Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
, by SIAWI
Secularism, i.e. separation of religion from politics, has been regularly attacked since its inception by the Catholic Church and ultra conservative political forces in Europe, even in France. During the past two decades, Muslim fundamentalists revived the struggle against secularism and (…)
, by Article 19, UN HCR
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) attempted to introduce reference to “defamation of religion” into UN language. This was around April last year, at the time of the danish cartoons controversy. Shortly after that Catholics For a Free Choice tried to warn us/organize about the (…)
, by HENEGHAN Tom
Orsay, France — With creationism now coming in Christian and Muslim versions, scientists, teachers and theologians in France are debating ways to counteract what they see as growing religious attacks on science.
Bible-based criticism of evolution, once limited to Protestant fundamentalists in (…)
, by SULEHRIA Farooq
The death toll from the 7.0-magnitude earthquake that flattened the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince on Jan 12 exceeded 20,000. On Feb 27, an even stronger earthquake, magnitude 8.8, struck Chile. The revised death toll of 279 was down from the initial 802, because a number of missing persons (…)
, by SINGH Khushwant
Those who watched Barkha Dutt’s We the People on the veil must have noticed that the invited audience was largely pro-hijab women who applauded every statement supporting this practice. The assumption was that the burqa tradition has to be sorted out by Muslims themselves and non-Muslims should (…)
, by HELIE LUCAS Marieme
For the past month a renewed debate about citizenship, religious freedom and gender hasbeen raging in Britain. Marieme Helie Lucas offers her perspective and throws down a few challenges to the “coward Left”.
In the controversy over the veil sparked by Jack Straw, there is one thing that is (…)
Recently there has been controversy around the veil worn by some Muslim women to conceal their faces. Many have seen this as a conflict between Muslims on one side and the “Islamophobic” west on the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. The debate on the wearing of the face veil and (…)
, by HELIE LUCAS Marieme
Whoever today does not add an S to ’veil’ and, even worse, refers to ‘The Islamic Veil’ (singular), wittingly or unwittingly, promotes the fundamentalist agenda. In these troubled times of history, I have become finicky about concepts and epistemology, writes sociologist and founder of WLUML, (…)
, by JOSHI Sudhir, RAO Nathan, SHER-ALAM Farida, SHER-ALAM Nadira, SUNDAR Aparna
On September 11, 2005, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty put an end to speculation about how he would respond to the recommendations in the report released by former NDP Attorney General Marion Boyd in December 2004. The report recommended that the government should continue to authorize religious (…)
, by FATAH Tarek, RAZA Raheel
It’s ironic that while more than 1,000 delegates met at a congress in Montreal called World’s Religions After September 11, where they discussed initiatives aimed at building greater understanding among followers of all faiths, halfway across the globe Pope Benedict XVI was making a speech that (…)
, by ALI Tariq
Was Benedict’s most recent provocation accidental or deliberate? The Bavarian is a razor-sharp reactionary cleric. A man who organises his own succession to the Papacy with a ruthless purge of potential dissidents and supervises the selection of Cardinals with great care leaves little to chance. (…)
, by HELIE LUCAS Marieme
Contribution presented at the sixth Asia Europe People’s Forum, Helsinki September 3-6, 2006, (plenary of cluster 3: Democracy and Human Rights).
The world has changed since the first international human rights organizations developed as we know them today: most conflicts do not any (…)
, by CHINTAMANI Roop, FATAH Tarek
Interview article donne by Terraviva during the World Social Forum in Karachi, Pakistan.
KARACHI - “Muslim countries, by their very nature, cease to take the first step towards creating a democratic modern state because their citizenship is based on inherited race and religion,” says Tarek (…)
, by PUNIYANI Ram
After going through the turmoil created by Advani’s ‘Secular Jinnah’ statement, its controller, RSS decided to get rid of him and finally appointed Rajnath Singh. a regional leader, as the President of BJP. Rajnath Singh was not much known in the broader circles and the views he held were (…)
, by Abdurrahman Wahid, Gus Dur
Abdurrahman Wahid, born Abdurrahman Addakhil (7 September 1940–30 December 2009), colloquially known as Gus Dur, has been long-time president of the muslim association Nahdlatul Ulama and the founder of the National Awakening Party (PKB). He was elected the first Indonesian president (…)
, by SULEHRIA Farooq
The political mullahs rub salt into the wounds of earthquake victims every time they shoot their mouths off blaming ’sinful’ people for earning the ’wrath of God’ in the form of the recent earthquake. Without a shred of respect for a generation of innocent schoolchildren lost to the disaster, (…)
, by SULEHRIA Farooq
The London bombings have reinforced the Muslim stereotype of a bearded fanatic, carrying explosives in a rucksack, detesting the West (read “civilisation”). Islam is yet again branded as a religion incompatible with democracy and human and women’s rights. This Islamophobia, theorised as a clash (…)
, by LÖWY Michael
The Marxist view of religion has been greatly over-simplified, typically identified with the well-worn refrain that it’s the “opiate of the people.” Michael Löwy challenges this misconception, and presents us with a much more nuanced view of Marxism and religion.
Is religion still, as Marx (…)
, by COWPER Alex
Secularism was a key demand of the leaders of the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries in the West, in France, America and elsewhere. They thought that human beings (or at least a minority of them) could arrive at truth through reason and construct rational social institutions. (…)
, by ACHCAR Gilbert
1. Classical Marxism’s theoretical (’philosophical’) attitude towards religion combines three complementary elements, the germ of which can be already found in the young Marx’s Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1843-44):
• First a critique of religion, as a factor of alienation. The (…)
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