An article by Stephen Cowden on elements of the British left getting into bed with Islamists.
https://journals.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/feministdissent/article/download/13/22....
it is not in any way clear why this this requires sections of the Left continue to politically ally themselves with and defend the Islamic religious right. It was exactly this politics I encountered at the Historical Materialism conference on 6-7 November 2015 at SOAS in London. This is a conference I have attended regularly and most of the conference this year was very good, as it generally is. However the session entitled ‘Islamaphobia, Secularism and Feminism’ left me deeply troubled about the dominance of this form of apologetics for the Islamic right and the way a younger generation of anti-racist activists, justifiably concerned about anti-Muslim racism, have come to support this, while being entirely unaware of the way this politics involves the erasure not just of secularism, but of a whole history of feminist struggles against the religious control of women’s lives and bodies.
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In the group’s discussion of the so-called ‘new secularists’, Southall Black Sisters (SBS) and British Muslims for a Secular Democracy (BMSD) were singled out for their ‘Islamaphobia’. When I raised the question of how organisations like a committed anti-racist group like SBS could be reasonably described as ‘Islamaphobic’, Nazarin Massoumi replied that SBS was ‘once progressive’ but now ‘supports the racist practices of the state’ through its involvement in counter radicalisation strategies, by which I would assume she is referring to the UK Government’s counter-radicalisation strategy, known as PREVENT. 2, though the group failed to offer any evidence of what this involved and how it was substantively ‘Islamaphobic’. Indeed it is revealing of the nature of this group’s work that they see it as appropriate to place political groups like SBS and BMSD alongside MI5 and MOSSAD. This was a session with a young audience and one of the things I found frustrating was the way this whole focus on ‘Islamaphobia’ was so readily accepted by an audience almost entirely unaware of the work done by groups like Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism (see Dhaliwal and Yuval-Davis [2014] for an account of the latter).
The final speaker was Nancy Lindisfarne whose presentation was entitled ‘Islamaphobia and Cultural Racism’. This was a version of a paper which she has published with Jonathon Neale on her site at Academia.edu (Lindisfarne and Neale, 2015). They argue that Islamic movements in the Middle East were ‘resistance movements’ to Western Oil Empires. While Lindisfarne does state that these movements are considerably less preferable than socialist or Marxist movements, she also depicts them as resistance movements that need to be supported by the Left nonetheless. When questioned about this, Lindisfarne went as far as to express critical admiration for ISIS’ resistance stating ‘you might not like everything they are fighting for, but my god they are fighting’; a remark that drew gasps of disbelief and disgust from many in the room. Lindisfarne was supported in this by members of the group RS21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century - a recent split from the SWP) which denounced the ‘purism’ of those leftists who failed to see that Islamist movements were forms of anti-Western resistance that had to be supported as part of an anti-imperialist politics in the UK.
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I would conclude with two points. The first is that David Miller’s analysis, growing out of a concern with propaganda and representation, has become a form of politics in which the ‘real’ ceases to exist. The fact that there are young men and women who find something attractive in the oppositional identity offered by Islamist extremism and ISIS is a reality. This cannot be conjured away by shouting ‘Islamaphobia’ at organisations like British Muslims for a Secular Democracy and Southall Black Sisters which are genuinely trying to develop strategies to address this reality. But the work of Miller, Mills, Massoumi and Aked has no actual answer to this real problem. In their world, reality only exists as a binary of representation; you are either for or against ‘Islamaphobia’. The incredibly dangerous implication of this was revealed at the Historical Materialism session when Miller stated that “Islamist is just another term for Muslim”
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Topic: The Poverty of Apologism: The British Left, Feminism and the Islamic Right