Introduction

In October 2023, a rather bizarre piece of news from Pakistan made the national and international news: a professor was forced by the clerics to apologise for teaching the theory of evolution and demanding basic human freedoms for women. Professor Sher Ali lives in Bannu, a Pashtun-majority conservative city in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan; many of its nearby villages are under Taliban control. Wanting to know more about this man standing up to the darkness in such a remote corner, I interviewed Sher Ali at the academy where he gives tuition to intermediate-level students. He is a well-read and humble person and provided much insight during our interview, a translated and edited transcript of which is below. I hope that the example of this brave and good man inspires others in Pakistan to embrace enlightenment over dogma.

Interview

Ehtesham Hassan: Please tell us about yourself. Who is Professor Sher Ali?

Sher Ali: I come from a small village in the area of Domel near the mountains. It borders the Waziristan District, not far from the Afghanistan border. My village is a very remote area and lacks basic facilities even today. In my childhood, we travelled for kilometres and used animals to bring clean drinking water to the village.

I started my educational journey in a school in a hut. In those days there was no electricity available so we would use kerosene oil lanterns to study at night. Luckily two of my uncles ran their schools in the village so I studied there. Both of them were very honest and hardworking. My elder brother would give us home tuition. After primary education, we had to go to a nearby village for further schooling. We would walk daily for kilometres to get to the school. We are four brothers and all of us are night-blind so we were not able to see the blackboard in the school. We would only rely on the teacher’s voice to learn our lessons and we had to write every word we heard from the teacher to make sense of the lessons. This helped sharpen our memories.

My grandfather was a religious cleric and he wanted me to be one also and I was admitted to a madrasa for this purpose. Life in the madrasa was really bad. I had to go door to door in the neighbourhood to collect alms for dinner. Another very disturbing issue was sexual abuse. Many of my classmates were victims of sexual abuse by our teacher. This was very traumatic to witness, so I refused to go to the seminary again.

After completing high school, I came to the city of Bannu for my intermediate and bachelor’s degree at Government Degree College Bannu. For my master’s in zoology, I went to Peshawar University and I later did my MPhil in the same subject from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad. In 2009 I secured a permanent job as a zoology lecturer and was posted in Mir Ali, Waziristan, where I taught for almost 13 years.

Can you please share your journey of enlightenment?

I come from a very religious society and family. I was extremely religious in my childhood. I would recite the Holy Quran for hours without understanding a word of it. I had memorised all the Muslim prayers and was more capable in this than the other kids. This gave me a good social standing among them.

When I started studying at the University of Peshawar, I visited the library regularly and started looking to read new books. I found a book about Abraham Lincoln which was very inspiring. Later, I read books on psychology and philosophy which gave me new perspectives. But even after reading such books, I was extremely religious. One thing I want to mention is that after the September 11 attacks in the US, I was even willing to go to Afghanistan for Jihad against the infidels.

During my studies in Islamabad, I met Dr Akif Khan. He used to discuss various ideas with me and he introduced me to new books and authors. He also added me to many freethinker groups on Facebook. In these groups, I met many Pakistani liberal and progressive thinkers and I regularly read their posts on the situation of our country. This had a substantial impact on my thinking. I started hating religious extremism and I even stopped practicing religion. This change enabled me to see that the Pakistani military establishment and clergy were responsible for the bad situation in my region.

In those days, I also read On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, which helped me deeply understand the idea of evolution and natural selection as opposed to creationism. I became tolerant and I started believing in pluralism. I began to realise that tolerance for opposing views is very important for the intellectual nourishment of any society. I changed my views from being based on religion to those based on scientific evidence. Any idea not backed by scientific evidence lost its charm for me.

What were the hurdles and obstacles you faced when you started preaching a rationalist worldview?

In 2014 I started a tuition academy where I was teaching the subject of biology to intermediate-level students. My way of teaching is very simple and interesting. I try to break down complex ideas and try to teach the students in their mother tongue, which is Pashto. Gradually my impact increased as more and more students started enrolling in my class. Students were amazed by the simplicity of scientific knowledge and they started asking questions from their families about human origins and the contradictions between religious views and the facts established by evolutionary science.

This started an uproar and I started receiving threatening letters from the Taliban. On the fateful day of 19 May 2022, I was travelling back from my college in Mir Ali to my home in Bannu when a bomb that was fit under my car went off. It was a terrible incident. I lost my left leg and was in trauma care for months. But finally, after six months, I recovered enough to start teaching again. I wanted to continue my mission because education is the best way to fight the darkness.

Could you tell us about the controversy over your teaching last year?

In September 2023, local mullahs and Taliban in Domel Bazar announced that women would not be allowed to come out in the markets and the public square. This was a shocking development. I was worried about the future of my village and surrounding areas if such things kept happening.

I, along with some like-minded friends and students, decided to conduct a seminar about the importance of women’s empowerment. In that seminar, I made a speech and criticised the decision to ban women from the public square I also criticised the concept of the burqa and how it hides women’s identity. I talked about the freedom of women in other Islamic countries like Turkey and Egypt. I clearly stated that banning any individual from the right of movement is a violation of fundamental rights enshrined in the constitution of Pakistan.

This speech sent shockwaves through Taliban and mullahs alike. Local mullahs started a hate/smear campaign against me. They started naming me in all their sermons and a coordinated social boycott campaign was launched against me. My father is 90 years old and he was really worried. My elder brother and my family were also being pressured. It was a very tough time for me. I feared for my family’s safety.

Ten days later, the local administration and police contacted me about this issue. They wanted to resolve the issue peacefully, so I cooperated with them and in the presence of a District Police Officer and more than 20 mullahs, I signed a peace agreement saying that I apologised if any of my words had hurt anyone’s sentiments. The mullahs then agreed to stop the hate campaign against me. But later that night, around midnight, I received a call from the Deputy Commissioner telling me that the mullahs had gone back on the agreement and were trying to legally tangle me using Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws.

I was advised to leave the city immediately, but I refused to leave my residence. The district administration then provided me with security personnel to guard me. During this period, I met many religious leaders who I thought were moderate and many promised to stand with me. A week later, I received a call from the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, telling me that a major wanted to meet me.

Since I was vocally opposed to the military establishment on social media, I feared that they might abduct me, but I still went to the cantonment to meet the intelligence officials. They talked about the situation and how to resolve it. The ISI asked the mullahs to stop the campaign against me. I had to apologise again in the Deputy Commissioner’s office in the presence of the mullahs to save my and my family’s lives and the photo of the event went viral on the internet.

After that incident, I changed my approach. Now, I don’t want to attract any attention for some time and I am waiting for the dust to settle. Currently, I see many horrible things happening in my city, but I can’t speak a word about them.

Please share your thoughts about rationalist activism in Pakistan.

A long time ago I made a Facebook post in which I called Pakistani liberal intellectuals ‘touch me not intellectuals’. They block anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. On the other hand, I have added all the religious people from my village on Facebook so that I can present them with an alternative. I sit with the youth of my village. I talk to them. In their language, I give them examples of the problems with religious ideas and military establishments. I support people in different ways. I give free tuition to poor kids and those from religious seminaries. I give small loans to poor people. I let people use my car in emergencies.

In these ways, I am deeply embedded in this society. Many people love me and stand for me and therefore acceptance of my ideas has increased over time. Most young people in my village are now supporters of women’s education and they do not get lured by the bait of Islamic Jihad.

This change, to me, is huge. Don’t alienate and hate people. Own them. Hug them and in simple language, by giving examples from daily life, tell them the truth. People are not stupid. Education and the internet are changing things.

Some people have compared what happened to you with what happened to Galileo. What are your thoughts on that comparison?

There are many similarities. One is the battle between dogma and reason, between religion and scientific evidence. One group believed in the freedom of expression and the other believed in stifling freedom of expression. In both cases, the rationalist had to face a large number of religious people alone. Galileo’s heliocentrism wasn’t a new thing at that time. He developed it by studying previous scientific thinkers. What I teach about evolution isn’t a new thing either. I just studied scientific history and now I am telling it to new generations.

However, there are many differences between the situations. Galileo was a scientist for all practical purposes. He invented the telescope, too, while I am an ordinary science teacher. Galileo’s case was purely scientific but mine is social and scientific. I spoke about women’s empowerment. The last main difference is that many hundred of years ago, the Church had little access to the world of knowledge, while today’s mullahs have access to the internet, so ignorance is not an excuse for them.

Related reading

How the persecution of Ahmadis undermines democracy in Pakistan, by Ayaz Brohi

From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March, by Tehreem Azeem

Surviving Ramadan: An ex-Muslim’s journey in Pakistan’s religious landscape, by Azad

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

The post The Galileo of Pakistan? Interview with Professor Sher Ali appeared first on The Freethinker.

Introduction

Jared Huffman is the Democratic representative for California’s 2nd congressional district and the only open non-believer in the US Congress. He is also at the forefront of the fight against Christian nationalism in America. He helped found the Congressional Freethought Caucus and the Stop Project 2025 Task Force. Andrew L. Seidel, constitutional attorney and author of The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom (and Freethinker contributor) had this to say about Huffman:

Rep. Jared Huffman is unafraid to publicly declare his belief in church-state separation and his lack of religion. That fearlessness is something we rarely see in American politicians, and it gives me hope for our future. There is no more stalwart defender of the separation of church and state than Rep. Huffman.

I recently spoke with Huffman over Zoom about his career and his opposition to the theocratic agenda of a future Donald Trump administration. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Interview

Daniel James Sharp: You are the only open non-believer in Congress. Could you tell us about that, and your personal background regarding religion?

Representative Jared Huffman: I had no intention of being known as the only open non-believer in Congress when I got elected back in 2012. I have been without religion for most of my adult life and in recent years came to sort of loosely identify as a humanist. But that was something I largely kept to myself. I had never been asked about it in politics. I’d spent twelve years in local government and six years in the California State Assembly and I could not imagine that it would ever come to be something I was known for in Congress.

But what I learned pretty early on is that there are all of these publications that want to know about the religious identification of people when they get to Congress. The Pew Research Center does this ongoing study about religiosity in Congress and there are all of these Capitol Hill publications that do surveys and ask you to choose your religious label. For the first few years, I essentially declined to answer those questions. I thought it was none of anyone’s business.

That changed when Donald Trump won the 2016 election and brought into government a growing number of strident Christian nationalists and an agenda that troubled me quite a bit and which I saw as deeply theocratic. I decided that this was something I needed to push back on.

However, it was hard to do that when I was keeping a little secret about my own religious identity, so I came out publicly as a humanist, making me the only member out of 535 in the House of Representatives and the Senate who openly acknowledges not having a God belief.

Do you think there are many other nonbelievers in Congress?

I know there are many more, but I’m the only one dumb enough to say it publicly!

Has coming out affected you politically?

I think that’s been an interesting part of the story. Conventional wisdom holds that you should never do that. And even in some of our more recent polls, atheists tend to rank lower than just about every other category in terms of the type of person Americans would vote for. So there was a lot of nervousness among my staff and from a lot of my friends and supporters when I came out in the fall of 2017.

But the backlash never came, and, if anything, I think my constituents appreciated me just being honest about what my moral framework was. I think they see an awful lot of hypocrisy in politics, a lot of fakers and people pretending to be religious, including Donald Trump, and I found that being honest about these things is actually pretty beneficial politically, and it also just feels more authentic, personally speaking.

Since Trump was elected in 2016, you have become very involved in resisting theocratic tendencies in government. You helped to found the Congressional Freethought Caucus in 2018, for example. Could you tell us how that came about?

Yes, that came next, after the Washington Post wrote a story about me coming out as a humanist. I think it was the next day after that piece was published that my colleague, Jamie Raskin, came to me on the House floor and said, ‘Hey, I think that’s great what you did, and I share the same concerns you have about the encroachment of religion into our government and our policies, we should think about some sort of a coalition to work on these secular issues.’ Conversations like that led pretty quickly to the creation of this new Congressional Freethought Caucus that we launched a few months later.

And what does the caucus do?

We support public policy based on facts and reason and science. We fiercely defend the separation of Church and State. We defend the rights of religious minorities, including the non-religious, against discrimination and stigmatization in the United States and worldwide. And we try to provide a safe place for members of Congress who want to openly discuss these matters of religious freedom without the constraints our political system has traditionally imposed.

It seems important to note that the caucus is formed of people from all different religious backgrounds. It’s not an atheist caucus.

Yes, it’s a mix, and it’s a mix that looks like the American people, which is different from Congress itself as a whole. The American people are getting less religious all the time and they are getting more religiously diverse, but Congress is stuck in a religious profile from the 1950s.

Do you think these changing demographics are part of the reason why there is this renewed Christian nationalist push?

I do. Religious fundamentalists correctly sense that their power and privilege are waning and that has caused them to become more desperate and extreme in their politics.

What is Project 2025?

Project 2025 is an extreme takeover plan for a second Trump presidency to quickly strip away many of the checks and balances in our democracy to amass unprecedented presidential power and use it to impose an extreme social order. It’s a plan to take total control over not just our government but also many of our individual freedoms. And the Christian nationalist agenda is at the heart of it.

Do you believe Trump’s statements distancing himself from Project 2025?

No, they are deeply unbelievable and implausible. Trump is inextricably intertwined with Project 2025 and until very recently both Trump’s inner circle and the Heritage Foundation, who published the plan, were openly boasting about the closeness of that connection. As Americans have come to learn more about Project 2025 and what it would do to their lives, it has become politically toxic to be associated with it, and that’s why you see these sudden attempts by Trump and his team to distance themselves from it.

How did people become more aware of it? It flew under the radar for quite a while.

Indeed, it flew under the radar for over a year. But our Freethought Caucus and others in Congress founded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force two months ago and, thanks to our efforts and the efforts of many others in the media and outside advocacy groups, more people have come to know about Project 2025 and the threat it poses to our democracy. Project 2025 went from being an obscure thing very few had heard about to, just a couple of weeks ago, surpassing Taylor Swift as the most talked about thing on the internet.

Quite an achievement! So, how exactly do you stop Project 2025?

It starts by understanding it, by reading the 920-page document that they arrogantly published and proclaimed as their presidential transition plan. That document lays out in great detail exactly what they intend to do. Our task force has been doing a deep dive into that, working with several dozen outside groups and leading experts to understand what some of these seemingly innocuous things they’re proposing actually mean in real life.

They hide beyond technical terms like ‘Schedule F civil service reform’ and we have been able to understand and help spotlight that what that really means is a mass purge of the entire federal workforce, rooting out anyone who has ever shown sympathy for Democratic politics, anyone who has ever been part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion programme, anyone who has worked on climate science—or anyone else who has offended the sensibilities of MAGA Republican extremists. They want to reclassify these employees and summarily fire them. This would affect well over 50,000 people throughout the federal workforce.

And then, as creepy as that already is, these people would be replaced by a cadre of trained and vetted Trump loyalists who are already maintained in a database housed by the Heritage Foundation. Essentially, they plan to repopulate the federal workforce with their own political operatives. This is not self-evident when you read the technical stuff in Project 2025, but that is exactly what their plan entails.

Can you give another example of their plans?

Yes. There are several ways in which they plan to impose their rigid social order. One of these is to dust off old morality codes from the 1870s using a dormant piece of legislation called the Comstock Act. The Comstock Act criminalises things that can be seen as obscene or profane and one of the things it criminalised back in the 1870s was anything that could terminate a pregnancy. Using this dormant legislation, which many believe is unconstitutional, Project 2025 are proposing what would amount to a nationwide ban on abortion, strict nationwide restrictions on contraception, and the criminalisation of in vitro fertilisation—very extreme and dystopic things.

It seems that the best way to stop Project 2025 is to stop Trump from being elected in November.

That’s the best way. That’s the most definitive way. But even if we beat Trump in this election, now that we have seen the Project 2025 playbook, we are going to have to build some policy firewalls against their plans in the future. The threat won’t go away. We need to build our defences against this kind of extreme takeover of government. But that is going to be much harder to do if Donald Trump is in the White House and his sworn loyalists are populating the entire federal workforce and they have broken down all of the checks and balances that stopped Trump’s worst impulses in his first presidency.

In essence, that’s what Project 2025 is: a plan to remove the obstacles that prevented Trump from doing many of the things he wanted to do or tried to do the first time around and to allow him to go even further.

Do you have a ‘doomsday scenario’ plan in the event of a Trump victory?

Yes, but it’s less than ideal. It relies on a lot of legal challenges in a legal system that has been well-populated by Trump loyalists. It relies on mobilising public opinion in a system where democracy and the democratic levers of power will not mean as much, because, frankly, Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy. Of course, there is no scenario under which we would just let all of this bad stuff happen without putting up a fight, but the tools that we would have to stop Project 2025 would be much less reliable if Trump wins.

How would the implementation of Project 2025 affect the rest of the world? What would be the consequences for America’s friends and allies?

I think that’s an important question for your readers. There’s no doubt that Project 2025 is hostile to the rules-based international order and our alliances that have kept Europe mostly free of war for the past half a century and more. It is hostile to globalism, as they refer to it, meaning free trade and the kind of trade relationships that we have with the European Union and many others around the world. It is hostile to confronting the climate crisis and even to acknowledging climate science. All of these are things that I’m sure folks in Scotland and the UK and throughout Europe would be deeply concerned by.

And there’s no doubt that Project 2025 is fundamentally sympathetic to strongman authoritarian regimes. In fact, it was inspired by Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The folks at the Heritage Foundation took a little trip to Hungary to learn about how Orbán had advanced all of these conservative, nationalist, authoritarian policies. Orbán has influenced the American right wing in a big way. He’s a bit of a rock star in Donald Trump’s world.

And so is Vladimir Putin, to an extent.

Indeed.

What are the chances of beating Trump in the election, now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic candidate?

A heck of a lot better than they were two or three weeks ago. My hope is that America is about to do what France did very recently. The French stared into the abyss of a right-wing authoritarian government and they realised what a scary and terrible prospect that was. In a matter of weeks, they united around a broad alliance to keep the far right out of power, and they succeeded. I think we are seeing a similar realisation and pivot from the American people. At least, I hope that is what’s happening. It certainly feels that way to me.

Looking in from the outside as an admirer of America, one thing I would like to see more of from the Democrats in particular is the patriotic case for secularism. The Christian nationalists and their ilk have claimed the mantle of patriotism, but their ideals are very far from the ideals America was founded on.

I think that’s a great point. And I know that you have worked with Andrew L. Seidel and others who are doing heroic work to recapture secular thought as part of what it means to be a patriotic American. I’m certainly all in for that. But the truth is that, though we did an incredible thing by separating Church and State in our Constitution, we have never done a great job of upholding that ideal. We have allowed Christian privilege and Christian power to influence our government for a long, long time, and in some ways what we’re struggling with now is a reckoning between the written law and the desperate attempts of Christian nationalists to hang on to their power and the founding premise of separating Church and State.

I suppose in some ways that’s the story of America. The battle between competing visions of America and trying to live up to those founding ideals.

Yes, that’s true. And the other thing that’s going on, I think, is that Christianity itself is in many respects changing around the world. I’ve spoken to secularists in Europe, in Scotland, Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, and it does seem that there is a strain of fundamentalist Christianity that has become more pronounced in recent years, a strain that is hyper-masculine, focused on power, and militaristic. The old ‘love thy neighbour’ Christianity is falling out of favour. People are fleeing traditional Christian denominations and identifying with these extreme, fundamentalist versions of Christianity. And they even mock what they see as soft Christianity. There’s a violence to these strains, which we saw with the January 6th insurrection in a big way.

So there is a lot happening, and it is more than just a fight between secularists and religionists. It’s also an internal struggle within Christianity itself over some pretty core values.

Going back to your point about the influence of Orbán, it seems to me that it also works the other way around. You have American fundamentalists pouring money into right-wing groups in Europe and funding fanatics in Israel and Uganda. So what can people outside of the US do to help in the fight against American fundamentalism?

It’s hard to compete with the mountains of dark money spread around the world by billionaire Christian nationalists, but we’re not powerless. The good news is that most people don’t really want to live in an authoritarian theocracy. I think lifting up education and science and civil society around the world is essential, as is promoting the idea of keeping religion out of government, of letting people make their own private religious choices without being able to impose their morality codes on everyone else. It’s a huge challenge, but I welcome the influence of secularists in Europe and elsewhere to try to counterbalance this wrong-headed phenomenon that, unfortunately, is emanating from my country.

That seems like a good place to finish. Good luck in the fight, and in November.

I appreciate that very much. I hope to talk to you again after we have saved our democracy.

Related reading

Donald Trump, political violence, and the future of America, by Daniel James Sharp

Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy, by Jonathan Church

Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? by Matt Johnson

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

A reading list against the ‘New Theism’ (and an offer to debate), by Daniel James Sharp

The post ‘Project 2025 is about accelerating the demise of a functioning democracy’: interview with US Representative Jared Huffman appeared first on The Freethinker.

I was born to an Indian Bengali Hindu family. My childhood was drenched in the rich embroidery of customs, ceremonies, and convictions; my perspective was moulded by the strict social standards that were imposed upon me. But I ended up scrutinising the doctrines that characterised my reality, and now I consider myself a seeker of truth rather than a follower of custom. I have travelled from unbridled religiosity to reasonableness.

My childhood in a Hindu family imparted to me a profound veneration for the heavenly. Narratives of divine beings were woven into the texture of my life. I believed in a world full of divine powers. My grandmother used to recount these exciting stories to me, from Prince Rama killing the demon Ravana and winning the beautiful Sita back to how Narasimha (an exceptional blend of human and lion and the fourth avatar of Vishnu) killed the evil king Hiranyakashipu and protected the king’s faithful son Prahlada.

However, as I grew up, I started to understand that these stories were simple legends. The seeds of uncertainty were planted in me as I took note of the irregularities and inconsistencies of the holy texts and lessons that I had once accepted unquestioningly. Questions emerged: How could a considerate god support unfairness and suffering? What objective reason was there for considering some practices sacrosanct and others not? Why should a husband be seen as a god by his wife? Why should the wife not be treated equally?

These and many other questions drove me to investigate what I had been taught, and eventually I broke free from the shackles of religiosity that had been imposed on me from birth. This was an overwhelming experience of liberation, but it caused conflict between me and my family and others who lived nearby. They could not let go of dogma and custom and were unable to engage with different viewpoints. My family made me practice absurd rituals like not oiling or shampooing my hair, not cutting my nails, and not having non-vegetable foods for 13 days between my grandmother’s death and funeral. But I was undaunted, still desperate to find my own way based on reason and evidence rather than blind adherence to antiquated traditions.

The situation between me and my family was like a cold war initially, but as time went on, they realised that forcing me to adhere to dogmas would not only hamper my personal growth but strain my relationship with them. With time, we both understood that to maintain a healthy relationship, we had to desist from discussing religion openly and respect each other’s choices.

The Hindu misogyny I experienced played a major role in my rejection of dogma. Disallowing menstruating women from entering temples, decreeing that widows are not allowed to participate in wedding rituals, preventing infertile women from taking part in baby showers, and various other misogynistic practices emboldened me to raise my voice against injustice.

I decided to embrace sanity. I recognised that the world was not generally as it appeared and that the search for truth was a progressive and always-evolving endeavour. Many books helped me in my journey towards rationality, starting with the Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh’s 1930 Why I Am an Atheist, which Singh wrote in jail just months before his execution. Singh left certain logical questions—like ‘Why doesn’t God create a better world for humans?’ and ‘Why doesn’t God stop humans from committing sin?’—unanswered in my mind. Later, books like The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) by Daniel Dennett helped me in my path to enlightenment.

So far, my experience as a secular person has been exciting, diverse, and full of challenges. On the one hand, I have faced questioning and judgement from people opposed to my views, and on the other, I have found comfort and backing in networks of similar people who shared my feelings and gave me a sense of fellowship that rose above the limits of religion, nationality, and culture. As I continued my journey, I felt I was in the right kind of company.

As I look back, I feel great appreciation for all the encounters I have had, both positive and negative, for they have moulded me into the person I am today. While the journey to reason was full of difficulties, it was also full of epiphanies, understanding, and personal development. Each step forward gives me a more profound knowledge of myself and the world I find myself in. It has provoked me to scrutinise the convictions and suspicions that once characterised my reality and to embrace vulnerability and uncertainty with boldness and interest. As I continue to explore the intricacies of life, I’m inspired by the thought that the pursuit of truth is an undertaking motivated by our most elevated desires, and I know that by rocking the boat and thinking freely we can make ourselves, and our world, a happier and better place.

Related reading

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Image of the week: Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian materialist and one of the Six Heretics, by Daniel James Sharp

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel, by Emma Park

The post Why I am no longer a Hindu appeared first on The Freethinker.

In an Afghanistan once again ruled by the Taliban, there exist public executions, floggings, and lashings of alleged criminals. A recent edict has also signalled the resumption of stoning for adultery. The Taliban’s leader, Hibatullah Akhundzada, declared:

‘You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles… [But] I represent Allah, and you represent Satan.’

It was clear from the start that the Taliban intended to create an Islamic theocracy. Recent developments along that road were inevitable—and also inevitably, Afghanistan’s 14 million women and girls are the ones who have suffered the most for this.

In December 2022, over a year after the Taliban’s re-ascension to power, they brought in a ban on women working in national and international NGOs. In April 2023, women were also banned from working with UN agencies. As Philip Loft of the House of Commons Library noted, ‘For 70% of these women, this was also their family’s main source of income.’ All the while, both the US and the UN continue to provide humanitarian aid to the country. As ProPublica has reported, ‘The U.S. remains the largest donor of aid to Afghanistan, providing a total of about $2.6 billion since the collapse of the previous Afghan government.’ There are credible fears that at least some of this money is being diverted to the Taliban. As US Representative Michael McCaul, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stated, ‘The U.S. government must work harder to prevent the Taliban from benefiting from humanitarian aid.’

The Taliban’s curtailment of women’s freedom has meant the deprivation of incomes for thousands of families and a reliance on foreign aid. However, this is not the Taliban’s only source of income. Dr Nooralhaq Nasimi MBE, the founder of the European Campaign for Human Rights for the People of Afghanistan, said to me that ‘the Taliban makes a lot of its money from opium production and lithium mining’, the latter of which involves Chinese investment. Although an uncertain industry in Afghanistan, lithium mining is potentially very lucrative, with Foreign Policy reporting in April 2023 that China had signed a deal worth ‘$10 billion for access to lithium deposits’.

The tragedy of the Taliban takeover in August 2021 is hard to overstate. Samira Hamidi, an Afghan women’s rights activist, told me that ‘the catastrophe in the country is getting worse’, and that ‘in the twenty years in between the Taliban’s time in power, most women and girls were trying to work, educate themselves, and build better lives.’ That freedom was denied to them for so long pre-2001, granted for a brief period, and then snatched away again is an open wound, felt within Afghanistan and in the diaspora. This state of affairs is hardly accidental or limited to education. Hamidi also told me that in governmental offices there are ‘signs telling women they are not allowed to enter.’ The systematic exclusion of women and girls from public life is an intentional move away from the ‘democratic principles’ Akhundzada so scornfully mentioned.

Despite this, a small light flickers, and there have been some brave acts of resistance. Hamidi said to me that ‘there were mass protests at the beginning, consisting mainly of women and girls.’ Although the protests have tapered off, ‘there are individual actions from brave individuals including human rights activists, women, and journalists.’ For instance, Ismail Mashal, a journalism professor who ran a private university, ripped up his academic records on live TV, handed out books in public, and refused to discriminate between his female and male students. For his courage and solidarity with the women of Afghanistan, he was met with violence and imprisonment.

Mashal’s stand was particularly notable given the pre-eminence of women in the protests against the Taliban. As a Human Rights Watch report noted in February 2023:

‘Mashal’s sense of justice, solidarity, and dissent provided a ray of hope in a country where peaceful protests are often solely championed by women. Since the Taliban took over Afghanistan in August 2021, public protests involving Afghan men standing up for women’s rights have been rare.’

This fact is another aspect of the tragedy: those with the most to lose, women, have made the greatest sacrifices to retain their freedoms, while the lack of solidarity from the other half of the population is one reason for their failure.

The Window of Hope women’s movement, an organisation fighting gender apartheid, recently released a statement:

‘We Afghan women have always raised our voice against the violation of human rights and the systematic suppression and elimination of women since the Taliban took over. Our voice should have been heard. But today, unfortunately, by ignoring the wishes of women and the people of Afghanistan, the process of systematic exclusion of women, arbitrary arrests, torture of prisoners, extra-legal gang rape trials of prisoners, suppression of ethnic and religious minorities has become a normal thing.’

That last fact is one too often forgotten. Despite claiming the status of an Islamic state, which should in theory not discriminate between different peoples, the Taliban is a deeply racist and sectarian organisation. Primarily populated by Pashtuns, they consider only themselves as ‘proper’ Afghans. Dr Nasimi told me that ‘the Taliban, when they entered Kabul, shot many members of the Tajik and Hazara ethnic groups.’

This is old behaviour recreated in new circumstances. A Human Rights Watch report from November 1998 chronicled the massacre of thousands of Hazara men and boys in the northwestern city of Mazar-i Sharif. This is further supported by a September 2020 written submission from the Hazara Research Collective to the International Relations and Defence Committee within the UK Parliament: ‘Over 8,000 Hazaras were systematically killed by the Taliban in the Mazar-i Sharif massacre of 1998.’

Ethnic and religious hatred is a sign of a disordered and diseased ideology, and this thread of violence connects the Taliban of the 1990s to the Taliban of today. A former government advisor who worked in the government overthrown by the Taliban in 2021 told me that ‘people in Afghanistan are not mentally well, they do not have any position in the country’s social and political life, they are not free to express themselves and all people think of is how to escape the country.’ There is undoubtedly truth in what he says. But, as the words and deeds of Afghanistan’s brave women show, a small light still exists, and one day, it shall burn much more brightly.

Related reading

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

South Asia’s silenced feminists, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

A new pact for atheism in the 21st century, by Leo Igwe

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The post A Small Light: Acts of Resistance in Afghanistan appeared first on The Freethinker.

Although elaborate hate speech laws can make it extremely difficult, we have the right to freedom of expression in Britain. Generally speaking, musicians are free to express their opinions. Morrissey can voice his opposition to mass immigration and concerns about the erosion of English identity while Stormzy can take the stage at Glastonbury and get his audience of over 200,000 people to yell ‘fuck the government’, both with impunity. The ability of artists to hold those in positions of power accountable is a fundamental civil liberty that ensures the maintenance of political equilibrium in a liberal democracy.

While our system has many flaws—cough, Scotland—we have never executed a musician for speaking their mind, as far as I can recall. And yet the Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi must face the horrifying reality of that exact situation. Salehi was given a death sentence in April this year after the Islamic Revolutionary Court of Isfahan accused him of ‘waging war against god’.

Salehi is a vocal opponent of the Islamic Republic. The right to free speech is guaranteed to well-known socially conscious rappers in the West, such as Talib Kweli and Immortal Technique, but Salehi was not accorded the same protection to express himself. In Iran, hip-hop is strictly forbidden. Artists typically use pseudonyms to get around the regime; Salehi, on the other hand, has always gone by his real name. 

The 33-year-old is at the forefront of socially conscious hip-hop in Iran and was a pioneer of the Rap-e Farsi (Persian-language rap) movement. His lyrics advocate for greater rights for women and workers while addressing injustice and inequality. In tracks like ‘Pomegranate’, he sings ‘Human (life) is cheap, the labourer is a pomegranate, Iran is a wealthy, fertile land,’ alluding to workers as nothing more than fruit to be squeezed. However, the majority of his vitriol is aimed at the Islamic Republic itself. In his most well-known song, ‘Soorakh Moosh’ (‘Rat Hole’), he condemns all those who support the corrupt regime and turn a blind eye to oppression and injustice. 

It was songs like this that initially drew the state’s attention to him. Iran’s security forces detained Salehi on September 13 2021 and accused him of ‘insulting the Supreme Leader’ and ‘propaganda against the regime’. He was granted a six-month suspended sentence and released from prison after serving more than a week. 

Salehi’s case serves as a microcosm of the fractures that exist in Iranian society more than 40 years after the revolution of 1979. Since the overthrow of the Shah, the country has been ruled as an Islamic republic, with women required to cover their hair in strict compliance with Islamic modesty laws. The ageing clerical elite—Ayatollah Khamenei is 85— is at variance with the majority of its citizens, who were born after the revolution. Many of them are concerned with personal freedoms and financial security—50% of Iranians are living in absolute poverty—rather than religious purity. Salehi speaks for a generation of disillusioned youth. 

His activism extends beyond words: he has supported a number of social causes, most notably the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and the September 2022 protests, which were sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman who was detained by the police after she was accused of wearing an ‘improper’ hijab. Subsequent anti-hijab demonstrations, which saw thousands of people take to the streets calling for women’s rights and the dissolution of the Islamic Republic, with many of them burning hijabs, spread across the country and resulted in over 22,000 arrests and over 530 deaths.

To support the women-led uprising, Salehi released two songs. ‘Battlefield’, which was released in early October 2022, contains the lyrics, ‘Woman, life, freedom, we will fight to the death/ Shoulder to shoulder like a defensive wall/ I believe in solidarity like divine faith/…We are thirsty for freedom’. A few weeks later, he released a song containing the lines, ‘44 years of your government, it is the year of failure/… Someone’s crime was dancing with her hair in the wind / Someone’s crime was that he or she was brave and criticised [the government]’.

On October 30, 2022, Salehi was detained once more and charged with spreading ‘propagandistic activity against the government’. He received a prison sentence of six years and three months in July 2023. The Supreme Court granted him bail in November after he had been imprisoned for more than a year, including 252 days in solitary confinement. When he was free, he posted a video to his official YouTube account from outside the jail where he had been held, claiming he had been tortured—having his arms and legs broken and given shots of adrenaline to keep him awake. He was swiftly reimprisoned.

For the crime of talking, or, in the words of the Isfahan court, ‘spreading corruption on earth’, Salehi was sentenced to death on 24 April 2024. As of writing, the case is awaiting appeal.

This is not an isolated case. Saman Yasin is another musician who suffered a similar fate. The Supreme Court commuted the Kurdish rapper’s death sentence, which had been imposed after his arrest during the 2022 protests, to five years in prison. Yasin has allegedly been tortured and prohibited from interacting with others.

Under the iron fist of Khamenei, Iran crushes dissent. Amnesty International reports that 853 people were executed in Iran in 2023—the highest number since 2015 and a 48% increase from the year before. 74% of executions reported globally in 2023 occurred in the Islamic Republic. 

Women who violate the dress code have also been severely punished. Ironically, a few weeks prior to World Hijab Day this year, an Iranian woman and activist by the name of Roya Heshmati was detained for 11 days, fined $300, and whipped 74 times after she was caught on social media without a headscarf. Salehi is right to use his platform to expose the violent misogyny that permeates totalitarian Islamic societies like Iran. The hijab is, quite simply, a symbol of oppression, not liberation, whatever some in the West might think. 

Freedom of expression is essential for musicians. All artists must be free to question, challenge, and criticise authority. The tyrant’s empire is built on a foundation of censorship. Words mean little when no one can hear them. Salehi’s three million Instagram followers have contributed to the attention his case has received in the West. While we can all lament the loss of meaningful conversation on social media, we cannot deny its power to instantly connect millions of people. 

Music is a powerful medium for telling stories. And we can spread that message by using the internet. A new wave of youthful, politically engaged musicians is emerging thanks to social media, as shown by Salehi and many others. See also the rise of dissident rappers in Russia such as Oxxxymiron and FACE—the latter of whom Putin has designated as a foreign agent. 

Nobody should ever be sentenced to death or even arrested for speaking their mind. Those who foolishly believe they can use violence to counter the pen do so because they understand that most people will be intimidated into silence. His extraordinary bravery and conviction bear witness to the principles that Salehi has upheld throughout his life. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes, ‘Courage is the only virtue you cannot fake.’ 

While we in the West take the right to free speech for granted, we should praise courageous people like Saman Yasin and Toomaj Salehi—people who are prepared to risk their lives in order to challenge the hegemony of the Ayatollah and his despotic, theocratic regime. 

Related reading

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Image of the week: celebrating the death of Ebrahim Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, by Daniel James Sharp

Secularism is a feminist issue, by Megan Manson

Faith Watch, November 2023, by Daniel James Sharp

When does a religious ideology become a political one? The case of Islam, by Niko Alm

‘The best way to combat bad speech is with good speech’ – interview with Maryam Namazie, by Emma Park

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

The rhythm of Tom Paine’s bones, by Eoin Carter

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Celebrating Eliza Flower: an unconventional woman, by Frances Lynch

The post Rap versus theocracy: Toomaj Salehi and the fight for a free Iran appeared first on The Freethinker.

With Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist party facing a setback in the polls, now is a good moment to consider other, nobler Indian traditions. This is what Kunwar Khuldune Shahid recently did in this magazine, discussing various strands of Indic religion and philosophy going back millennia. One such strand is Carvaka, one of the oldest atheist/materialist philosophical schools in history. Shahid describes it thus:

‘Carvaka, however, corresponds most closely to modern-day atheism. It takes no prisoners in denying the supernatural. The seventh-century Indic Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti described the views of Carvaka thus: ‘Believing that the Veda are standard (holy or divine), believing in a Creator for the world, Bathing in holy waters for gaining punya, having pride (vanity) about one’s caste, Performing penance to absolve sins, Are the five symptoms of having lost one’s sanity.’ The adherents of Carvaka endorsed materialism, viewing pratyaksha, or direct perception, as the sole means of attaining knowledge and calling the concept of the afterworld and ‘the realm of Shiva’ fabrications of ‘stupid imposters’. The Carvaka school of thought has been referenced in everything from epics like the Mahabharata to the Mughal codes of law to modern-day podcasts.’

Having examined the roots of Hindu nationalist ideology, Shahid concludes:

‘Perhaps it is through embracing the best ideals of Carvaka, forged by its millennia-old struggle against all forms of superstition and supremacism, that Indic freethought can truly be unshackled from religious groupthink and dogma and any interpretation of god can be rendered decisively irrelevant in matters of governance.’

Hence this image of the week, a portrayal from the Dazu Rock Carvings in China of the ancient Indian materialist Ajita Kesakambali (fl. 6th century BCE). Kesakambali’s ideas were a major source for the Carvaka school, and his writings are the earliest surviving Carvaka texts. The image is cropped from a photograph featuring five of the Six Heretical Teachers, rivals of the Buddha supposedly defeated by him in a miracle contest. More information on the story of the Six can be found here.

The story is meant, of course, to glorify the Buddha, but it demonstrates the pluralistic nature of ancient Indian philosophy, which even included avowed godlessness. Modi and the advocates of the Hindu Nation deliberately obscure this pluralism in the name of religious purity. They are traitors to India’s greatest and deepest traditions, from the secularism of Nehru to the diversity of ancient Indian philosophy. Their nationalism is built on lies. Or, in other words, it is nationalism.

Long live Carvaka!

Image cropped from a photograph by Gwydion M. Williams. CC BY 2.0.

Related reading

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel, by Emma Park

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

‘Words are the only victors’ – Salman Rushdie’s ‘Victory City’, reviewed, by Daniel James Sharp

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

Faith Watch, February 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Image of the week: Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian materialist and one of the Six Heretics appeared first on The Freethinker.

Up until early 2018, I was a staunch believer in Islam, accepting everything that was imposed on me without question. However, my journey towards enlightenment began when I enrolled in a BS English Literature program for my higher studies. I assumed that studying English would be the same as learning a foreign language, just as I had been taught since my first day of school. But I was wrong.

The term ‘literature’ was foreign to me until I attended my first class. Growing up in a society where human emotions, feelings, and thoughts are not considered worthy of being written about, I was puzzled by the very concept of literature. I started pondering what it meant, apart from its numerous official definitions.

Despite my incompetency in reading English books, I started reading English novels, a practice that is not common in my society. It is not taught or encouraged by parents or teachers to read beyond the course books. But I was determined to discover the meaning of the word ‘literature’.

After finishing my first two novels, Animal Farm by George Orwell and The Broken Wings by Khalil Gibran, in my first semester, I faced extreme difficulty in understanding their meanings. English is an adopted language in the place where I live, and I hardly understood what I had read, but I was able to sketch the storylines.

I did not give up, however, and I kept reading, but it became a challenge for me, especially as a woman in a society where women are expected to do little more than handle household chores. Even just holding an English novel in my hands was considered questionable, and I was met with disapproving looks from my family. Whenever the family was sleeping, whether in the afternoon or evening, I read. I used to take my book to college and read outside whenever possible.

After consistently reading English novels, stories, prose, and poetry for two years, my mind started questioning. I was trying to find answers to my questions but I could not find them anywhere. So, I started writing poetry in English, which seemed like an outlet for my burning emotions. It was a blurry period where I was stuck between my beliefs and my questions.

It took me more than a year to write out all my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I wrote like crazy, but it did not satisfy me. I was seeking something that could extinguish the fire burning inside me.

The more I read, the more my mind asked questions. After reading English literature from different periods, I saw the changes undergone by English, British, and global society. I saw the lives of women in literature and compared them to the lives of women around me. Reading novels like Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, which depict the struggles of women’s lives to realise their individuality in a stifling and patriarchal world, broadened my perspective. I started seeing the hypocrisy of my society, where patriarchal cultural norms are imposed behind the shield of religion. This made me seek the reasons behind the huge differences I had become aware of.

In the penultimate year of my bachelor’s, I came to know about theories like feminism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, de-structuralism, colonialism, and absurdism. Before knowing about these, I was just reading the lines, but these theories made me read between and beyond the lines. I started applying theories to the texts I read, which opened another world to me. Now, I could see the realities behind everything that was structured around me. My excitement for reading became, more and more, a craze. Reading changed me from a submissive girl into a furious one who was ready to debate and discuss.

But this was not welcomed. I started questioning my teachers, my fellows, my relatives, and my family. Apart from a few people, I was met with negativity.

In the last year of my BS, I was supposed to conduct research for my thesis. Everyone advised me to go for novels and drama, not poetry; arguments about poetry were supposed to be more difficult to defend in a thesis. But being a lover of poetry and a poetess, I decided to choose the difficult path that most people avoided. I ended up analysing Sylvia Plath’s poems through the lens of absurdism. It was difficult, but I wanted to challenge myself, to discover new things.

After four years of struggle, I came out of university as another being who was aware of her rights, one who knew how and when to say ‘no’, and one who was familiar with the realities of life and the system I lived in. Studying English literature changed my life forever. Now, when people tell me I need to be a woman in a particular way, I just laugh at their foolishness. It is like telling a blind man who has recovered his sight to go back to the darkness.

Now that I am equipped to see the realities behind the curtains of social, cultural, and religious phenomena, I am trying to make other women aware of their basic freedom. They are free beings apart from their religion, society, and culture but they are still deprived of their freedom and rights in the name of these things. Sadly, women around me are caged and they are happy with it. I understand how they feel: as the old saying goes, ignorance is bliss. They accept this slavery imposed on them by society as something natural and unquestionable. I wish that I could see them become aware and empowered. And I also wish that women in my society could get more access to higher education. That way, perhaps, they will be able to share my experience of emancipation.

The post My journey from blindness to rationality: how English literature saved me appeared first on The Freethinker.

In 2018, a group of feminists in Karachi, the largest city in Pakistan, decided to march for gender justice on 8 March, International Women’s Day. They named it Aurat March (Women’s March). Hundreds marched with colourful placards demanding immediate social change in the country. The march kept growing and in subsequent years marches were held in various other cities including Lahore, Islamabad, Hyderabad, Multan, Larkana, Faisalabad, and Sukkur. This year saw hundreds join the seventh Aurat March in several cities across Pakistan. Nevertheless, the march has seen severe backlash over the years, not only from the media and society at large but also from the state.

How did this radical and reviled movement begin? I spoke to classical dancer and social activist Sheema Kermani, who has been involved with the Aurat March Karachi Chapter since its inception. She said that their idea was to show society that women have had enough and that they were ready for change. They had no idea that the Aurat March would turn into such a massive movement:

‘Seven years ago, we did not know how far it would go or whether it would be more than that. We wanted to show our protest and resistance against patriarchy. More importantly, we wanted to show that women in Pakistan were ready for a change.’

The mainstream media mostly ignored the first march, but this is true for all social movements in the beginning. However, as the movement grew, some of the slogans from the march such as mera jism meri marzi (my body, my choice) went viral on the internet and inspired a huge backlash. The march was accused of being against the societal norms, religion, and culture of Pakistani society.

Some opponents of Aurat have tried to place restrictions on the march, claiming that the slogans were immoral and indecent. However, Islamabad High Court dismissed that petition and ordered that the words used in the slogans of the march should be understood based on the intentions of the marchers rather than through the mindset of a certain section of society who opposed the march. Another attempt to ban the march was rejected by the Lahore High Court. Since these cases, the organisers have worked hard to keep the march going every year while handling the backlash and court cases and keeping the marches in line with legal directions—not to mention keeping the marchers safe.

Journalist and feminist Sabahat Zakariya, a regular at Aurat March Lahore Chapter, told me that the march’s biggest achievement was to push people to talk about issues that they would not even normally count as issues:

‘The march did a lot to bring certain intangible ideas to the mainstream. Like [the slogan] khud khana garam karlo (warm your food yourself). It is not a light issue. It is about domestic burdens and who takes work responsibility in the house. These are very important things that need…to be reflected upon.’

The state has also resisted the march. The organisers of several chapters have faced issues with getting permits for the march and have had to deal with security arrangements, route approval, handling court petitions against the march, and filing petitions to seek assistance in carrying out the march. These things take most of their energy and resources, leaving them with limited room for focusing on the march itself. An organiser from the Lahore Chapter told me (on the condition of anonymity):

‘I think people did not understand the march in 2018. We started seeing resistance after the 2019 march, especially at the state level. Every year, the resistance is different. Last year, we were not permitted to arrange the march [in Lahore], though we have been marching for several years. Eventually, the court permitted us.’

The organiser said that some chapters face more difficulties than others. In some cities like Karachi and Lahore, the march is more or less accepted, while in Islamabad the police restrict marchers to a specific area. In some conservative areas of the country, it is entirely impossible to organise a march.

‘I feel the government [and the police] have gotten used to the march. Now we do not see administrative resistance. They have security plans, they know our routes…but society gives us strong resistance. Some file petitions [against the march] every year,’ the Lahore Chapter organiser said. ‘In Islamabad, police give more resistance to marchers. They did not let them march beyond the Press Club [this year]. In Karachi and Lahore, the situation is a bit more lenient. Though we do [still] face some resistance from the police.’

2021 was the toughest year for Aurat organisers and marchers. They had to deal with several blasphemy cases against them. This was when they became more cautious of the media. Many of them would decline to comment or would request anonymity. They were already wary of the mainstream media due to incorrect reporting and its insensitivity towards gender issues and events. The blasphemy accusations increased this wariness. As the Lahore Chapter organiser said,

‘We recognize that more engagement with media will bring harm to the march because they do not have gender sensitivity and skills to cover [the] women’s movement. It is not our goal that the media should cover the march much due to bad experiences. We think it is good to stay [aside] from the media.’

Zakariya is of the opinion that the mainstream media has deliberately not been engaging with the movement. However, she thinks the march has become ‘dull’ because now the marchers are not as bold as they used to be. They are more engaged with the mainstream media critique. They bring with them placards that are more focused on answering media criticisms than on expressing their own views.

Dr Feroza Batool, who researched backlashes to the Aurat March for her doctoral thesis, believes that despite the popularity and impact of the march, it has experienced an intense decline in its momentum, mainly due to the backlash:

‘I feel that the momentum of the Aurat March has decreased. The march was giving space for people to come there and talk about their issues. It was perhaps a big thing for a group that wanted that space to let out their frustration and reflect on their lived experiences through their placards. But there were other people too who, when [they] received backlash, could not handle it and they decided to back off.’

Dr Batool also raised concerns about the movement’s inclusivity and connection to the grassroots. She found in her research that march organisers in several cities started to distance themselves from local organisations and unions working for women’s rights:

‘I feel the open idea of different perspectives on feminism and the environment that was there in the start for everyone started to reduce over time. The march is not very inclusive. The march [has tilted] to the elite circle of feminists in the past few years. It happens to other movements too. A movement starts, people join it, but then some hijack it. I feel those on the forefront of such movements get some rigidity in themselves and they expect that others [should] follow them with the same perspective.’

However, she also said that the march had shaken the patriarchy in the conservative society of Pakistan and that it would keep doing so due to the involvement of youth in the movement. Nonetheless, the march will have to do a lot more to turn into a movement that involves everyone from every segment of society, and it faces a long and difficult struggle to realise its aim of women’s emancipation in Pakistan.

Further reading

Breaking the silence: Pakistani ex-Muslims find a voice on social media, by Tehreem Azeem

The power of outrage, by Tehreem Azeem

From religious orthodoxy to free thought, by Tehreem Azeem

Coerced faith: the battle against forced conversions in Pakistan’s Dalit community, by Shaukat Korai

South Asia’s silenced feminists, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The post From the streets to social change: examining the evolution of Pakistan’s Aurat March appeared first on The Freethinker.

In January, the BBC reported that the Islamic Students Associations of Britain (ISA) has been promoting online events in which Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commanders have given anti-Semitic and Islamist talks to students. One such speaker even later boasted about his role in training Hamas before the 7 October attacks. The ISA is different from mainstream student Muslim groups in that, as the BBC reported, it ‘was founded to promote the philosophy of the leader of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini.’ The IRGC is one of the arms of the Iranian state and it supports Islamist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The British security services say that they have dealt with more than a dozen kidnapping and assassination plots by the IRGC since 2020.

All of this reveals just how insidiously the Iranian regime is using Muslim organisations in the West to target and radicalise Muslim youth. Despite this, and despite the fact that the Iranian leadership has a long history of waging proxy conflicts in the Middle East to destabilise the region, Iran was appointed chair of the 2023 United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Social Forum.

It is important to mention that the Social Forum took place amid Israel and Hamas’ ongoing conflict (though the initial appointment of Iran to the chair preceded the conflict). On 7 October, Hamas entered Israel with the sole goal of killing as many people as they could. They brutally massacred more than 1,000 people of all ages, including men, women, children, and entire families.

Given the links between Iran and terrorist groups like Hamas, 7 October raised the question of Iran’s involvement in the massacre of Israeli civilians. There have been conflicting reports about Iran’s direct involvement in the attack, but Iran has publicly praised the attack and voiced its strong support for Hamas. Nevertheless, the UN let Iran chair the Social Forum. Less than a month after 7 October, the UN General Assembly rejected a resolution to condemn Hamas for such a vicious attack on civilians.

This is not to mention that, while the UN’s response to 7 October and Hamas’s crimes has been severely lacking, Israel has been harshly criticised for its counter-attack. It is reprehensible that the United Nations, the very organisation that was established to resolve international conflicts and promote human rights, has been unable to consistently do so in this case.

Despite their theological differences, the Iranian regime and the extremists it supports share essentially the same ideology as the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State. They seek to subjugate people under Islamic law and to establish and spread Islamic states. People who think that the dream of establishing the caliphate died with the military destruction of Islamic State are wrong. Islamic State’s ideology lives on in the shape of Hamas and Hezbollah and the theocratic regime that supports them. Radicalisation and terrorism remain as dangerous as ever.

In the UK, the director general of MI5, Ken McCallum, has said that MI5 is ‘focused with particular intensity’ on the growing risk of attacks within the UK following recent events in the Middle East. He further said:

‘Sadly, over the course of my career, it has often been the case that events in the Middle East can then echo in Europe, in the UK, and so my teams are absolutely alert to the possibility that events in the Middle East cause some people in the United Kingdom to attempt some form of attack of whatever sort.’

By allowing Iran to chair the UNHRC Social Forum, the UN demonstrated extreme indifference to the plight of the people suffering at the hands of extremists. The Iranian people have been protesting in the streets since 2022, demanding an end to an oppressive, cruel, authoritarian dictatorship that sanctions state-sponsored terrorism. This appointment, announced shortly after Iran executed two men for blasphemy, was a disastrous choice that both subtly and explicitly validated Iran’s brutal treatment of its citizens.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has a history of overtly violating human rights, especially those of women and anti-regime dissidents. It is regrettable, to put it mildly, that the United Nations let Iran’s corrupt and theocratic government legitimise its brutal treatment of the Iranian people by giving them a platform at the UNHRC.

The Iranian protests since September 2022 were provoked by the death, in custody, of Mahsa Amini, 22. She likely died after being beaten by the morality police for wearing ‘improper’ hijab. Last year, 17-year-old Armita Geravand passed away after purportedly being beaten into a month-long coma by a member of the morality police. Her crime was the same as Amini’s.

This presents a bleak picture of the state-sponsored violence that is a reality for the Iranian people, especially for women and girls. It is a sad state of affairs that after Mahsa Amini was killed, very little was done by the international community to hold the Iranian authorities responsible for the use of lethal force against demonstrators.

The UN has a long history of pusillanimity when it comes to Iran. In 2022, Iran was chosen to serve on the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). After Amini’s death, the United States proposed the successful resolution to remove Iran from the CSW. This was viewed as a positive step in holding the Iranian regime accountable for its long history of mistreatment of and discrimination against women and girls.

The irony is that the resolution was proposed and approved because the member states felt that Iran’s membership on the Commission had tarnished the UN’s reputation on human rights. But the very next year, as we have seen, the UN appointed Iran to chair the UNHRC Social Forum.

The Iranian people were left in the dark by this appointment. It showed once again that the UN’s commitment to human rights is, at best, shaky and inconsistent. The Iranian regime is an Islamist regime, whose aims include the dissemination of terror and extremism around the world and the theocratic oppression of its own people. The UN’s criminal negligence has had and will continue to have terrible ramifications for the Middle East and the entire world. Not least, it emboldens Iran in its continued support for the heinous act of terrorism that Hamas carried out on the Israeli people on 7 October. The UN is effectively giving the go-ahead to a murderous terror organisation to destroy everything that stands in the way of their theocratic dreams.

Further reading

The ‘Women’s Revolution’: from two activists in Iran, by Rastine Mortad and Sadaf Sepiddasht

The need for a new Enlightenment, by Christopher Hitchens

The hijab is the wrong symbol to represent women, by Khadija Khan

Religion and the Arab-Israeli conflict, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Bloodshed in Gaza: Islamists, leftist ideologues, and the prospects of a two-state solution, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

An Islamic (mis)education about Israel, by Hina Husain

Is the Israel-Palestine conflict fundamentally a nationalist, not a religious, war? by Ralph Leonard

Young, radical and morally confused, by Gerfried Ambrosch

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A judge citing the Bible and referring to God dozens of times in a court decision that limits reproductive health care. A nonbinary teenager dead after months of bullying in a state where public officials are advancing anti-LGBTQ+ policies. Public school boards agreeing to hire religious chaplains in place of mental health counsellors. A nationally televised prayer service sponsored by members of Congress, attended by the President of the United States, and held in the seat of American government. 

All these incidents happened recently and within the space of about a month in different locations across the United States. They may seem unrelated, but all serve as potent examples of how white Christian Nationalism is ascendant in the U.S.

White Christian Nationalism is a political ideology and cultural framework rooted in the dangerous belief that America is—and must remain—a Christian nation founded for its white Christian inhabitants, and that our laws and policies must codify that privilege. Christian Nationalists deny the separation of church and state promised by the U.S. Constitution. They oppose equality for Black and Brown people, women, LGBTQ+ people, religious minorities, and the nonreligious because their goal is to retain traditional power structures and turn back America’s steady progress toward her goal of equality. Through a well-funded shadow network of organizations, allied politicians and judges, and other political power brokers, Christian Nationalists are marshalling the power of the state to impose their beliefs on all Americans.

Take reproductive freedom. In February, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a theology-infused opinion that human life begins at conception and therefore frozen embryos harvested for in vitro fertilization should have the same legal rights as living, breathing children. The court’s chief justice went a step further by writing a 22-page concurring opinion in which he cited the Bible five times and mentioned God or “the creator” nearly 50 times.

It was far from the first time that public officials have cited religion to justify the restriction of reproductive rights. In Missouri, legislators repeatedly voiced their religious beliefs when they passed the state’s current abortion ban; they even wrote religion into the law itself, proclaiming, ‘Almighty God is the author of life.’ My organization, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, along with the National Women’s Law Center, is in court on behalf of 14 clergy from seven different faith denominations challenging Missouri’s ban, which went into effect when the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative bloc abolished the nationwide right to abortion in 2022. During the oral argument before the Supreme Court in that case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called out Mississippi lawmakers’ religious impetus for banning abortion: ‘How is your interest anything but a religious view?’

Christian Nationalism is also behind much of the vile persecution of LGBTQ+ people. Americans United and its allies have demanded the ouster of a religious extremist state politician who is pushing his anti-LGBTQ+, Christian Nationalist policies to the extreme. Ryan Walters, the superintendent of public instruction for Oklahoma, is on a crusade to infuse religion into the state’s public schools, from personally praying to a classroom of elementary school students to writing a suggested prayer for all of the state’s schools to supporting the creation of what would be the nation’s first religious public school (Americans United is also challenging that school in court).

Walters also advocates the teaching of a whitewashed version of American history and demonizes LGBTQ+ people. It was in this toxic atmosphere that a 16-year-old nonbinary student named Nex Benedict died. Nex, who was of Native American heritage, died on 8 February after being beaten in their Oklahoma high school restroom by other students. This came after months of bullying. Nex’s death was ruled a suicide; state and federal officials continue to investigate the circumstances around their death. But what is clear is that Walters created the environment that drove this child—whom he was supposed to protect—to a place of hopelessness and despair. After Nex’s death, Walters doubled down on his anti-trans rhetoric: In a New York Times interview, he said: ‘There’s not multiple genders. There’s two. That’s how God created us.’

The attack on public schools and students that Walters is waging in Oklahoma is a microcosm of what we are seeing across the country. Christian Nationalists are on a crusade to impose their religious beliefs on public school students even as they continue to divert ever more public funding to private religious schools. Right now, Americans United is tracking more than 1,300 bills in states across the country that impact church-state separation; nearly half of them involve public education.

Following in the path of Texas, at least 14 state legislatures have proposed bills that would allow public schools to replace qualified counsellors with religious chaplains. Lawmakers in various states have also proposed bills that would require public school classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, allow public school teachers to pray in front of and even with students, and allow for the teaching of the Bible or intelligent design creationism in public schools. At the same time, religious extremists are advancing schemes that force taxpayers to fund tuition at private, religious schools that can indoctrinate and discriminate; last year alone at least 17 states expanded or created new private school voucher programs.

There are so many other examples I could give of how Christian Nationalism is invading our lives and threatening our rights and freedoms. One vivid example was, while waving the Christian flag and ‘Jesus saves’ banners, Christian Nationalists drove the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021, as election deniers sought to keep former president Donald Trump in power.

Recent polling by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that about 30% of Americans are adherents to or sympathizers of Christian Nationalism; a majority of Republicans and a supermajority of white evangelical Protestants espouse these views. PRRI also found that Christian Nationalists are more likely to have racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and patriarchal views. And the survey not surprisingly found a correlation between Christian Nationalism and a penchant for personal and political violence and authoritarianism.

This is not the first time the U.S. has experienced a resurgence of Christian Nationalism. In the 1950s amid the Cold War, Christian Nationalists were behind Congress creating the National Prayer Breakfast, adding ‘under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance that schoolchildren recite every morning, and establishing ‘In God We Trust’ as the national motto. They were also behind the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s and 1980s, as religious conservatives opposed to the desegregation of Christian universities coalesced into an anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ+ rights, anti-feminism political movement.

America’s changing demographics and the fear this is engendering are spurring the current rise in white Christian Nationalism. In 2014, white Christians ceased being the majority in America. As their numbers have declined, the number of religiously unaffiliated people (the ‘nones’) has grown to about 26% of the population, according to PRRI. The U.S. has elected the first Black president and the first multiracial and female vice president. Same-sex couples now have the right to marry nationwide. There have been great strides in the movements for racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ+ equality.

Now we are seeing the backlash: White Christian Nationalists are raging against the dying of their privilege. They were emboldened by Trump, who tapped into their insecurity and gave them unprecedented access to the White House and influence over federal policies. The Trump administration weaponized religious freedom as a license to discriminate in social services, health care, employment, education, and other aspects of American life.

During a 2018 state dinner at the White House with prominent evangelical Christians, Trump bragged: ‘The support you’ve given me has been incredible, but I really don’t feel guilty because I have given you a lot back—just about everything I promised. And, as one of our great pastors just said, ‘Actually, you’ve given us much more, sir, than you’ve promised,’ and I think that’s true in many respects.’

Through a shadow network of organizations and political allies working to pack the courts, lobby politicians to rewrite laws, and empower book-banning, curriculum-scrubbing school boards, white Christian Nationalists are wielding outsized power. And they are taking a wrecking ball to the wall that separates church and state. They know church-state separation is the antidote to white Christian Nationalism. They know that this bedrock principle, an American original enshrined in our Constitution, protects freedom and equality for all of us. They know that it is foundational to our democracy. And they know that it is incompatible with their agenda of securing power and privilege for a select few.

The good news is that America has faced waves of white Christian Nationalism before and battled it back. That, combined with the reality that we have the power of the people and the American Constitution on our side, gives me hope for the future. Americans United for Separation of Church and State has been around for 77 years and the organization is thriving. Every day, we are bringing together growing numbers of religious and nonreligious Americans to fight in the courts, in Congress, across state legislatures, and in the public square for freedom without favour and equality without exception. What could be more American than that?

Further reading

Reproductive freedom is religious freedom, by Andrew Seidel and Rachel Laser

Secular conservatives? If only… by Jacques Berlinerblau

Faith Watch, February 2024 and Faith Watch, March 2024, by Daniel James Sharp

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