Under the new rules, religious practices are prohibited in premises and facilities  belonging to public institutions. This means that dedicated prayer rooms at universities can no longer be used for prayer. The legislation also prevents students from using other campus spaces, such as classrooms, offices or dining areas, for religious practices.

The changes also extend restrictions on religious symbols to additional groups, including staff in subsidized private schools and subsidized childcare services. The law also establishes new rules for religious accommodations and prohibits collective religious practices on public roads and in public parks without municipal authorization.

The Quebec government presents the measures as part of its model of state secularism, emphasizing the separation of religion and the state, state neutrality and equality. Critics, however, argue that the expanded restrictions place greater limits on religious expression and practice, with particular implications for Muslim communities.

It’s hard to think of a writer more contentious than Salman Rushdie. From death threats to fatwas, insult to injury, the Indian-born British-American author has carved out a career from controversy, becoming a martyr in the process. The darkened lens over his right eye is now a symbol of sacrifice, lost in a life-changing and condemnable attack two years ago.

To some, he’s a liberal hero — the ultimate champion of secularism and free speech who becomes more revered the more he’s attacked. But to Muslims like me, Salman Rushdie is the embodiment of modern-day Islamophobia, a literary figure who masquerades as a ‘progressive free thinker’ and a by-product of a liberal atheist elite obsessed with Islam.

What’s more, Salman Rushdie’s recent comments on Palestine confirm what many of us had been saying about his brand of liberal atheism: that it is predicated upon, and comes full circle back to, thinly-veiled Islamophobia.

Salman Rushdie says the quiet part out loud

Speaking to a German podcast last week about the US campus protests, Salman Rushdie said that whilst he’d “argued for a Palestinian state for most of (his life) — right now, if there was a Palestinian state, it would be run by Hamas, and that would make it a Taliban-like state, and it would be a client state of Iran,” adding, “It’s very strange for young, progressive student politics to kind of support a fascist terrorist group.”

In this statement, the West’s poster child of free speech makes an ironically reductive statement about the intentions of pro-Palestine protesters by conflating the support for Palestine with support for Hamas. In doing so, Salman Rushdie peddles right-wing conspiracy theories linking Palestinian activism to terrorism and extremism.

We’ve seen this false equivalence of pro-Palestinian activism and extremism become commonplace in mainstream political discourse in recent months. It’s almost always weaponized against politically active Muslims advocating for causes against their government’s bloody, imperial aims.

Consider Rishi Sunak’s ominous and loaded reference in March 2024 to pro-Palestine protests as extremist “forces at home trying to tear us apart” or the media describing the UK university protests as “antisemitism on campus”. Just a few days ago, a teacher was charged with a hate crime for waving a placard showing Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman as coconuts.

The conflation of support for Palestine with extremism is dangerous enough. But, in a way, Rushdie’s comments are even more menacing because his skin tone and Muslim-sounding name afford him a status that carries more weight.

Salman Rushdie’s entire career has been built on the facade that he is progressive, forward-thinking, and liberal so hearing him describe a future Palestinian state as a “Taliban-like” satellite state of Iran is even harder to dismiss as puerile politics.

Rushdie’s position has changed from purported criticism of a sacred text — although many of us believe that it was always rooted in Islamophobia — to the sort of outright Islamophobia that we usually see on the front of a tabloid paper. This trajectory is part and parcel of a wider campaign to demonize, ostracize and ultimately criminalize Muslimness in the Western world and often this is done under the guise of liberal, secular values.

Anything but Islam

The most outspoken atheists of today, like Richard Dawkins, have also revealed themselves to be nothing but elite white men with an unhealthy obsession with Islam and Muslims. Dawkins’ recent revelation that he is actually “culturally Christian” — despite making a name for himself on the premise that he is an atheist — because Christianity is fundamentally “decent” whereas Islam is “not”, and his specific reference to Islam’s “hostility to women” are all in the same vein as Rushdie’s comments.

The message is that Islam is inherently backwards, inferior, and violent and the opposite is always better because it has more proximity to superior Western values, whether that is Christianity, secularism or outright atheism.

I’ve always been somewhat bemused by the West’s veneration of Rushdie, and his status as part literary deity, part emblem of the West itself. But in his most recent comments, the facade of Rushdie has never been more transparent.

His appeal amongst the liberal elite is precisely because he is a walking-talking, career-long reminder of violence and intolerance that is supposedly exceptional to Islam and Muslims. His life in hiding, the fatwas issued against him, and now the physical injury of his blinded eye all send a constant, reverberating message that Muslims are illiberal and parochial and “we”, the west, are the very antithesis to this. And the West thrives on this opportunity to cast itself as superior, tolerant and progressive.

This was limiting enough for Muslims before. But now Rushdie’s comments have tipped into constituting a direct threat against the liberties of Muslims in Britain and beyond.

In a climate in which our political activism is already criminalized, in which our children are already hyper-policed in school, and our religious freedoms are being curbed by the day, the face of Western liberalism rendering opposition to genocide equal to terrorism should be something that worries us all.

Source: The New Arab

France’s recent prohibitions on hijabs in sports and abayas in schools have ignited protests domestically and globally.

France’s Sports Minister Amelie Oudea-Castera announced on 3rd September 2023 that French athletes w the French country’s athletes will be barred from wearing hijabs or other religious symbols while competing at the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. The announcement was made during her appearance on a show ‘Sunday in Politics”, which aired on France 3.

The minister stated that the ban upholds France’s principle of “strict secularism” and will apply to all members of the French Olympic team. She referenced a recent ruling by the Council of State upholding a hijab ban for football matches, which has been enforced by the French Football Federation since 2016. Her announcement contradicts a policy by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which considers hijabs a cultural rather than religious symbol. An IOC spokesperson clarified that participants can wear hijabs in the Olympic Village, saying “There are no restrictions on wearing the hijab.” 

 

 

 

 

 

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres on 19th September implicitly opposed the abaya ban in French schools. Addressing representatives of states worldwide, the Secretary-General of the United Nations (UN) condemned the ban on the abaya in public schools. He spoke in French and stated: “In some countries, women and girls are punished for wearing too much clothing. In others, because they don’t wear enough.” 

Author: Emad Mirmotahari

Published in: College Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1, Winter 2022, pp. 80-102

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

In this essay the author explores the place of secularism in Tabish Khair’s novel, How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position. More specifically, it is argued that the novel’s narrator, a secular Muslim academic in Denmark, harbors a particular kind of secularism that is explicitly hostile to Islam, a hostility that is borne, in large part, from anxieties about terrorism and xenophobia. The narrator’s version of secularism, however, raises the question of how secularism and post colonialism encounter one another. The novel itself generates a critique of the narrator’s secularism, suggesting that it impairs his ability to achieve the kind of Saidian secular criticism that would recognize Islam (and religion in general) as a central factor of the postcolonial intellectuals that secular academics purport to re-voice and empower.

Read the full article HERE.

Source: Johns Hopkins University’s Website

But what does that lead to?

As research in the past couple of decades has reflected those drops in behaviors and beliefs, conventional wisdom has lingered on a superficial understanding about what it really means — for our identities, our yearnings for something “bigger than ourselves” and our ideas about the role of religion in politics.

Now, a new crop of books dives into the many shades of gray in growing secularism and its important ramifications.

Deploying new research and theories, these writers go beyond the top-level data and argue that many Americans are, in fact, a mix. Someone may be devout personally, for instance, but strongly believe in church-state separation and the primacy of science and observable facts. They may be completely non-religious but also agnostic when it comes to the role of religion in public life.

The 2021 book “Secular Surge,” by a trio of prominent political scientists, says “secular” core values include freethinking, logic and reason — rather than received authority — human experience and the laws of nature. Secularism, notably, is not defined by opposition to religious identity or practices. By this definition, a quarter of Americans now have a secular worldview, the researchers contest, and events such as the pandemic could speed along the birth of a secular political left, not unlike the early days of the religious right.

“There has been no innovation in secular thought in 50 years, few new policy ideas,” Berlinerblau said in an interview. “There’s no coherence, no leadership, no central movement. They can’t articulate what they want it to do.”

Berlinerblau’s book and others of late look at different parts of personal and public secularism, but they agree that the contemporary terminology is inadequate.

Emma Koonse Wenner, religion editor for Publishers Weekly, said there is a bit of a boom happening on the topic. There are so many people who have left traditional religious structures but are still interested in the “spiritual but not religious” genre, she said, that PW now does a regular feature on the topic of the “nones” — those Americans who tell pollsters they have “no religion.” That group has swelled from 16 percent of the country in 2007 to 29 percent today, Pew Research said last month.

Experts on secularism sometimes call this era the “third wave” for secularism. The early freethinkers were first, then the “new atheists,” such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who were defined by their angry, direct criticism of religion.

Source: Washington Post

A spotlight of suspicion was trained on them again even before the latest acts of extremist violence, including two beheadings. President Emmanuel Macron has forged ahead with his effort to rid Islam in France of extremists, part of a project he labels “separatism,” a term that makes Muslims wince.

Amid intensifying rhetoric and fresh attacks by outsiders, including the killings of three people Thursday at a Catholic church in Nice, Muslims in France have kept their heads down and chins up. But deep down, some are squirming, feeling they are being held responsible.

Islam is the second religion in France, which has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe. But the country’s estimated 5 million Muslims have walked a delicate line in search of full acceptance in what for many is their nation of birth. Discrimination casts a shadow over some and is an outright barrier to mainstream life for others.

France’s cherished value of secularism, which is meant to ensure religious freedom, has in recent years been used by the state to reign in customs practiced by some Muslims. The president’s proposed law may mean further tinkering with the 1905 secularism law born out of a conflict with the powerful Roman Catholic clergy.

The rise of Islam into public view was gradual and mostly went unnoticed until the far right seized upon it as a threat to the French identity. Over the years mosques have multiplied, along with Muslim schools.

The religion with no single leader has multiple strains in France, running from moderate to Salafist with a rigorous interpretation of the religion to outright radical upstarts.

In his project, Macron envisions measures like training imams in France instead of bringing them in from Turkey, Morocco or Algeria.

Source: The Associated Press

One of the primary concerns of Muslim parents in the West is the religious identity of their children. Many parents wonder what the secret is to raising a child with imān (faith) in a society in which being Muslim can be challenging. Approximately 70% of people in the U.S. identify as Christian, nearly 23% identify as having no religion, and less than 1% identify as Muslim. Although Muslim families transmit their religious affiliation to their children at higher rates than Christians in America, approximately 20% of those raised as Muslims do not identify as Muslim in adulthood.

In this cultural context, where Christianity is the majority religion and the philosophies of secularism, liberalism, feminism, capitalism, and atheism are pervasive and influential, Muslims who desire to transmit Islam to their children need to understand how to socialize their children to develop a healthy Islamic identity.

Exactly what should parents do to inculcate Islamic beliefs, values, and behaviors in their children? What type of schools should they send their children to? What effects do friends have on their children’s religious identity? What types of parent-child relationships and parenting practices facilitate the development of faith? These are the types of questions that parents ask and need answers to, yet relatively little is known about the process of religious identity development in Muslim youth in America.

This paper provides an overview of theories about the mechanisms by which religion is conveyed and passed down to children in America. Although the overwhelming majority of research has been conducted with adherents of other faiths in the United States, the insights from existing research are invaluable in constructing theoretical models and a roadmap to better understand Islamic identity development of Muslim American youth.

Source: Yaqeen Institute

Blanquer told BFMTV that even though French law did not ban mothers in headscarves from going on school trips as volunteers, he wanted to avoid this “as much as possible”. He said he encouraged “dialogue” in which head teachers would ask mothers to remove their scarves. He said the parents association had made a “regrettable” mistake by using the picture.

The parents association that produced the pamphlet, the FCPE, said the minister was wrong. Its co-president Rodrigo Arenas said: “We’re on the side of the law and we’re simply here to inform parents of their rights. “The country’s state council has ruled that parents are free to wear what they like. This means mothers on school trips can wear headscarves. And yet there are still school trips in France which are cancelled by teachers who won’t allow mothers in headscarves to accompany children.

Source: The Guardian

Editors-in-Chief: Gary Wood, Virginia Tech and Tugrul Keskin, Shanghai University

Publisher: Brill

A new issue of the Sociology of Islam (SOI) has been published.

The Sociology of Islam (SOI) explores modern social, political and economic transformations in Muslim Societies through the lens of sociological analysis, social theory, industrialization, modernity, social movements, secularism and political economy. It provides a unique sociological approach in addition to a multi-disciplinary approach.

Table of Contents

• Articles

– A Manifesto: The Meaning of Sociology of Islam, Muslim Societies, the “Middle East” and the Human Rights Industry, by Tugrul Keskin
– Islam. The Meaning of Style, Pierre Hecker
– African American Twelver Shia Community of New York, by Abbas Aghdassi and Seyed Mohammad Marandi
– Society in Qatar before the Oil Industry in Light of Archaeological Evidence, by Moain Sadeq
– Texts as Objects of Value and Veneration, by Mahmood Kooria

• Book Reviews

– Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey, written by Jeremy F. Walton; By Sabine Dreher
– Corporate Islam: Sharia and the Modern Workplace, written by Sloane-White, Patricia; By Aaron Z. Pitluck

Source: Brill Online