Dissent has just published an exchange prompted by a response to an article of mine they printed in February.  The response was by Rafia Zakaria.  I am posting both below.  To respond go to the Dissent Facebook page.
 
RAFIA ZAKARIA'S RESPONSE

In her essay “An Expedient Alliance? The Muslim Right and The Anglo-American Left,” noted feminist Meredith Tax makes a number of accusations. Most of them center on the Left’s “support of the Muslim Right,” which has in Tax’s view “undermined struggles for secular democracy in the Global South.” Tax argues that “left-wing alliances with fundamentalist groups” amount to a betrayal “of the majority of their co-religionists, who do not wish to be represented by extremists.”
 
As someone whose native country of Pakistan is currently ravaged by the Tehreek-e-Taliban and a motley of affiliated groups, who has lost friends to mobs led by religious bigots, and who fears being unable to return to a beloved homeland, I could not share more wholeheartedly Tax’s assessment of the virulence of fundamentalism and the threat it poses to free expression, to women, to minorities, and to all those who oppose the imposition of their views on others. Fundamentalism is devastating diverse societies and inflicting blows on long-sustained histories of pluralism and tolerance.
 
However, I was deeply disturbed by the breadth of the claims and denunciations in Tax’s piece. Tax erects her architecture of left-right support and alliance with a series of anecdotes. These include, among others, state “multiculturalism” policies in the UK that have led to funding for “identity-based groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat e Islaami,” antiwar activists’ support for the “Iraqi insurgency,” and an “unwillingness to criticize the Iranian theocracy.” Each bit provides a glimpse of an actual controversy, but only the bit suited to Tax’s purposes: underlining the Left’s stupidity when it comes to dealing with political Islam. Any geographical, cultural, or contextual complications that don’t fit the rubric of the stupid Left and the sly Muslim Right are discarded.
 
The variety of brief examples establish points that most leftists would agree with, making it harder to examine the reductions and conflations they contain without losing the forest for the trees. I could point out, for example, that Sharia is not a static body of law but a dynamic body of jurisprudence open to reinterpretation. Or I could direct readers to the brave feminist interventions that are beginning the task of taking Sharia from avowedly discriminatory and patriarchal uses to the feminist and egalitarian ones.
 
In my own selection of anecdotes, I would also include the story of Asiya Nasir. A female, Christian MP in the National Assembly of Pakistan, Nasir’s party is none other than the Jamaat Ulema Islam, which by Tax’s definitions is part of the “Muslim Right.” Nasir is one of the strongest advocates for minorities and women in Pakistan, battling criticism from all sides to push human rights issues onto the parliamentary agenda. I could even take Tax’s own example of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban while sitting in her school bus. While Yousafzai is a champion of girl’s education, she keeps her head covered and prays in nearly every interview, she hasn’t come out in favor of gay rights or a secular state, and a group of Pakistani Islamists have issued a fatwa that denounces the Taliban attack and comes out in favor of girls’ education. Does all this disqualify Yousafzai from the support of the Anglo-American Left?
 
Ultimately, the anecdotal arguments in Tax’s piece serve to create a broad binary that seeks to divide up good and bad Muslims (along with good and bad leftists). It blinds us to the possibility that there are crucial differences between the identity politics of minority Muslims in the United Kingdom and the inner divisions among Islamists in Pakistan, between the insurgency in Iraq and the politics of the Brotherhood in post-Mubarak Egypt. Tax elides these differences and uses a single recipe for denunciation, which applies to “those the media call ‘moderate Islamists’” just as much as it applies to al-Qaeda.
 
Finally, there is the question of alliance itself. In a world where multi-dimensional allegiances and prismatic identities have left many alienated; the idea of rallying the Anglo-American Left around some central principles—including the separation of church and state—is a well-intentioned one. But Tax uses this rallying cry to blame leftists for “undermin[ing] struggles for secular democracy in the Global South.” There is hubris in this argument—in the idea that the political trajectories of the Global South are dependant on the ruminations of Anglo-American leftists and their ability to choose the right alliances. Political ideas and movements in the Middle East and South Asia do not generally rise and fall on such questions. Moreover, the secular and liberal Obama administration’s drone campaign has done far more to motivate religious extremism in Pakistan than Code Pink’s decision to work with Imran Khan and his Islamist political party.
 
Tax’s essay could have provoked some necessary soul-searching on the American Left about the meaning of solidarity and support at a time when the American government is engaged in globe-spanning conflict with Islamic extremists, but it reads as an angry tirade against insufficiently emphatic denunciations. As a Pakistani and American living at the intersection of two societies mired in mistrust, in which all interactions are immediately elevated to civilizational consequence, I would argue that a dialectic of compassion would serve us better than attack. Such a dialectic would not force us into the crude choices of identity politics (are you a Muslim or woman first?) or into either/ors over contested concepts like Sharia, but rather acknowledge that humans ally and interact politically on multiple levels, that common understanding is slow, and that the rhetoric of denunciation can create distance between the very people who would most benefit from any alliance at all.
 
MY REPLY
 
Rafia Zakaria and I have a number of points of agreement. We agree on the dangers of fundamentalism. We agree that some feminists are trying to make Sharia more woman-friendly and that Sharia is not a static body of law; my book Double Bind quotes Women Living Under Muslim Laws to say that “there is no such thing as a codified Sharia.”
 
We disagree on other points. Zakaria objects to my critical tone and my use of examples, which she calls “anecdotes,” saying, “Each bit provides a glimpse of an actual controversy, but only the bit suited to Tax’s purposes: underlining the Left’s stupidity when it comes to dealing with political Islam.” Exactly. I chose examples that would illustrate the point I was trying to make and point to a deeply problematic trend of support by certain left-wing groups for the Muslin Right—a trend many others have also noted, including Fred Halliday.
 
To my examples Zakaria opposes two of her own. The first is Asiya Nasir, described as a Christian woman MP belonging to an Islamic party in Pakistan, Jamiat Ulema Islam (JUL-F). Despite Nasir’s membership in this party, Zakaria says she is a strong advocate for women and minorities.
 
But Zakaria leaves out a plot point: why would a group that has been described as a “hard-line Islamist party, widely considered a political front for numerous jihadi organizations, including the Taliban,” a party that believes women should have no part in public life, want a Christian female MP to begin with? The answer is political opportunism. Pakistan reserves 17 percent of its seats in parliament for women and dishes them out according to each party’s number of votes. Since 2002 all candidates have had to be college graduates. Most members of the JUI-F were educated in madrassahs rather than secular universities, so when they got seven votes in the 2008 election and were awarded an additional seat for a woman, they had to scramble for a candidate.
 
Asiya Nasir’s membership in the JUI-F has in no way mitigated its anti-woman politics. As Afiya Zia of Pakistan’s Women’s Action Forum points out, the entire JUI-F party actively opposed last year’s Domestic Violence Bill. Its leader, Maulana Fazlur Rahman, "dismissed the Bill’s contents as an attempt to impose a Zionist/Westernised agenda and its proponents as ‘home-breakers and shameless women’….The women members of the JUI-F also expressed their objection to the ‘freedoms’ associated with the DVB, which, in their view, challenges the sanctity of marriage and the rightful dominance of the husband. According to them, domestic violence is often an impulsive act on part of the husband when the woman tries to become head of the household."
 
So much for Zakaria’s first example. Her second is Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, of whom she says, “While Yousafzai is a champion of girl’s education, she keeps her head covered and prays in nearly every interview, she hasn’t come out in favor of gay rights or a secular state.”
 
But Malala Yousafzai, like her father, is an activist for secular education and against fundamentalism. The Talibanis who shot her say they did so because she wanted to secularize society and because she spoke against them. “We did not attack her for raising voice for education. We targeted her for opposing mujahideen and their war.” However personally observant she may be, politically she risked her life to advocate for the separation between religion and the state—the very meaning of secularism, and the only secure basis for the rights of women, religious minorities, sexual minorities, and dissenters. Why confuse the issue?
 
Zakaria also objects to my lumping “moderate Islamists” and Salafi-Jihadis together as members of the Muslim Right. Many in the human rights world were willing to take “moderate Islamist” parties like Ennadha in Tunisa and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt at face value when they said they opposed violence and believed in democracy. But now that these parties are in power, violence and repression are increasing. Sexual assaults on women in Tahrir Square have become so overwhelming that Egyptian protesters are forming their own protection squads, while in Tunisia, Chokri Belaid, a secular opposition politician, was assassinated last month and his widow holds Ennadha responsible. Ennadha’s neoliberal economic policies have also led to pitched battles between party militants and trade unionists, while the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt just released a statement calling on all “Islamic countries” to oppose CEDAW because it “violates all principles of the Islamic Sharia and the Islamic community.”
 
Similarly in Bangladesh, members of the “moderate Islamist” party Jamaat e Islami have been engaged in a bloodbath since one of their leaders was condemned to death on February 28 for crimes against humanity committed during the 1971 War of Independence. In the twenty-four hours after the verdict, at least thirty-five people were killed; subsequently, Hindu neighborhoods were attacked and a train full of Hindus set on fire. A delegation supporting justice for genocide victims visited Amnesty International in London, asking for support for demands made by the Centre for Secular Space including “an investigation into the threat to human rights constituted by global religious fundamentalist organisations such as the Jamaat e Islami.”
 
Unfortunately, anyone who mentions facts like these is likely to be accused, in Zakaria’s words, of creating “a broad binary that seeks to divide up good and bad Muslims.” But these conflicts are real and Muslims are fighting on both sides. So whom are we to have solidarity with—trade unionists, feminists, gays, and students, or the “moderate Islamists” in power? Attempts to blur this question will not make it go away.
 
But Zakaria says that those in the North don’t have to worry about these matters because it is hubris to imagine that “the political trajectories of the Global South are dependant on the ruminations of Anglo-American leftists and their ability to choose the right alliances.”
 
To me, thinking on a global scale is not hubris; it is a strategic necessity in a globalized world where, more than ever before, actions in one place affect events in another. Think how the protesters of Tahrir Square and the indignados of Spain created a feedback loop with Occupy. Knowing and caring what is happening to people in other parts of the world is neither rescue nor interference; it is mutual aid and common interest, particularly for those with a similar vision of social change. I do not mean some vague and fuzzy “dialectic of compassion” but good old-fashioned solidarity.
 
One way of showing solidarity is to draw attention to the demands of movements in other places. In that spirit, here is part of the International Women’s Day statement of the Women’s Action Forum of Pakistan, written in response to Sunni violence against the Shia minority.
 

"We demand that militant religious organizations face public criminal prosecution through due process of law….The impunity with which these terrorists operate must be revoked and their funding sources halted, including the detrimental role played by some Saudi Arabian interests groups….
 
"We demand that the Pakistan army and paramilitary forces be made answerable to civilian authorities and accountable to citizens to explain their performance in the ‘war against terror’ for which it has received funds from America, in addition to a significant share from the national budget….
 
"We mourn and condemn the countless precious lives lost to terrorism. We believe the way out is to be found within the Constitution and democracy. WAF reiterates the necessity of a secular dispensation. WAF urges for a substantive peace that offers justice and protection of human rights and liberties for all citizens. We believe it is possible."

The Muslim Right and the Anglo-American Left: the love that dare not speak its name
[This piece was published by Dissent under the title, "An Expedient Alliance?  The Muslim Ri ght and the Anglo-American Left" on Feb. 25, 2013]

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.
 

It is a natural impulse to want to defend Muslims in the current climate of increasing xenophobia, discrimination, and violent attacks in both Europe and North America. Islam is often maligned and misrepresented in the North. And Jihadis have the same rights to due process of law as anybody else and should be defended against violations like rendition and torture. But defending Muslims against discrimination should not mean giving political support to the conceptual framework of the Muslim Right, as Amnesty International did in 2010 when it endorsed “defensive jihad,” or as an antiwar coalition in London did when it allowed sex-segregated seating at its meetings.
 
A particularly egregious example of this trend has been left-wing support for the “Iraqi insurgency,” which includes groups allied with al-Qaeda and is made up of Sunni militants who practice sectarian violence against Shi’ia and plant bombs in marketplaces and civilian neighborhoods. Although Iraqi leftists and feminists oppose the Iraqi insurgency, both the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition in the United States and the Stop the War Coalition in the UK have endorsed it on the basis that it is fighting foreign invasion and imperialism. In fact, the insurgency has directed its violence less at the United States than at imposing an Islamic state on its own people, targeting women in particular.
 
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. According to the Pew Research Center, very few of them support the interpretations and actions of Salafi-Jihadis, who no more represent all Muslims than the American Nazi Party or English Defence League represent all Christians.
 
In the name of multiculturalism, some states, including the UK, have taken organizations led by the Muslim Right to represent the population as a whole, funding identity-based groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat e Islaami. Canada has taken a similar approach, as noted by sociologist Haideh Moghissi, a professor at Toronto’s York University:
 

"Western governments and the media seem determined to promote the punishing, unforgiving and violent voices of Islam. Worse, taking them as the authentic and representative voices of Muslims worldwide, they are made legitimate partners at negotiation tables whenever there is a need to address the interests and grievances of Muslim populations. By making religion the guiding principle in their foreign policy and in dealing with their own ethnic minorities, these governments follow, in a sense, the agenda of conservative Muslims, rather than stressing and protecting the hard-won secular political values and practices of their societies. From my perspective, it is hard not to worry about some ill-advised government policies, such as allowing Friday prayers in publicly funded middle schools in Toronto, which includes hiring an imam to lead the prayers for thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students."
 

With similar political blindness, sections of the international Left have continued to support the Iranian theocracy despite its violent repression of the “Green Revolution” of 2009-2010, its attacks on student and women’s organizations, and its suppression of labor unions. In September 2010, for instance, 150 self-described “progressive activists” in the United States, led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and former member of the House of Representatives Cynthia McKinney, dined with Iranian President Ahmadinejad on his visit to the UN to show their support for his allegedly anti-imperialist stand. Left-wing supporters of Ahmadinejad are willing to overlook the fact that he is not only a dictator and fundamentalist but also a Holocaust denier.
 
Unwillingness to criticize the Iranian theocracy has led to a lack of solidarity with the people of Iran, a particular problem at a time of sanctions and talk of war. In March 2012, a United National Antiwar Coalition met in Hartford to oppose the possibility of war with Iran, condemn sanctions, and oppose U.S. wars and interference in other places. By an overwhelming majority, however, the meeting refused to support the human rights of the Iranian people, voting down a resolution that said, “We oppose war and sanctions against the Iranian people and stand in solidarity with their struggle against state repression and all forms of outside intervention.” As Manijeh Nasrabadi, a spokeswoman for the New York-based Raha Iranian Feminists Group, which supported the defeated resolution, said,
 

"If we don’t support Iranians struggling in Iran for the same things we fight for here, such as labor rights, abolition of the death penalty and freedom for political prisoners, we risk a politically debilitating form of cultural relativism. At best we are hypocrites; at worst we show an inability to imagine Iranians as anything other than passive victims of Western powers. Ironically, this echoes racist and Orientalist stereotypes of the kind that most antiwar activists would hasten to decry."
 

The antiwar movement’s courtship of the Muslim Right went even further in the UK, where, in 2001, the Socialist Workers Party initiated the Stop the War Coalition, which two years later organized the largest UK antiwar demonstration ever, against the war in Iraq. They did so in partnership with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Muslim Association of Britain, which is associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The SWP was carrying out a policy outlined by Chris Harman, one of its leaders. As early as 1994, Harman wrote that the Left must not regard Islamists as the enemy because “they are not responsible for the system of international capitalism.” Rather, their “feeling of revolt” should be “tapped for progressive purposes,” meaning that the SWP should try to manipulate the Muslim Right into supporting left-wing objectives. In pursuit of this plan, the SWP made remarkable concessions for a Marxist organization that theoretically stands for equality between men and women, going as far as allowing gender-segregated seating (reportedly for Asian women only) at antiwar meetings. When questioned on this, the secretary of the Stop the War Coalition described women’s rights and gay rights as a “shibboleth” that could not be allowed to get in the way of unity with Muslim groups. (It comes as no surprise that the SWP is now falling apart as a result of a rape scandal in its leadership.)
 
The alliance with the Stop the War Coalition brought new strength and visibility to the Muslim Brotherhood’s organization in the UK. According to Richard Phillips, writing in Race and Class in 2008, because of this campaign the Muslim Association of Britain grew “from a relatively obscure group to one with a national profile. It gained considerable influence, punching well above the weight suggested by its limited membership and narrow formal constituency…” While English Trotskyites were elated by the success of this alliance, an Iraqi leftist who attended a 2003 conference of the Stop the War Coalition came away in despair at the folly of the SWP in building up the Muslim Right, saying, “Ironically, political Islam is applauded and welcomed by the SWP, while both ordinary Muslims in the Middle East and in Western society, and Western people reject it.”
 
Left-wing alliances with fundamentalist groups—whether Christian, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim—are betrayals of the majority of their co-religionists, who do not wish to be represented by extremists. Such alliances are also betrayals of basic socialist principle, and of the sense of self-preservation, since leftists are the first to be killed wherever fundamentalists come to power. Ask any Iranian.
 
Meredith Tax’s new book, Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, is available online at lulu.com. It will be launched on March 1 with a panel at the New School’s Wollman Hall, 65 W. 11th Street, 5th floor, New York, NY. The panel will feature Ann Snitow of Gender Studies, Anissa Hélie of Women Living Under Muslim Laws, Afiya Zia of the Women’s Action Forum in Pakistan, and Meredith Tax. For more information and to get on the list, contact admin [at] centreforsecularspace [dot] org.

This piece is a considerably expanded version of my last blog.  It went up on openDemocracy on 5 February 2013:

I have spent the last twenty years working on issues of women and religious censorship.  As a feminist activist in International PEN [13] and then in Women’s WORLD [14], I couldn’t help noticing that increasing numbers of women writers were being targeted by fundamentalists. Not all these fundamentalists were Islamists; some were Christians, Jews, or Hindus.  In fact, one of my own books was targeted [15] by the Christian Coalition [16] in the US. 
 
Nobody on the left ever objected when I criticized Christian or Jewish fundamentalism.  But when I did defence work for censored Muslim feminists, people would look at me sideways, as if to say, who are you to talk about this?  This tendency has become much more marked since 9/11 and the “war on terror.”  Today on the left and in some academic circles, people responding to attacks on Muslim feminists in other countries are likely to be accused of reinforcing the "victim-savage-saviour" framework [17] or preparing for the next US invasion. [18]  This puts anyone working with actual women’s human rights defenders in places like North Africa or Pakistan in an impossible situation. From these concerns springs my book, Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, [19] published by the Centre for Secular Space [20].
 
Human rights defenders are supposed to protect the rights of those oppressed by the state or by non-state actors. They must also defend the rights of women (which may be violated by the state as well as by non-state actors).  But what happens when people who are mistreated by the state violate the rights of women?  Can one fight their violations while at the same defending their rights against state power?  How? 
 
This political terrain is tied up in so many knots it amounts to what Gregory Bateson called a “double bind” in “Toward a theory of schizophrenia [21]”  - a double bind results when people are given conflicting instructions so that in obeying one set of orders, they must violate the other. 
 
Last year’s debate [22] around Mona Eltahawy’s article on the oppression of women in the Middle East, called  "Why do they hate us?" [23]  is a recent example of this double bind. As Parastou Houssori, [24] who teaches international refugee law at the University of Cairo, observed:  

Some of the other criticisms of El Tahawy’s piece illustrate the dilemma of the “double bind” that African-American and other feminists have also faced. For instance, when they write about their experiences, African-American feminists often find themselves caught between confronting the patriarchy within African-American communities, and defending their African-American brothers from the broader racism that exists in American society. Similarly, women who identify as Islamic feminists often find themselves in this bind, as they try to reconcile their feminism and religious identity, and also defend their religion from Islamophobia.

This double bind cannot be resolved by retreating into silence or becoming immobilized. In international law, it can be addressed by emphasizing that non-state actors must not violate rights, and by integrating equality and non-discrimination more fully into human rights work.  But on the political level, one can only proceed by thinking one’s way through a maze of taboos, injunctions and received ideas - and also being willing to face backlash and censorship.  
 
Gita Sahgal [25], founding head of the gender unit at Amnesty International, found this out three years ago when she left Amnesty after publicly raising objections to its alliance with Cageprisoners, [26] a UK organization set up to defend prisoners at Guantanamo. People around the world came to Gita’s defense [27] and have now formed the Centre for Secular Space [28] in order to strengthen secular voices, oppose fundamentalism, and promote universality in human rights. The questions we raise are critical to the left:
 
In a period of right wing attacks on Muslims – or people thought to be Muslims – how does one respond to human rights violations by the Muslim right without feeding hate campaigns?
 
When the US invokes the oppression of Muslim women [29] to sanctify war, how do we practice feminist solidarity without strengthening Orientalism and neocolonialism?
 
When the US targets jihadis for assassination by drone, [30] should human rights defenders worry about violations perpetrated by those  same jihadis or focus on violations by the state?     
 
What do we mean by the Muslim right?  I define it as: “a range of transnational political movements that mobilize identity politics towards 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 parties and groups called ‘salafis’ that may run for office but also try to enforce some version of Sharia law through street violence; and a much smaller militant wing of salafi-jihadis that endorses military means and practices violence against civilians. The goal of all political Islamists, whatever means they may prefer, is a state founded upon a version of Sharia law that systematically discriminates against women along with sexual and religious minorities.” 
 
Starting from there, Double Bind discusses salafi-jihadi history, ideas, and organizational methods with particular attention to Cageprisoners, making the case that it is actually a public relations organization for jihadis. The book looks at the practice of the Anglo-American antiwar movement and challenges what I believe are five wrong ideas about the Muslim right: that it is anti-imperialist; that “defence of Muslim lands” is comparable to national liberation struggles; that the problem is “Islamophobia;” that terrorism is justified by revolutionary necessity; and that any feminist who criticizes the Muslim right is an Orientalist ally of US imperialism.
 
Some on the left have accepted the world view of the Muslim right, which defines political goals in religious terms, to the extent that they see the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Mali as attacks on Muslims. Take, for instance, Glenn Greenwald [31]: “As French war planes bomb Mali, there is one simple statistic that provides the key context: this west African nation of 15 million people is the eighth country in which western powers - over the last four years alone - have bombed and killed Muslims - after Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and the Philippines (that does not count the numerous lethal tyrannies propped up by the west in that region). For obvious reasons, the rhetoric that the west is not at war with the Islamic world grows increasingly hollow with each new expansion of this militarism.”
 
By adopting a religious framework, Greenwald obscures the geopolitical reasons for the conflicts he names and ignores the fact that most of them involve Muslims killing other Muslims—in the case of Mali, Sunni salafi-jihadis imposing their version of Islam on Sufis. [32]  Like people who see Taliban activity in Pakistan largely as a reaction against drones, [33] leftists who frame the issues in Mali solely in terms of Western imperialism deny the agency of the people living there, who have been voting with their feet by fleeing jihadi-controlled areas in droves. 
 
Leftists often hold back from talking about the Muslim right because they are afraid that doing so will strengthen Western racists and nativists. But surely we have to oppose all varieties of right wing politics. Of course we must stand up to demagogues who characterize every Muslim as a potential terrorist and try to whip up violence against civilians. In my view, these people are fascists. But the fact that we have a problem with white fascists in the US or UK should not lead us to overlook the fact that other parts of the world have problems of their own with fascist movements, some of which claim to be the only true Muslims and try to enforce their version of Islam through violence.  Add in the fact that a number of jihadis come from Canada, the UK or the US, and it becomes apparent that we cannot think only in terms of domestic political struggles when we live in a globalized world. 
 
Rather than framing the world situation as a war between US imperialism and Islamist freedom fighters, Double Bind [19] sees a complicated dialectic between terrorism and counter-terrorism with the possibility of an emerging conservative front in which Washington and the Muslim Brotherhood are as likely to be allies as adversaries, and both are opposed by popular democratic movements. Instead of sanitizing and protecting the Muslim right in the name of fighting colonialism and imperialism, we propose a strategy of solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats, trade unionists, religious and sexual minorities and feminists struggling in the Global South against both neo-liberalism and religious fundamentalism.
 
Secular space is central to this strategy.  Since the end of the Cold War, secular spaces all over the world have come under siege by various forms of fundamentalism [34], and the instrumentalization of religion for political gain has become a problem in regions as varied as Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the MENA region, North America, South America, South Asia, and Western Europe.  In all these places, religious identity politics has muddied discussion of class, labour, racism and discrimination against women and sexual minorities.
 
Democratic governance is based on the idea that the authority of the state is delegated by the people rather than coming from God.  The separation of the state from religion is central to democracy because gender, religious minority and sexual rights become issues whenever human rights are limited by religion, culture, or political expediency. Thus secular space is essential to the development of democratic popular movements that can oppose both neoliberalism and fundamentalism. To move forward, we need a strategy that combines solidarity with defence of secular space.
 
Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights [19] will be launched by a panel at Toynbee Hall in London on 11th of February 2013 and by a panel at the New School in New York on March 1. To register for either, contact admin [at] centreforsecularspace.org and put which event you want to attend in the subject line.
 

Debating alliances
 
This was posted on openDemocracy.com on Nov. 12, 2012.
 
A month ago I wrote a critique of a Code Pink delegation to Waziristan with Pakistani politician Imran Khan.  My words were strong and, while some found them objectionable, they have stimulated a rich debate about alliances, drones, and solidarity by Pam Bailey, Rebecca Johnson, Afiya Zia and others. Rebecca Johnson says that “various defenders of the patriarchy and militarism seized on Tax's criticisms as an opportunity to uphold drone warfare and dismiss Code Pink’s peace and justice activism across the board,” but I have not been able to find evidence of this online.  In any case, surely open debate about strategy is so essential it is worth some risk.
 
I was criticized for not having posed my questions to Code Pink before I wrote.  Since I listen to criticism, before writing this I sent Medea Benjamin a number of questions, which she answered freely and fully. 
 
My main issue with the campaign was Code Pink’s decision to partner with Imran Khan, whom Pakistani liberals consider a front for the military and who has made many statements praising the Afghan Taliban.  Medea Benjamin said that they had originally planned to send their own delegation, but were working on the anti-drone campaign with Reprieve and Shahzad Akbar, a Pakistani lawyer who represents drone victims, and both suggested Code Pink join Khan’s delegation as a way of getting into Waziristan.  She and other members of the delegation consider the trip a success because it led to many articles on drones that otherwise would not have been written.  
 
Despite our friendly correspondence and the fact that the delegation achieved its purpose of getting more press for drones, I still question the wisdom of joining Khan’s delegation.  Why?  Because a movement needs to ensure that its short term tactical aims do not contradict its long term strategy. The following remarks are meant to apply to the peace movement as a whole, not particularly to Code Pink.
 
In the late sixties, when I got involved in the antiwar movement, it was axiomatic that tactics have to flow from strategy, and strategy has to be based on an analysis of the world situation.  Unfortunately, the strategy of some in the peace movement is still based on the world as it was in 1968, when two rival economic and social systems vied for hegemony over the Global South.  At that time, Third World liberation movements, fighting to get out from under Europe and the US, got support from the socialist countries and tended to have leftwing politics.  It was natural that Western leftists would identify with these movements.
 
But that world died in 1989.  Now many populist and nationalist movements in both the North and Global South are based on rightwing versions of identity politics inspired by poisonously misogynistic religious fundamentalism—think of the Christian Right in the US, the Orthodox Right in Russia and Serbia, and the Muslim Right in large parts of the world.  We live at a time of confusing and rapidly shifting alignments, similar in some ways to the 1930s, when fascist movements were rising and the Western powers alternately opposed them and colluded with them.  Today, fundamentalist movements are rising and their relationships are complicated.  One day they attack each other and the next day they cooperate at the UN.  With one hand they fight the US and the World Bank, and with the other, take money from both.
 
These movements of the religious right are enormously oppressive and dangerous, most of all to people in the areas they control.  Leftwing support for them is madness, for leftists are the first people they will kill if they gain power—one need look no further than Iran to know that.  Yet today on the left, in the peace movement, and in human rights organizations, people who would never support groups on the Christian or Jewish Right embrace groups on the Muslim Right in the name of anti-imperialist solidarity.  The 2010 controversy sparked by Gita Sahgal over Amnesty International’s partnership with Cageprisoners was about exactly this problem of alliances. 
 
During this controversy, three South Asian feminist activists started a petition which stressed that avoiding dubious alliances is a matter of principle: “Many of us who work to defend human rights in the context of conflict and terrorism know the importance of maintaining a clear and visible distance from potential partners and allies when there is any doubt about their commitment to human rights.”  The Centre for Secular Space was formed partly to support this principle.  
 
This principle should also be applied in a global campaign against drones. I agree with the object of this campaign and with the concerns expressed about US militarism.  The issue is particularly important to American citizens, since our country has violated so many human rights norms in the course of the “war on terror.” What I disagree with is developing a campaign against drones in alliance with Imran Khan.
 
Khan, who has been fundraising for his political party in California, is good at working the media—a recent article in the Daily Beast called him “similar to Barak Obama in 2008.” Actually, he’s more similar to Ron Paul; both combine an antiwar message with rightwing politics. Trudy Cooper, a member of the Code Pink delegation, has posted several defensive comments saying Khan is the next best thing to Santa Claus and, if I don’t know this, I must have done lousy research, using only the “surface media.” But anyone who actually wants to know Khan’s view can find them out easily—just google “Imran Khan extremism” (over a million entries), or “Imran Khan Islamism” (over 7 million entries). 
 
You will find Pankaj Mishra saying that “Khan refused in 2006 to support reforms to the so-called Hudood Ordinance, which exposes rape victims to charges of adultery unless they can produce four males who witnessed their violation.”  You will find the Indian paper, The Mail, saying  “Imran Khan has justified his association with Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief Hafiz Saeed, the key conspirator for the Mumbai attack, saying it was his duty to engage everyone, ‘however extreme they be’.” You will find that Khan's party, PTT, is part of an electoral alliance with Jamaat e Islami, a transnational group some of whose leading members are currently on trial for war crimes in Bangladesh.   You can also read about Khan's speech outside the hospital where Malala lay after being shot, in which he defended the Afghan Taliban, saying they were fighting a “holy war” against the West and were justified by Islamic law.
 
Whatever short term benefits in terms of press might accrue, I think it makes no sense for pacifists from the Fellowship of Reconciliation, who were part of the delegation to Waziristan, to ally with a frontman for the Pakistani military, or for members of Code Pink, who oppose violence against women, to partner with a man who supports the Afghan Taliban even as it actively promotes violence against women.   
 
I also raised questions in my first article about whether Code Pink had consulted with Pakistani women’s groups prior to going on Kahn’s delegation.  I asked because I assumed they wouldn’t have gone if Pakistani feminists had advised against it; Rebecca Johnson makes the same assumption in her article.  Our assumption was incorrect.  Medea Benjamin has sent me copies of some of the advice she received, which said, “If you can do this trip/project without being too identified with him [Khan] or his party, it would be much better,” and “Feminists in Pakistan do not like him or his party. Nevertheless, we are glad you are coming.”  Other advisors, especially those working against drones, came in on the other side.  As Medea Benjamin said in her comment on Johnson’s article, “We weighed the different comments we heard, and did what we thought was right.” 
 
In the end, of course, one must always decide for onself.  The question is how.  Rebecca Johnson’s suggests, citing Women in Black, that one should consult with “women on the ground” but not necessarily do what they advise because they may have conflicting opinions or be influenced by “countervailing political factors.”  I am not sure how far one can extrapolate from Women in Black, a diverse network of small women’s groups who demonstrate regularly for peace but disagree on a number of fundamental questions.  I also am uneasy about an implied hierarchy between local and global, as if global activists inevitably have more of an overview than “women on the ground.”  Certainly, if I were going to plan a program in Pakistan, I would listen very carefully indeed to people from Shirkat Gah, whose perspective is as sophisticated and transnational as that of any Western peace group, and to the 30 year old feminist, anti-militarist and anti-fundamentalist Women's Action Forum.
 
Code Pink is beginning long-term work in Pakistan so they probably will do that.  When I asked Medea Benjamin if she had done further research on Khan since this controversy, she said, “It has not made me research more about Imran Khan, as we are not looking for an ongoing relationship with a Pakistan political party. But the stories we heard about the Taliban, the shooting of Malala and this discussion have made me want to do more to support some of the groups we met that are supporting women in areas where the Taliban operate.”
 
Pam Bailey’s piece, which mentions this plan to do long term work in Pakistan,  centers on her solidarity work in Gaza. Bailey makes a distinction between taking leadership, which she feels she can do against US actions in support of the Israeli occupation, and simply being “present in solidarity” during conflicts between Palestinian youth and the Hamas government.  Likewise, she says, it was proper for Code Pink to issue a press release in support of Malala but it would not have been right for them to “take the lead.”
 
Are these really the only two alternatives?  Nobody, least of all me, wants Americans to try to take the lead in either Gaza or Pakistan.  But making connections between issues does not involve taking over.  What bothers me about Bailey’s approach is­ that such issues are all related.  How can one segregate the topics one can address as an American from those one can address as a woman or democrat or human rights defender? The strength of Hamas in Gaza, and its ability to impose a Taliban-like policy of Islamization on the people there, is related to the brutality of Operation Cast Lead and the Israeli occupation; the corruption, collaboration and ineffectiveness of the PLA; and the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. We need to look at the connections, not only between the US and Israel, but between the US and the Brotherhood, between militarism and the sequestration of women, and a thousand other things.  We cannot separate the US role from everything else because the US has its fingers in so many pies.
 
What I am hoping for is greater complication, depth, and sophistication in the approach of the peace movement.  A hunkering-down strategy like the one Pam Bailey proposes in Gaza could lead to that.  A strategy focused on getting press is less likely to do so.  This brings us back to the question of alliances.
 
I am more familiar with Code Pink’s work in the US than I am with their work in other countries.  In the US, they have focused on disruption and performance; as Pam Bailey says, “We infiltrate closed meetings, we show up at hearings with banners and wearing pink feather boas, and we travel where others will not tread.” This is a media strategy; its objective is to get the press to pay attention to antiwar issues and US violations of human rights. In a media strategy, alliances are not too important; they can be short-term and based on agreement on single issues. The point is to use the media to excite enough public indignation to force the government to stop using drones and end the war.
 
Such media campaigns can be useful for short term aims and Code Pink is very good at them.  But we also need a long term strategy and, in this age of globalization, it must deal not only with neoliberal militarism but with movements of religious fundamentalists all over the world.  I believe the long term strategy of Western feminists and human rights defenders must be to fight all such regressive forces by building strong, radical alliances across borders, based on the demands of people in the countries at war.  In this strategy, choosing the right allies is key, because progressives will have a different agenda from the religious right.  Especially in countries at war, where the US is involved, it is critical to know and support the broad spectrum of demands of liberals, secularists, democrats, labor organizers, human rights and sexual rights defenders, and feminists, and to partner with these forces, rather than with politicians aligned with fundamentalist groups and the military.