Meredith Tax: An Expedient Alliance? The Muslim Right and the Anglo-American Left
Ironically, the embrace by some leftists of Islamic fundamentalism mirrors distortions about Islam put about by anti-immigrant conservatives. The far Right talks as if all Muslims were potential terrorists, while the far Left talks as if Salafi-Jihadis represented all Muslims. Both ignore the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are like everybody else: they just want to survive and live their lives in peace.
I was recently in London to launch my book Double Bind: the Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, published by a new transnational think tank, the Centre for Secular Space. (The New York City launch is Friday, March 1.) The event took place in Tower Hamlets, once a center of Jewish immigration, now largely Muslim and a site of intense struggle between South Asian secularists and fundamentalists. According to Ansar Ahmedullah, a community organizer who spoke at the launch, his group had planned a demonstration in a park near the East London Mosque to express solidarity with the Shahbagh protest currently convulsing Bangladesh. When they arrived at the park, they found it full of Salafis who had come out of the nearby mosque to prevent the demonstration. A six-hour standoff ensued, with violent attacks on several protesters.
One of the fiercest struggles in world politics today is taking place between Muslim fundamentalists and secularists who want to separate religion and the state. In the United States, at least among academics and feminists, great efforts have been made to obscure this struggle and to delegitimize secularists as passé. I recently saw an email whose writer describes my book Double Bind—without having read it, since it has not yet been released—as the work of “a U.S. supporter of Zionism who has been pushing an Islamophobic line against the antiwar movement, using Muslims or ex-Muslims for a veneer of legitimacy.” To characterize any Muslim who dares to criticize other Muslims as a pawn of people like me is a ridiculous insult to Asian feminists. By delegitimizing the discussion, the writer embraces the framing of the Muslim Right and, in effect, sides with the Salafists in East London who tried to prevent the demonstration in the local park.
Double Bind is about this dynamic, and what happens when the Left takes up the language and framing of the Muslim Right. I define the Muslim Right as a range of transnational political movements that mobilize identity politics toward the goal of a theocratic state. It consists of those the media call “moderate Islamists,” who aim to reach this goal gradually by electoral and educational means; extremist Salafi parties and groups that run candidates for office but also try to enforce some version of Sharia law through street violence; and a much smaller militant wing of Salafi-Jihadis, whose propaganda endorses military means and who practice violence against civilians. The goal of all political Islamists, whatever means they may prefer, is a state founded upon some version of Sharia law that systematically discriminates against women along with sexual and religious minorities.
Historically, the Left has stood for very different values—at least in principle: separation between religion and the state; social equality; an end to discrimination against women and minorities; economic justice; opposition to imperialist and racist wars. In the last ten years, however, some groups on the far Left have allied with conservative Muslim organizations that stand for religious discrimination, advocate death for those they consider apostates, oppose gay rights, subordinate women, and seek to impose their views on others through violence. This support of the Muslim Right has undermined struggles for secular democracy in the Global South and has spread from the far Left to feminists, the human rights movement, and progressive donors... Read more:
