipelago of Lakshadweep, off the southwest coast, as well as Jammu and Kashmir in northern India, on the border with Pakistan.

Since Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) gained power in 2014, hate crimes and discrimination against marginalised groups have surged. Rabid mobs have lynched Muslim men based on mere suspicions of consuming or transporting beef (the cow is considered sacred in Hinduism). The nation’s history is being rewritten to align with hardliner and radical Hindutva agendas. Members of minority communities have been forced to chant slogans aligned with the Hindutva ideology, and riots have been incited by BJP politicians.

The list of hate crimes is extensive and ongoing. Recently, during a discussion in the Indian parliament, a BJP lawmaker directed Islamophobic abuse at his Muslim colleague with impunity. According to Hindutva Watch, a US-based research group that monitors hate speech directed at Muslims and other minority groups in India, there were 255 documented instances of gatherings promoting hate speech against Muslims during the first half of 2023. A significant majority, 80 percent, of the ‘hate speech gatherings targeting Muslims’ occurred in BJP-ruled states (which have their own governments) and union territories (areas directly under the control of the central Indian government).

With the rise of Islamophobia in India, Muslims have been targeted repeatedly and are the marginalised population. The persecution the Muslim community faces outweighs any instances of Muslims inciting violence.

In response to this assault on India’s secular social fabric, civil society organisations led by Anhad, an NGO that operates in the sphere of social justice and human rights, have initiated a nationwide campaign called #MereGharAakeToDekho (‘Visit My Home, Be My Guest’) to counter the escalating anti-Muslim sentiments.

This campaign encourages people to visit homes and spend time with individuals from marginalised and minority communities. 

From her experience working with minority communities in riot-hit areas, social activist and Anhad founder Shabnam Hashmi has learned that countering hatred and dispelling preconceived notions can most effectively be achieved when people build close personal connections and come together in public spaces.

‘If the same lies are repeated again and again, people start believing them. To counter this, we believed that the best approach was physically entering each other’s spaces,’ she adds. ‘When communities don’t interact, it becomes easier for hatred to spread.’

And she is right.

Initially, Aditi was not comfortable with the idea of the visit and discussed it with her husband. Her apprehension was not about meeting that particular family but visiting a Muslim-majority neighbourhood in Delhi.

‘At first, I asked my husband, “Why should we go? I don’t spread hate, and I support harmony between communities. So, what’s the purpose of our visit?’ says Aditi.

She soon found the answer. During the visit, ‘I realised that “they are just like us.” Conversations with them felt as easy as talking to friends, and it opened our hearts. The more we segregate ourselves, the more power we give to the fear created in society.’

For Kazmi, it was a simple matter. She immediately agreed when an NGO approached her to host a couple from the majority Hindu community. ‘I grew up in a secular environment and never faced any discrimination because of my religion [Islam],’ she says.

Aditi reluctantly participated in the campaign without informing any family members. Now, though, she desires to share her experience with everyone.

Given the religious tensions currently brewing in the country, Kazmi feels that communities must interact more with each other to get to know each other better.

Similarly, in Shaheen Bagh, another Muslim-majority neighborhood in Delhi, another Muslim family hosted Shalu Raizada on August 15.

Starting in December 2019, Shaheen Bagh was the centre of a four-month non-violent sit-in protest led primarily by Muslim women. This protest was a response to the Indian government’s implementation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC), and National Population Register (NPR). 

Detractors of these laws claim that they violate the rights to equality, life, and personal liberty, all safeguarded under the Indian Constitution. Furthermore, these laws are perceived as being specifically designed to exclude Muslims. 

The Citizenship (Amendment) Act grants citizenship based on religion to six non-Muslim groups (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians) from Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh who arrived in India before 31 December 2014. It does not mention Muslims.

The CAA is unconstitutional as it violates India’s secular values and may disenfranchise its Muslim population. The government’s planned National Register of Citizens process poses even more significant risks in conjunction with the CAA. No clear guidelines and arbitrary implementation threaten to divide India’s diverse society, robbing people of citizenship and rights.

Right-wing and hardliner Hindutva politicians used this opportunity to portray Indian Muslims as traitors. Shaheen Bagh, despite being in Delhi, has started to be called “mini-Pakistan” – a term used by right-wing Hindus of any Muslim-majority areas in India.

Raizada was not sure how the home visit would play out following these events, so she asked two friends to accompany her.

When she arrived at the home of the Muslim family she was visiting, Raizada and her friends found that Shaheen Bagh celebrated India’s Independence Day with as much enthusiasm as any other community. ‘I found no semblance of the stereotypes ingrained in our minds about certain groups. I realised how trivial our thoughts are,’ she says.

Raizada noticed that the hosts had their share of insecurities as well.

From their host, Daaniya Afreen, they learned that Afreen’s children, who study in a posh English-medium school, have faced discrimination from other students because of their Muslim identity.

‘They have been compelled to chant “Jai Shree Ram” [‘Hail, Lord Ram’, a Hindu chant] on several occasions,’ says Afreen. However, she adds that the school administration was very cooperative and immediately addressed the issue.

Both parties agree that there is an acute lack of interaction between their communities in this volatile atmosphere in the country.

‘The situation is further exacerbated by unverified WhatsApp messages demonising the Muslim community and spreading religious hatred,’ says Raizada.

‘Yet as we sat down and conversed, it became evident that reality diverges significantly from societal portrayals today. We can understand each other better through interactions in each other’s spaces—neighbourhoods and homes. Our viewpoints may differ, but fundamentally, we are all human,’ she adds.

Raizada says that although various communities have coexisted in India for centuries, the current climate makes it imperative that people actively strive to deepen their understanding of one another.

To get this campaign started, NGOs and civil society organisations across 28 states leveraged their resources to form state-level working and community coordinating committees. These organisations held meetings in the areas and communities where they worked to initiate the campaign. Moreover, the organisers reached out to people from every stratum of society and region.

Farida Khan, who attended the meetings, recalls that some community-based organisations had backed out, stating that this campaign might affect their relationship with the community they were working with.

Khan, who lives on the outskirts of Delhi, is an activist and teacher. She teaches girls who have dropped out of school for various reasons from Hindu and Muslim communities in local working-class neighbourhoods. She first approached her students’ families, presented them with the idea of opening their homes to people from different communities, and gauged their interest in participating in the campaign.

It was not easy to cut through the hostile and, particularly at present, anti-Muslim sentiments that have been rising in the country. ‘They asked me why they should allow strangers into their home. Some were scared to participate, fearing boycott from their relatives,’ she says.

To navigate these difficulties, Khan mobilised community volunteers to go from home to home and talk to families from different religious communities. They kept up this exercise for more than 20 days. The communities, she says, were greatly influenced by the harmful content shared over social media. ‘It took us some time to convince the families. Sometimes, the women wouldn’t entertain us without their husbands. Moreover, the communities were greatly influenced by viral content received over social media.’

Finally, she was able to convince 40 Muslim families and 25 Hindu families to open up their homes to people from other religious communities.

The campaign is very clear about who they want to reach out to. It does not want to engage with individuals from any religious community who actively promote hatred. The focus is on reaching out to the fence-sitters. If this outreach continues, Hashmi says, it will naturally have a ripple effect. 

‘It is about creating spaces where we encourage people who don’t usually socialise to come and visit each other,’ says Anita Cheria, who took an active lead in spreading the campaign in the southern state of Karnataka.

According to Cheria, the campaign’s strength is in the simplicity with which it counters this toxicity, placing faith in the human spirit and humanity. 

‘While it may not appear to be a ground-breaking initiative, this straightforward action can instil fundamental values such as friendship and relationship-building through gradual and incremental steps. It may seem small, but it can lead to meaningful and significant engagement,’ she says.

‘For some reason or another, we visit certain types of people but not others. This “othering” is intrinsic to each person and, to a large extent, has initiated this campaign.’

Cheria also emphasises that vulnerable individuals should not be singled out to showcase their credibility or open their homes: ‘It should be a mutual exchange, with visits occurring reciprocally, and not turning into an activity that, directly or indirectly, compels people to prove their goodness or credibility in any way.’

The visits are ongoing. The organisers boosted the campaign in time for 2 October, a national holiday celebrated as the anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi, the ‘Father of the Nation’. 

According to Hashmi, on 2 October, thousands of people participated across various states, making the campaign a huge success.

From 11-17 October, the campaign was conducted in remote villages near Kupwara district in Kashmir’s Lolab Valley. Twenty-five people from different Indian states stayed with local families, making it the first of its kind event in Kashmir.

All guests and hosts gathered for a picnic in Chandigam village and dinner in Chogal village. Singing and dancing continued late into the night, breaking many taboos imposed by conservative society in these parts.

‘The common narrative about Kashmir focuses only on terror and unsafe areas. By placing people in villages within a border district considered among the most dangerous, we aimed to challenge this belief,’ says Hashmi. She adds that people from different religions stayed with local families, visiting about ten other families and local schools, in order to learn that the real situation differs significantly from the way it is portrayed in the media.

‘Girls from various villages gathered at the host’s house. The singing and dancing continued well past midnight,’ says Hashmi.

Additionally, 20 participants will travel to Kupwara, a restive region in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. During their stay, spanning four nights, they will reside in local village homes and have the chance to build connections with their hosts. 

Kashmir is the only (mainland) Indian state with a Muslim-majority population and is a disputed territory between India and Pakistan. The region has grappled with cross-border militancy for decades, and people from Kashmir are often met with suspicion from the rest of India.

The campaign is set to run until January 2024, in the hope that open dialogue can forge enduring friendships, serving as a strong defence against ongoing political efforts to divide people.

* Some names in this article have been changed to protect those mentioned.

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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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How, it might be asked, can Salman Rushdie’s new novel about a semi-divine sorceress and the city she creates from a handful of magical seeds have anything worthwhile to say about the ‘real’ world? Surely such stuff is just frivolous fantasy?

Such a demand for relevance to everyday life would miss the point: that serious literature, whether it employs the fantastical or the realist mode, uses the unreal to see the real anew.

This point is, crudely speaking, the guiding principle of what I have come to think of as the Rushdian philosophy of literature, which is most distinctly spelt out across various essays in his non-fiction collection, Languages of Truth (2021). As he puts it: ‘For me, the fantastic has been a way of adding dimensions to the real, adding fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh dimensions to the usual three; a way of enriching and intensifying our experience of the real, rather than escaping from it into superhero-vampire fantasyland.’

Rushdie’s new novel, Victory City, is a sterling example of this philosophy in action. Yes, there is a sorceress who creates a city using magic seeds, and yes, there are also some goddesses and superhuman martial artists, too. But Victory City is very much about the real world and has much to say about the present moment—not in spite of the fabulism, but through it.

The novel tells the story of Pampa Kampana and the city she creates, Bisnaga. Bisnaga is the ‘garbled mispronunciation’ by a foreigner of ‘Vijayanagar’, which is just one letter short of Vijayanagara—the historical South Indian city and empire whose name translates as ‘City of Victory’. Fictionalised versions of real historical figures from Vijanayagara make up much of the novel’s dramatis personae, while real historical events are reimagined throughout. This is one way Rushdie ties the fictional to the real: he provides an alternative or mirror mythology by looking at real history askew and infusing it with his own imaginings. 

In Rushdie’s version, the origins of this great empire lie in the grief of a young girl, Pampa, who watches as her newly-widowed mother immolates herself. After this traumatising experience, the goddess Parvati, one of whose local names is Pampa, gives the girl divine powers, a mission, and a curse:

‘[Y]ou will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways, and you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure, to see it all and tell its story, even though once you have finished telling it you will die immediately and nobody will remember you for four hundred and fifty years.’

And so Pampa Kampana creates Bisnaga with magical seeds, and for nearly 250 years she shares in its triumphs and disasters. Pampa always seeks to promote beauty and truth and the rights of women against violence, intolerance and religious fanaticism. Sometimes she is successful, and at other times, she is not. Over the centuries, she is variously Queen of Bisnaga, an exiled enemy of the state and, in the end, a poet mutilated by a king, with only her words, her story, left to her.

In fact, Pampa’s words are the key to the novel, which is structured as a retelling by a modern author of Pampa’s lost and recently found Jayaparajaya (‘Victory and Defeat’). Pampa’s verses make up, in this world, one of the great texts of history, alongside, for example, the ancient Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. This narrative technique is in keeping with Rushdie’s love of multi-layered fiction. His novels often interrogate the act of storytelling itself: in Victory City, the stories of Pampa Kampana and Bisnaga are refracted through the words of the narrator, who also occasionally interjects to analyse Pampa’s ‘original’ text.

It is not just in its form that Victory City evokes traditional Rushdian themes, but in its content, too. The novel explores exile, hybridity, migration, religion, love, and metamorphosis, and asks a favourite question of Rushdie’s: ‘[N]ow that we find ourselves here…how shall we live?’

That question is spoken in Victory City by the first king of Bisnaga, Hukka, as he and his brother (and Bisnaga’s second ruler) Bukka regard the city and the people newly grown from Pampa’s magical seeds. This new-born civilisation and its populace must decide how they shall live. Over more than two centuries, we are given a variety of answers to the question. Sometimes, Pampa’s ideal of a liberal empire, where women are equal to men, with art and beauty and enquiry at its core, wins out; at other times, it is stifling religious orthodoxy that rules; at yet other times, chaos, violence and strife.

As the words of Parvati to Pampa imply, history is contingent and cyclical, and there can be no final victory. There are only victory and defeat, and victory and defeat, ad infinitum.

Or, as Pampa writes near the end while Bisnaga burns and falls forever (a scene which is exquisitely rendered):

‘Nothing endures, but nothing is meaningless either. We rise, we fall, we rise again, and again we fall. We go on. I too have succeeded and I have also failed. Death is close now. In death do triumph and failure humbly meet. We learn far less from victory than from defeat.’

It is in these cycles of victory and defeat that another Rushdian theme plays out: the clash of narratives. At one point, when Pampa’s religious grandson has become king, she seeks to convince the people of Bisnaga, through her supernatural ‘whispering’, of the superiority of her philosophy:

‘[S]he would have to persuade many of them that the cultured, inclusive, sophisticated narrative of Bisnaga that she was offering them was a better one than the narrow, exclusionary, and, to her way of thinking, barbarian official narrative of the moment.’

She both succeeds and fails in this task, at different moments in the novel, because the people of Bisnaga are as willing to believe in ‘narrow, exclusionary’ narratives as they are in ‘cultured, inclusive, sophisticated’ ones. In Victory City, there is no straightforward triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’, but a recognition that humanity is as vulnerable to the tribal and the fanatical as it is capable of nobility and enlightenment. This is one of the problems that humanity will always have to face in ‘real’ life, and it is as apparent in the world, right now, as in Rushdie’s fictionalised version of Vijayanagara.

For example, the conflict between the secular Bukkaites and the Hindu sectarian followers of the holy fanatic Vidyasagar mirrors the current battle between those Indians who hold to the old, secular, pluralistic ideals of Nehru and those who prefer the ascendant Hindu chauvinism of Modi and his followers.

Rushdie also examines the oppression of women under tradition and religion and, in Pampa, gives us a great tragic heroine of resistance to such oppression. In Indian mythology, the goddess Parvati is the reincarnation of Sati, the first wife of Shiva, who sacrificed herself in flames to protect her husband’s honour (hence the name of the old Hindu practice of widow burning, sati or suttee). The mission Parvati gives to Pampa in the novel is a direct repudiation of this practice: why should women have to burn in the name of male honour?

Rushdie’s Parvati has come to oppose her own mythology, and perhaps Pampa’s Jayaparajaya can be read as a female-centred, even feminist, addition to (and subversion of) the canonical texts. Pampa Kampana is emphatically not the Sita of the Ramayana, whose story consists of being a damsel-in-distress and who must constantly prove her purity to men. Today, when the women of Afghanistan are once more enslaved and abused by the Taliban and the women (and men) of Iran are being beaten and killed for championing female emancipation, this theme is all too relevant.

Even the magic and the gods and the miracles of Victory City must give way to the all too human, as another goddess tells the exiled Pampa:

‘The moment is near when the gods must retreat from the world and stop interfering in its history. Very soon human beings…will have to learn to manage without us and make their stories on their own.’

This echoes Rushdie’s point about fantastical fiction being a way to view the real world aslant.

As Bisnaga falls, its people realise that their only hope is each other:

‘[They] understood for the first time that no wall would save them if there were not human beings upon them; that in the end the salvation of human beings came from other human beings and not from things, not matter how large and imposing – and even magical – those things might be.’

Without gods and magic walls, we are left with only the human. For Rushdie, the most human of human activities is storytelling. The final lines of Victory City are given to Pampa Kampana as she dies. Her last verses tell us that kings and empires and great deeds are all just dust in the great expanse of history, and that ‘I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words./Words are the only victors.’

And that is the final and greatest lesson of the novel. Forget all the politics, scheming and divine intervention: none of it really matters. All that matters are the words; all that matters is the story. Literature is here set against temporal and spiritual power—and, ultimately, wins. The exile and the outcast outlast their oppressors, even if the oppressors triumph in the short term.

Should this seem an overly optimistic conclusion, consider Ovid, whom Rushdie has elsewhere cited as an exemplar of such a long-term victory. Ovid was banished from Rome by the Emperor Augustus to Tomis on the Black Sea in AD 8. In this backwater, he died forgotten. Yet he continued to write poetry that would survive to this day. In comparison, the glory of the Roman Empire seems short-lived. Or take the poetry of Federico García Lorca, which has outlasted the ideology of the Spanish fascists who murdered him; or the works of imprisoned and exiled dissidents like Serge and Solzhenitsyn, which have outlived the Soviet Union. Victory and defeat, indeed.

Bisnaga falls and Pampa dies, but through her words both her story and the highest ideals of Bisnaga, realised only partially and temporarily in her own lifetime, can continue to live and breathe and inspire. In Victory City, Rushdie shows us the triumph of love, life and literature against philistinism, death and fanaticism. When Pampa Kampana is blinded for a perceived betrayal by Krishnadevaraya, the last great king of Bisnaga, she is slowly restored by the power of telling her own story—the power of words:

‘She began to feel her selfhood returning as she wrote… She could not describe herself as happy – happiness, she felt, had moved out of her vicinity forever – but as she wrote she came closer to the new place where it had taken up residence than at any other time…’

She then begins hearing the ‘whispers’ of the people of Bisnaga, in a reversal of her own ‘whispering’, long ago, to them:

‘They brought the world back to her and took her back into the world. There was nothing to be done about the blindness but now it was more than just darkness, it was filled with people, their faces, their hopes, their fears, their lives… [N]ow, little by little, the whispered secrets of the city allowed joy to be reborn, in the birth of a child, in the building of a home, in the heart of loving families she had never met; in the shoeing of a horse, the ripening of fruits in their orchards, the richness of the harvest. Yes, she reminded herself, terrible things happened, a terrible thing had happened to her, but life on earth was still bountiful, still plenteous, still good. She might be blind, but she could see that there was light.’

Rushdie himself lost an eye to his attacker last year. Yet like Pampa, the power of his imagination and his love of the world survive. Like Pampa, he knows the horrors of this world, but also its goodness, and he can see the light, too. Even if his assassin had succeeded in murdering him, Rushdie’s words would, and will, live on and would – and almost certainly will – outlast the theocratic Iranian regime that has for so long tried and failed to still his tongue. It is a pleasing irony of history that, not long after the attack on Rushdie, the Islamic Republic brought what might just be its final reckoning upon itself with another thuggish assault, this time resulting in the murder of a woman, Mahsa Amini, for not wearing the hijab in accordance with its repressive rules.

Victory City is a literary victory, and a great one at that. In an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker this February, Rushdie expressed his wish that the novel not be seen through the lens of the attack against him. Instead, he wants ‘[readers] to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.’ In this, he has succeeded magnificently.

But it is also appropriate that so many of Victory City’s themes perfectly rebuke those who would see its author silenced or dead. Rushdie’s long resistance to tyranny, his resilience in the face of horrific violence, and his unswerving commitment to liberty and free expression are triumphs of humanism. In other words, Salman Rushdie is a victor, too.

Victory City, by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, pp 352), will be published on 9 February 2023.

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The post ‘Words are the only victors’ – Salman Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’, reviewed appeared first on The Freethinker.

What motivated you to make this film?

It was a personal journey. I was a reckless, irrational individual mainly because I was brought up in an orthodox religious family. I was groomed in a system where everything is holy and a religious significance was attributed to the mundane events of everyday life. My ‘Damascene conversion’ was not from atheism to belief, but the other way round and more slowly. Through constant questioning of my childhood beliefs, seeking answers and analysing empirically, I started feeling liberated from the worldview with which I grew up. I would say that this intellectual enlightenment is what motivated me to make this film. I started viewing the world in the light of rationalism and realised there are so many people, especially in India, who are chained to religious dogma and its associated stigmas. They too need liberation. Film is the most popular form of art. As a filmmaker, I considered it was my responsibility to share my experiences and spread the importance of rationalism in today’s political context.

How long has it been in the making, and what was it like to direct?

We started the production of Vivesini in 2019 November, and had planned to complete it by April 2020 – but then the pandemic hit. We ultimately finished production in 2021 and completed the film in 2022. It was an enjoyable experience to direct Vivesini. I also had the responsibility of ensuring that the film did not come across as propaganda. I believe in art and not in propaganda, because I see art as something that welcomes everyone with open arms, regardless of their beliefs and associations. I think I have done justice to the central idea, which is the importance of rationalism, without disregarding the requirements of mainstream cinema.

Can you tell us a bit about the actors and why you chose them?

There are five main characters in the film, including the protagonist, Shakthi. All the other four characters act as a catalyst to her. For Jayaraman, I originally had two actors in mind. In the end, I was delighted to recruit the actor Nasser, who is based in Chennai, and already had a similar outlook on life to Jayaraman. Nasser has been the focal point of Vivesini ever since.

For the character of Clara, I had few figures in mind, all of whom were activists. In particular, I wanted a tall, dark personality who could resonate with the ideas of Clara Zetkin. I met Mekha Rajan and briefed her about this character. We had already worked together on another project before, so I knew her strengths. Mekha was known for her sweet on-screen demeanour and was very popular among television viewers, thanks to the many adverts in which she was cast either as a doting mother or a devout wife. This was the main reason why I chose her – because Clara is exactly the opposite.

Kavya, who plays Shakthi, had no major experience of working in a film before. But her confidence and the audition she gave for Shakthi were tremendous. I was looking for a pair of eyes that were constantly searching for answers and a sense of exhaustion in her expression from that constant searching. We were able to capture that mood throughout. Kavya really identified with Shakthi’s journey, and this is reflected on screen. 

Vanessa Stevenson played the cameo role of Alice Walker. I had worked with Vanessa during my postgraduate days in Kent. The main challenge I faced while writing Alice’s part was the number of stunt sequences involved. So I needed an actor who could trust me when she was required to hang thirty feet off the ground from an industrial crane. Vanessa, an experienced actor from London, did just that. And she is so convincing as Alice Walker.

For Charles Aniefuna, we had initially shortlisted an actor from Hollywood. But due to a last-minute date clash he withdrew, and we had to look for an African American actor with considerable experience. When Gary Cordice sent in his reel I was thrilled, because he was exactly the figure I had in mind. However, he was British, with a strong British accent. We worked on his American accent for three months and finally took him on board. Charles Aniefuna’s ancestors are from Africa and his great-grandfather was a tribal leader of a clan. Charles carries the same passion and spirit about nature that his ancestors had. I saw all of this in Gary.

How did you come up with the plot?

I come from a place where writers, journalists, academics and intellectuals who express rationalist views are threatened and even killed by religious mobs in the name of protecting their religious beliefs. To take but one among so many instances, when my state’s elected representative, M. Karunanidhi, once remarked that a deity was a fictional mythological character, the right-wing politician Ram Vilas Vedanti suggested that it would be praiseworthy to behead him and cut out his tongue. Other extremist religious organisations endorsed this view.

The far-right political narrative has been on the rise across the world in the last few years; it especially seems to have started targeting science, free speech, free thought, and radical and secular ideas. Look at the recent attack on Salman Rushdie, or several recent attacks on Indian rationalists. When these irrationalist forces seep into power structures like the legislature, judiciary and constitutional framework, then they can push human civilisation back by several centuries, and have a particularly negative effect on women and, in India, people from the lower castes.

To answer your question on how I came up with the plot, I see the plot in terms, as it were, of a fall from a cliff. And I am standing on the edge of the cliff called ‘society’, and these social issues keep bombarding me one after the other, pushing me off the cliff, and I eventually landed on this plot. This plot is my destination. My journey as an individual seeking answers has made me land here.

What are the key things you would like your viewers to take away from it?

Above all, I want them to be persuaded of the importance of rational thinking and free thought, the value of standing against oppression in any form, and the importance of welcoming progressive ideas that can liberate humanity from the restrictions of narrow religious worldviews. But there are also other themes that I hope the viewers will be able to absorb – in particular, the way in which anthropology can help us understand human development over thousands of years, and the need to liberate ourselves from the religious beliefs, rituals and customs that arose at an early stage of humanity’s development.

Where does the title come from, and what is the connection with the Freethinker?

As a result of globalisation, the world has grown smaller. Technology, infrastructure, culture, recipes, fashion, and so forth reaches the other side of the world almost instantly – whether for better or worse. Almost 140 years ago, a progressive, radical freethought movement travelled thousands of miles from London to British Madras (now Chennai) in less than a year, without the internet. In 1881, G.W. Foote founded the Freethinker. In 1882, the magazine inspired a group of people in British-ruled Madras to start a progressive journal called The Thinker in English and Tattuva Vivesni in Tamil. ‘Athipakkam’ Venkatachalam (a rationalist who took the name of his village as his first name) was the leading contributor to Tattuva Vivesini. This journal was published from 1882 to 1888, after which it disappeared for lack of patronage.

In 2019, I made Vivesini, which talks about the resurgence of rationalism in Chennai, and in which a fictional character, ‘Jayaraman’ was presented as Athipakkam Venkatachalam’s great grandson. Alice Walker, a fictional character whose great-grandmother (in the film) worked with Charles Bradlaugh, revives the spirit of enlightenment in Shakthi. In July 2022, the very first private screening of Vivesini was held in Conway Hall, in the presence of members of the National Secular Society, of which Bradlaugh was the first president, and the editor of the Freethinker. I am delighted to witness the reconnection of the Freethinker magazine and Tattuva Vivesini through the art of cinema. For me, this symbolises the resurgence of enlightenment in Chennai.

How prevalent is superstition in southern India today?

Superstition is part and parcel of any average Indian’s outlook. For instance, numerous events, from taking the oath in the legislative assembly, to launching rockets or even writing the code for a new piece of software, are required to be done on an ‘auspicious’ date and even at an ‘auspicious’ time of day. We make the most important and crucial life decisions based on superstitious beliefs. We look to auspicious dates, days and times even for things like medical procedures. But in recent years there has been a movement to reinterpret these superstitions and irrational beliefs as ‘science’ – a sort of ‘science’ that is thousands of years old and was in use by our ancestors. Any scientific explanation or objection to these practices is considered blasphemous, and critics are likely to face retribution from religious leaders.

For you, how is freethought connected to political activism?

Vivesini considers some of the ways in which free thought can lead to political activism. Shakthi is brought up by a rationalist father who advocates freethought. But it is not until she is grown up and starts to ask questions that she frees herself of illusions about what happened to her parents in the past, and ends up as an activist, as they were.

Thinking freely, rationally and without being constrained by religious superstition can lead to political secularism. Historically, the freethought, rationalist and secularist movements have fought for the separation of church and state, paved the way for industrialisation and been criticised by religious leaders for questioning the established order. In our era, political activism plays an important role in creating consciousness about environmentalism, the decentralisation of power, sustainable energy, gender equality and so on. And where there is freethought there is political activism. 

What is the future of secularism in south India?

The British rule of India was marked by many shadows. However, I see introduction of freethought and progressive, reformist ideas as the silver lining during this period. The rationalist movement started by the Madras Secular Society gained further momentum during the Dravidian movement. Just as the work of Satyajit Ray (1921-1992), a progressive filmmaker from Bengal, reflected the years of social reform in Bengal, the Dravidian school of reformism gave birth to Dravidian cinema, which started propagating secularist and rationalist ideas through films.

Southern India, especially Tamil Nadu, has always been receptive to progressive ideas, and it continues to do so. Here in Tamil Nadu, the representatives of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a rational political party, still consciously follow Charles Bradlaugh’s example of refusing to take a religious oath when assuming office. Four Chief Ministers who hail from the Dravidian movement, C.N. Annadurai, M. Karunanidhi, M.G. Ramachandran and M.K. Stalin, have followed this secular method of taking the oath.

What’s next after Vivesini – do you have plans for a sequel?

I am first planning to screen Vivesini at certain universities and educational institutions in the UK and US, and then release it commercially in India. I have no plans for a sequel, but am looking at producing films that can break the current trend in the Indian film industry, which, although technically and aesthetically advanced, is presenting increasingly regressive ideas that go back to pre-modern times. This reflects the current mood in national politics, in which people in power are reintroducing ancient religious beliefs and adapting them to present circumstances. Anything that was preached or followed or propagated centuries ago is not automatically holy. We tend to associate ideas that are thousands of years old with sanctity. But I would argue that such ideas were formed when humankind was in its childhood stage; we are now, as it were, in humanity’s middle age and fighting the trauma we had during our childhood. But the point is that these beliefs are primitive and should not be venerated merely because they are very old. To break this pattern, I am looking at injecting progressive thoughts into people’s minds through my films.

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The post The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan 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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The most imposing building in the world to have taken Charles Bradlaugh’s name is in a city he never visited and in a country which did not exist in his lifetime. The construction of Bradlaugh Hall in Lahore began in 1900, nine years after the death of the man after whom it was named. For decades, it was a rallying point for the nationalist movement which brought an end to the British Raj. It is now dilapidated, and squatters have moved in. If nothing is done, it will simply crumble away. But among those who seek to conserve the city’s heritage, there are signs of interest in reclaiming and restoring this huge, architecturally heterodox building which is such an important part of Lahore’s history. A new generation of Pakistani architects is taking the lead.

Hiba Hamid Hashmi is an architect, urban designer and lecturer at the Lahore campus of COMSATS University (‘Commission on Science and Technology for Sustainable Development in the South’). She has given her students the task of devising an ‘adaptive reuse’ of the hall. ‘We are running this as a student project with an intention to revive the Hall as a public gathering space by introducing programmes inviting community activities,’ she says. ‘We also intend to propose a design strategy for the public square outside, as there is a dearth of public spaces in Lahore.’ One of her fourth-year students, Mohammad Moiz Khan, took the photographs which accompany this article.

From a humble household in Hoxton, Charles Bradlaugh quickly rose to become the commanding figure in the Victorian freethought movement. He was a prolific campaigner on the controversial issues of the day: a radical, republican, atheist, supporter of Indian and Irish nationalism, advocate of birth control, propagandist, pamphleteer and orator. He founded the National Secular Society in 1866 and established the National Reformer as one of the most widely read political journals of the day.

In 1880, Bradlaugh was elected MP for Northampton, standing as a Liberal but very much on the party’s radical wing. However, he was only able to take his seat in 1886, after a titanic struggle against opponents in Parliament who insisted that, as an atheist, he could neither affirm nor swear the oath of allegiance to the monarch on the Bible. He was a constitutionalist, a reformer rather than a revolutionary, and relished being in the House of Commons. He became a champion of Indian issues, protesting against the misuse of funds allocated for famine relief and the British authorities’ deposition of the Maharajah of Kashmir; this earned him the informal title of ‘Member for India’. His purpose was not to promote the British Raj but to seek to represent the interests of the Indian people in the imperial Parliament, since Indians themselves, as subjects of the Empire, had no formal representation.

Charles Bradlaugh set sail for Bombay (now Mumbai) on his only visit to India in November 1889, arriving there on Christmas Eve. He had been invited to address the recently established Indian National Congress. This later became the party of Nehru and Gandhi, but at the time consisted of an elite alliance of a small number of progressive Britishers in India and of politically assertive Indian lawyers and professionals. It had not yet reached the stage of demanding independence, but instead advocated for a much greater role for Indians in managing their own affairs.

The ‘Member for India’ was fêted. Five days after his arrival, his speech to the annual session of Congress was enthusiastically received. The text was later included in a volume commemorating the centenary of his birth (Champion of Liberty: Charles Bradlaugh, Freethought Press Association, 1933). ‘Friends, fellow-subjects and fellow-citizens,’ Bradlaugh began, to loud cheers, and went on:

‘I have no right to offer advice to you, but if I had, and if I dared, I would say to you men from lands almost as separate, although within your own continent, as England is from you – I would say to you men with race traditions, caste views, and religious differences – that in an empire like ours what we should seek and have is equality before the law for all – (cheers) – equality of opportunity for all, equality of expression for all – penalty on none, favouritism for none. And I believe in this great Congress I see the germs of that which may be as fruitful for good as the most fruitful tree that grows under your sun.’

He commended Congress for including women in its ranks, asserting that ‘great thoughts and great endeavours are not made less because the man goes to the woman for counsel in the hour of need, and makes the woman stronger.’

Bradlaugh made the trip out both to demonstrate his support for Indian nationalism and as a rest cure. He had been seriously ill and a long sea journey was seen as an enforced respite from his punishing, self-imposed workload. ‘My health is coming back very fast,’ he wrote in a voyager’s log which he kept while on board ship. He was deluding himself. While in India, Bradlaugh was not well enough to venture beyond Bombay. In early January he set sail for home. A year after his return to England, he died. M.K. Gandhi, then 21, was among the mourners who attended his funeral.

In 1893, the annual gathering of the Indian National Congress was convened in Lahore, the capital of the province of Punjab in British India. The session was presided over by Dadabhai Naoroji, a wealthy Bombay Parsee who in the previous year had become the first Indian to be elected an MP. His constituency of Central Finsbury adjoined Bradlaugh’s old meeting place at the Hall of Science on Old Street, and Naoroji took on Bradlaugh’s mantle of Member for India. It seems to have been at that session of Congress that plans were developed to build a hall in Lahore which would both honour Charles Bradlaugh and provide a venue for nationalists to assemble without requiring permission from the British authorities.

Fundraising for the hall in Lahore took some time; the foundation stone was only laid in October 1900. Over the decades, Bradlaugh Hall was used as a cultural and theatrical venue. Its political purpose was also amply fulfilled: in the first half of the twentieth century, just about every nationalist leader of note addressed rallies there. One of the most influential nationalists, Lala Lajpat Rai, set up a college within the Hall’s precincts.

In August 1947 the British withdrew from India. The Hall got caught up in the trauma of Partition, since Lahore lay inside Pakistan, though only a few miles from the dividing line. Much of Punjab erupted in violence, and the great majority of Lahore’s Hindu and Sikh communities fled from their home city and eastwards to India. In its way, the Hall, too, was a victim of Partition. In Pakistan, an Evacuee Trust Property Board was set up to administer the public buildings, particularly schools and places of worship, left behind by those who had migrated. It seems the managers of the Hall were among those who left Lahore, so the building became part of the Board’s extensive property portfolio. For a while, it was leased to an educational institute, but little attention was given to its upkeep.

Bradlaugh Hall is wonderfully located, close to the historic heart of Lahore. But it does not directly front a main road, so for many citizens of Lahore, it has long been out of sight and out of mind. Although the building is supposedly sealed shut, two years ago, I managed, with the help of a local historian, to get access to it, by clambering through an unlocked rear door. When I visited, the Hall was an austere, hollowed-out shell. It was evocative to stand where so many nationalist leaders would once have stood and delivered an uncompromising message about the injustice of British rule. There must be scope to reclaim this splendid building, so central to Punjab’s politics.

A campaign to Save Bradlaugh Hall, spearheaded by historians, heritage enthusiasts and civic activists, has been putting pressure on the local authorities to find a new purpose for this historic building. They want to see its renaissance as a cultural venue. Some money is said to have been allocated for basic repairs, but it is still not clear when, or whether, this work will take place. The future of the building is complicated by the mesh of different trusts and authorities whose support and funds are needed for the building to be reborn. Hashmi remains upbeat, encouraged by the enthusiasm of her architecture students. “Maybe when Lahore’s Walled City Authority actually manages to conserve the building, our faculty and students can pitch their ideas,” she says. “We hope for the best!”

Update, 16th May 2022

The Walled City of Lahore Authority (WCLA) and the Evacuee Trust Property Board have agreed on a Memorandum of Understanding to provide funding to restore the Hall. Further information here.

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