Originally published here.
In 1989 women of many faiths and none formed a collective in London towork at the interface of feminism and anti-racism, in struggles againstboth religious fundamentalism and the excesses of neo-liberalism. Theytold Deniz Kandiyoti the story of Women against Fundamentalism.
Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) was formed duringthe height of the Rushdie Affair in 1989, soon after the publication of TheSatanic Verses when Muslim fundamentalist organisations, through theirtransnational networks, attempted to get the book banned, stagingdemonstrations and book burnings, including in the UK. Ayatollah Khomeini,then Supreme Leader of Iran, issued a fatwa authorizing the killing of Salman Rushdie.
The initial push to form WAF came from members of Southall Black Sisters(SBS) who recognised these anti -Rushdie mobilisations as the sign of a globalresurgence in religious fundamentalism. They understood that the polarisedresponses - both the portrayals of Muslims as inherently barbaric and thesupport for the anti-Rushdie demonstrators on grounds of cultural sensitivityand anti-racism – were also manifestations of the problems of multicu lturalistpolicy and practice in the UK.
They also saw resurgent religion as a direct threatto the rights of women and girls. So at an International Women’s Day meeting inSouthall on 8th March 1989, SBS raised these concerns and issued astatement in support of Rushdie, the right to freedom of expression and theright to dissent and doubt.SBS joined forces with Voices for Rushdie, the Iranian Women’s Organisation,and Brent Asian Women’s Refuge, and WAF was then founded as a feministcoalition of women from a diverse range of ethnic, national, class, professional,and religious backgrounds. We were united by our shared political values asfeminists, and as dissenters within our communities and their political circles.
Even before 9/11 we saw that the use of religion became more and morecritical to state policies. Many of us noted that multiculturalism was mutatinginto multifaithism. Paradoxically, when New Labour responded to the 2001 riotsand 9/11 through the combined force of Community Cohesion and PreventingViolent Extremism policies, these were channelled through strengthened staterelations with religious groups.
Multiculturalism was being denigrated andassimilationism was revived, while class differences were also played down in acontext where new layers of religious leaderships became the beneficiaries of aNew Labour policy. The issues that we had raised in our critique ofmulticulturalism became accentuated as the number of ‘religious leaders’ andrepresentatives increased exponentially. They became a critical part of NewLabour’s neo liberal instrumentalisation of ‘community’ and they were givenadditional spaces within which to manoeuvre.
Asserting that rights need not be justified by religious texts or frameworks, butmust simply be available to everyone, requires new struggles. Individually andcollectively, we need to find a way of keeping a politics of hope alive whileavoiding the all too easy sense of paralysis and despair induced by the vastlocal and global challenges facing anti-fundamentalist anti-racist feminism.
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