Double Bind

In a period of right wing attacks on Muslims - or people thought to be Muslims - how does one respond to human rights violations by the Muslim Right without feeding hate campaigns?

When US diplomats invoke the oppression of Muslim women to sanctify war, how do we practice feminist solidarity without strengthening Orientalism and neocolonialism?

When the US targets jihadis for assassination by drone, should human rights defenders worry about violations perpetrated by those same jihadis or focus on violations by the state?

Double Bind opens with ambitious questions.  Perhaps it is optimistic to expect a 100-page volume to answer them in full, especially when the very act of asking confuses sections of the left-wing audience and therefore itself needs to be explained.  But the questions invite that expectation and though writer and feminist activist Meredith Tax signposts an in-principle way forward with clarity, Double Bind would be a more effective book with more detail.

Both the book and its publisher, the Centre for Secular Space, have grown out of the 2010 dispute between Amnesty International and Gita Sahgal, the former head of its Gender Unit, over the organisation's work with former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners.  Sahgal argued that Begg and his associates promoted an "Islamic Right" agenda of "defensive jihad".  Sahgal charged that Amnesty's partnership with  "Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban"  lent public legitimacy to an ideology incompatible with universal human rights and in particular with gender equality.

Among the British left (if not always elsewhere), many reacted with scepticism.  (For a sample, see the discussion under this article by Victoria Brittain, Begg's biographer.)  Gita Sahgal was accused of relying on and reinforcing bigoted stereotypes and McCarthyist insinuations about Muslims and of facilitating the appropriation of feminist concerns and language to make the case for war.  Particular hay was made over her speaking to "the Murdoch press".  Some critics doubted the existence of an "Islamic Right".

Double Bind outlines a clear intellectual path through the issues thrown up by these events.  Tax defines the "Muslim Right" as "a range of transnational political movements that mobilize identity politics towards the goal of a theocratic state".  She describes their historical roots in the Afghan mujahideen, lays out their Saudi connections, explains their main ideological goals and highlights their role in human rights abuses, alongside fundamentalists of other stripes:

"Most fundamentalist campaigns are local; events like 7/7 in the UK and 9/11 in the US are rare compared to pressure, threats and violence at the community level, designed to impose ideological conformity and obedience to fundamentalist rules. ... One of their aims is to impose their moral values on such communities, which usually entails targeting religious minorities, women, and LGBT populations."

Aside from a few brief descriptions of the Taliban, details of these local campaigns are reserved for footnotes. 

I fear that a sketch at this level of generality may not persuade those who are sceptical about the notion of a Muslim Right movement and prone to handwaving away murderous sectarian doctrine as somehow insignificant or unreal.  It might have worked better to include one or two more thoroughly concretised examples - putting together a thicker illustration of how the networks and the teachings come together to produce abuses.  Without this, the book's ensuing argument has a slight imbalance.  Much ink is spilled detailing Begg et al's links to transnational networks but perhaps readers coming in cold would benefit from a fleshier picture of the problematic activities in which those networks are being supported. 

Tax punches harder with her analysis of the Anglo-American left, arguing that the Amnesty-Cageprisoners connection exemplifies a tendency in the human rights movement to ignore the ways in which non-state targets of state counter-terrorist excesses may themselves be complicit in rights abuses.  Binary US(-plus-UK)-versus-the-world thinking produces failures of solidarity:

"...the Anglo-American left will have to overcome its imperial narcissism, in which the US (with its UK ally) is assumed to be the cause of everything bad happening in the world, and the only possible response to its overwhelming power and evil is a pained ironic stance, or, at best, a position of moral witness."

Tax takes to task, for instance, "left wing support for 'the Iraqi insurgency'", despite its violence toward women, trade union leaders, religious minorities, gays and lesbians.  Closer to home, she raises the example of the Socialist Workers Party's "courtship of the Muslim Right", which led to it rubbishing women's rights and gay rights as a "shibboleth" and holding sex-segregated anti-war meetings.  Importantly, she points out that the failure to recognise the nature of the Muslim Right: 

"mirrors distortions about Islam put about by antiimmigrant conservatives - the far right talks as if all Muslims were potential terrorists, while the far left talks as if salafi-jihadis represented all Muslims. Both ignore the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are like everybody else; they just want to survive and live their lives in peace. Very few of them support the interpretations and actions of salafi-jihadis, who no more represent all Muslims than the American Nazi Party or English Defence League represent all Christians."

Double Bind is at its best with sharp exposures of lazy thinking: with, in other words, asking the right questions.  But what of its answers? 

The book's broad prescription is valuable and incisive: "solidarity with actual popular movements of democrats and feminists struggling in the Global South" - but perhaps too thinly characterised.  While this single book should not be expected to lay out "a complete programme for social justice", the call to action would have benefitted from specific examples: some instances, however small, of effective solidarity which is worth emulating.  This omission notwithstanding, Double Bind issues an important challenge; perhaps to find out more we will need to watch this Space.

*Please note, the standfirst has been corrected from the original publication. It should read certain Muslim networks and women's rights rather than being Muslim and women's rights.