Weekly Worker 511 Thursday January 15 2004

Secular support for ban

It must be understand that the proposed ban on religious symbols in French state schools is not just a ban on the muslim hijab, although this has excited the most controversy. It is also a ban on the jewish skullcap and “ostentatious” christian crosses.

It must be understood in the context of French history: in particular the long and bitter struggle for a secular, democratic republic which dates back to the revolution of 1789 and takes in the revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. What the ban does is clarify and strengthen the law of 1905 on the separation of church and state. This was the work of the government of Emile Combes, a doctor, radical and freemason, and the Bloc des Gauches. The Radical Party, later the Radical and Socialist Party, was the most democratic and secular wing of republicanism.

French socialism inherited this tradition. The French Socialist Party of Jean Jaurès stood for social transformation, republican defence and the social republic. It was said that there were two Frances. One was democratic, republican and secularist. The other was religious, reactionary and monarchist.

Freemasonry, long at war with the church hierarchy, was a great influence. Masonic banners flew on the walls of Paris in 1871 and French masonry abandoned the Great Architect of the Universe in favour of atheism.

President Chirac has stated in a new year address: “It is not a matter of refounding or changing the boundaries of secularism. It is simply a matter of France staying true to a balance that has been established over decades and reaffirming a principle with respect but also resolutely.” Perhaps Chirac is taking his clue from Robespierre, who said in 1794 that only the fatherland has a right to educate its children. Chirac, of course, is no Robespierre, let alone a Marat or a sans culottes wearing the red cap of liberty and spiking aristocrats with a pike. But to retain a measure of political credibility he has had to place himself in the French republican tradition.

The ban not only has the support of secularists. Many christians and the Union of Jewish Students (France has the largest Jewish population in Europe) support it. Nor is the muslim world entirely united in its opposition to the ban. Sheik Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, the grand mufti of the Al Azhar mosque in Cairo and a leading expert on sunni islam, has stated that, while muslim women have a religious obligation to wear the hijab, this applies only in muslim countries; and women who obey French law need not fear divine retribution.

A number of French women of muslim origin have signed a statement supporting the ban and defending the right of 1.7 million muslim French women not to wear the hijab. These include Loubna Meliane, a spokesperson for SOS Racisme; Fadela Amra, a leader of Ni Putes Ni Soumises; the actress Isabelle Adjani; and Chahdott Djavann, author of A bas le voile (Down with the veil).

They argue that the hijab condemns women to intolerable discrimination which denies them freedom and dignity. They demand that Chirac unreservedly supports secularism and equality between the sexes.

The hijab is clearly a symbol of oppression based on the absurd idea that the sight of female hair would lead men into the type of temptation allegedly suffered by the biblical Adam. This supposed temptation has served as the excuse for the oppression of women in all the religions of the book. The skullcap and the cross are also symbols of oppression. The skullcap symbolises the oppression of the Hebrews by the Levite priesthood of Judea. The tribe of Levi got to be priests for slaughtering the worshippers of the golden calf after Moses got back from receiving the law from Yahweh on Mount Horeb. The cross was a Roman instrument of execution on which Yeshua bar Yosif, if he ever existed, was done to death. The only educational value they have is as means to teach people the oppressive nature of religion.

If religion is a private matter, then its proper place is in private - in the home or the place of worship, not in the schools of a secular state. However, religion is not entirely a private matter. It is a question of what role it plays in class society. By promising the masses a reward in a mythical afterlife, religion serves the ruling class by keeping them passive in this life. If they get out of line they are threatened with eternal hellfire and damnation. When the church held power, hellfire was made all too real by the pyres of the inquisition. Women regarded as witches and heretics, atheists included, were condemned. St Paul’s injunction to be of one mind found its realisation in the executions by fire of Mary Tudor.

Socialism is nothing if it is not materialist science. As such it demands an intransigent and unyielding struggle against superstition, obscurantism and idealism of all sorts. This was the struggle waged by British socialists such as Guy Alred, John Gott and FA Ridley and in the USSR by the Society of the Militant Godless who sought to free the minds of the Soviet masses from the feudal ideological grip of orthodox christianity. Anything which weakens the influence of religion in society and the power of the clergy over their flocks is to be welcomed, not opposed on the basis of a spurious libertarianism. Socialism does not mean anyone can do what they like. It means the rule of laws made by the victorious working class in its own interests and those of society as a whole. Those who choose to defy these laws must suffer the consequences.

In 1905, the year the French laws on separation of church and state were being enacted, Rosa Luxemburg wrote in Socialism and the churches: “… from the moment the priests use the pulpit as a means of struggle against the working class, the workers must fight against the enemies of their rights and liberation. For he who defends the exploiters and helps to prolong this present regime of misery is the mortal enemy of the proletariat, whether he be in a cassock or the uniform of the police.” This is a lesson today’s socialists need to take to heart and act upon.

It is the clergy who are the flics and mouches of capitalism, not the comrades of Lutte Ouvrière. To call comrades who fought bravely on the barricades of 1968 “Jacques Chirac’s policemen” is not polemic: it is an insult unworthy of comrade Manson (Weekly Worker January 8).

Society may have progressed beyond the point where it was necessary to strangle priests with the guts of kings. But socialists still have the task of driving gods from the skies and capitalists from the earth. When the hijab, the skullcap and the cross and all symbols of religious oppression are consigned to the flames, and the Sepher Torah - on which judaism, christianity and islam are based - is consigned to the attentions of worms and mice, only then will humanity be happy; only then will it be free.

Terry Liddle
Socialist Secular Association

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