Bradford FiLiA 2019

SBS’ 'Bradford connection' and the politics of simultaneous resistance: lessons for contemporary feminism

Hello Sisters

It is wonderful to be here with you all.

I have been given the honour and privilege of making the opening address which is daunting to say the least. I have thought long and hard about what to say. Where to start?

This is SBS’ 40th anniversary. We have lived through four decades of political and economic change – much of it is moving in a direction that has left us reeling on many fronts.

We live in politically volatile and chilling times. What has really struck me the most however is how, in country after country, criminals are being elected as leaders. I mean serious criminals who engage in genocide and ethnic cleansing and foment hatred, division and war. India, the US, Hungary, Poland, Australia, Brazil, Israel, Russia, Philippines, the list goes on.  Leaders in these and many other countries are engaged in nothing short of organised crime in which key state institutions are deployed in the service of repression.

Democracy is in the firing line. The rule of law is not only being subverted but dismantled and replaced with a lynch mob politics of fear, violence, intolerance and censorship. Truth and freedom (except capitalist freedom to destroy the environment and to exploit and make profits from human labour) are being sacrificed at the alter of right wing populism, nationalism and authoritarianism. Absolute power without any form of accountability is the name of the game everywhere.  We have, as the American author Terri Murray has noted, ‘moved from a politics of fear to a fear of politics and worse, a fear of democracy.’

This is why we are seeing a worldwide onslaught on citizenship and human rights - a rejection of secular, democratic values that were established in the aftermath of the Second World War. Values that were once integral to struggles against tryanny, colonialism and racism across the world.

The consequence is an exponential rise in economic and social inequalities and a relentless assault on free speech and non-conformism. Those who question, criticise or dissent are denounced as traitors, seditionists, betrayers, anti-patriotic, anti-nationalists and so on. They are hounded, detained and even killed. Stanislav Mrkkelov commenting on the Russian situation has said: ‘patriotism has become the state’s criteria of eligibility towards its citizens. If you aren’t a patriot, then you’re a pariah and the state will soon do everything to choke the life out of you.’ This is true of a great many countries.

The question then is this: are we are witness to history running backwards? I believe that we are; we are on the cusp of an era of political, social, economic and cultural fascism and we have been here before.

When I learnt that the next FiLiA conference was to take place in Bradford, I readily accepted the invitation to do the opening address partly because SBS’ history and work on race, religion and gender has a historical Bradford connection. In fact, the more I think about it the more I realise that our political connections with Bradford holds wider significance not just for SBS but for feminism and progressive politics more generally. And this gives me - all of us - the opportunity to reflect on the individual and collective political journeys we’ve made, and to assess why we have ended up where we are and what we can and must to do, to stop history from sliding backwards.

Both Bradford and Southall saw seminal anti-racist struggles in the late 70s and early 80s waged by radical Asian youth movements. Amidst chronic industrial decline and rising racism, including police racism, South Asian youth, men and women, rose up to defend their communities against racist and fascist violence and provocation in the way that Afro-Caribbean youths had done elsewhere.

In 1979, in Southall, the anti-racists protesters tried unsuccessfully to stop fascist National Front members from marching through Southall – which was widely regarded as an act of racial provocation. The racial uprising however culminated in the mass criminalisation of the anti-racist protesters and the murder of Blair Peach, a white anti-racist activist, who was killed by police officers from specialist militarised police units.

Similarly, in 1981 in Bradford, 12 black youths from all religious backgrounds (known as the Bradford 12) formed an alliance to defend the largely Asian community of Bradford from the threat of fascists marching through Bradford. Calling themselves the United Black Youth League they armed themselves with petrol bombs which they never used. Despite this, the twelve members were charged and tried with ‘conspiracy to cause explosives and endanger lives’ but astonishingly for the times, they were all acquitted.

In both cases, defence campaigns were formed to support those arrested. In both cases, the anti-racist campaigns were inspired by the Black Power and Civil Rights movement in the US.  Afro Caribbean and Asian youth organised under the term ‘black’ because they saw this as a secular and unifying identity that signified shared experiences of colonialism and racism. Although the adoption of black identity did not go uncontested, in those days, there was still a consensus amongst minority groups that understood the value of adopting a secular identity since it created the space for coalition building and alliances across within and between different communities. They invested the term with a progressive politics of unity.

Needless to say, it has now become incredibly difficult to retain this secular black identity as an organising principle for challenging racism and to swim against the currents of religious fundamentalism and sectarian identity politics that seek to erase the more emancipatory moments of anti-racist and feminist history.

It was in the heat of such mass anti-racist activity that SBS was born as an autonomous black feminist campaigning group. However, we did not just blindly take up the call of anti-racism; we also questioned the movement’s blind spots and its myth making tendencies – especially in casting anti-racist struggles as unified struggles waged by homogeneous communities untroubled by class, patriarchy, caste and other fault lines that generate internal sources of power, division and inequality.

In that sense SBS’ very inception was itself an act of dissent because, like any rebellious child, we charted our political journey towards a secular and progressive anti-racist feminism by both drawing from and challenging the orthodoxies of the movements into which we were born.

Like other women’s groups, we developed autonomous black women’s projects. What made us different is that we located ourselves in wider social movements even though we had to contest these same movements for space and legitimacy as black women. By trying to forge alliances with other progressive social movements, we tried to bridge the gap between anti-racism, feminism and socialist left politics.

I don’t want to paint a romantic picture of black feminism because even amongst black women there were different political perspectives and priorities, but there was also an attempt to forge an intersectional analysis that examined not identities but the structural links between sexuality, race, class and gender and to break out of our parochial concerns by developing an international perspective.

From the 80s onwards, SBS broke the silence on domestic and gender-related violence with protests against domestic violence and the related murders and suicides of South Asian women in Southall and elsewhere. In doing so, we both borrowed from and made connections with the struggles of feminists in India and elsewhere.

Perhaps even more significantly, we also broke with the multicultural consensus that elevated the voice of patriarchal business and religious leaderships and set them up as representatives of their so called communities. These forces set about using their new found positions to delegitimise our secular feminist concerns about violence against women and the family by denouncing them as signs of western corruption and moral degradation. The patriarchs demanded a culturally relativist approach to violence against women at best and non-state intervention in family matters at worst. The backlash that they mounted from time to time sought to place us outside community boundaries and to delegitimise feminist voices as somehow antithetical to community values and norms that they had come to define. Sadly much of the black anti-racist Left was also not immune to taking such positions although they did so for different reasons.

By the 90s, we were forced to confront head on the intersection of culture, violence, religion and power in a series of high profile legal cases of battered women who kill, the highpoint of which was the case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia. However it was the complex case of Zoora Shah from Bradford that proved to be one of our toughest challenges in overcoming multiculturalism in the law and community.

Zoora Shah, was a destitute Muslim woman with 3 very young children who in April 1992, killed Mohammed Azam, following years of sexual and financial abuse and humiliation. He was the brother of Sher Azam, the then leader of the Bradford Council of Mosques. Mohammed Azam had sexually abused and exploited Zoora over many years – a fact that was well known by Sher Azam and many others. But they chose to turn a blind eye because Zoora was deemed to be an outcaste by virtue of having been deserted and divorced by her abusive first husband.

Zoora was charged and convicted of a series of offences including the attempted murder, and murder of Mohammed Azam and was sentenced to life imprisonment with an unprecedented lengthy tariff of 20 years. 

For reasons to do with misogyny and racism in the law, our attempt to overturn her convictions failed. There was a complete judicial failure to understand her social context and her intersecting experiences of gender, culture and poverty.

There is a lot to the case, but what I want to highlight in particular, is the response of Sher Azam. Following her unsuccessful appeal, I approached him to sign a petition seeking a reduction in her tariff; I argued that it was excessive and inhumane and that he should support her on humanitarian grounds. I did not even bother raising the ground of gender justice with him. I went to him out of desperation because I knew that his support and those of other Muslim clerics and leaders would carry more weight with the Home Secretary who had no time for secular feminists like us. But Sher Azam was in no mood to support us. Without any sense of irony, his reply was that he agreed with me that the tariff imposed was problematic because it left Zoora languishing in jail for a long time which he said was inhumane. His view was that if she was living under a pure Sharia regime, she would have been stoned to death which was preferable. He said death by stoning is inherently more humane since it leads to instantaneous death.

I don’t think I fully appreciated the significance of his response - looking back it was such a clear warning sign of the growing power of religious fundamentalism in Bradford and across the UK and of the direction that fundamentalists were going in; it is a power that has since seeped out into society and established fundamentalist Sharia laws as Muslim community norms and values.

Of course, Bradford had already put itself on the map during the Rushdie Affair in 1989. It was the now infamous site of anti-Rushdie protests and book burning. Sher Azam and others led a well co -ordinated Islamist hate campaign against Rushdie on the grounds that his book the Satanic Verses was blasphemous. But more significantly, these religious leaderships used the opportunity to launch a fundamentalist political agenda that has generated communalism, violence against women and splintered anti-racist unity and progressive struggles. Sher Azam projected himself as a moderate and a man of peace. But his complicity in the sexual violence inflicted on Zoora Shah by his own brother and his agitation against Rushdie who had been condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini shows an altogether different side.

What is also little understood is that the Bradford Council of Mosque was in part a creation of the local authority and its multicultural strategy which had installed Sher Azam as the custodian of the Muslim community, a community that, as Keenan Malik points out, did not exist until council policy had parcelled it up and given it as a gift to the Council for Mosques. At the same time, other religious umbrella groups claiming to be representatives of their communities such as the Federation for Sikh Organizations and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad also fundamentalists and anti-democratic, also began to spring up, paving the way for the entrenchment of regressive religious political identities, political cronyism and vote bank politics.  

30 years ago, in response to the frenzy surrounding the publication of the Satanic Verses, Women Against Fundamentalism made up of black and white women from many different backgrounds confronted the anti-Rushdie Muslim fundamentalists in London. We had to. No one else except some in the liberal literary establishment dared to voice support for Rushdie and the right to freedom of expression. The Left was characteristically silent if not in bed with the fundamentalists. The significance of what is now an iconic WAF moment of protest in Parliament Square is that alongside other feminists we drew connections between Rushdie’s right to dissent and the feminist tradition of dissenting. The Salman Rushdie affair was in effect a turning point in compelling us to make explicit the link between gender equality and the need for secular democracy.

The significance of the rise of religious fundamentalism and the Religious Right more generally, is that it has largely displaced the anti-racist struggles that we have tried to wage - those based on shared experiences and goals. Instead what we see is the recasting of political and cultural forms of resistance to inequality and state abuses of power as questions of religious freedom. Using the language of anti-discrimination, equality and even human rights, the Religious right has seduced many on the Left, including many feminists, into uncritically accepting religious identity politics as the main framework by which to address demands for the recognition of minorities. We have seen the growth of religious fundamentalist and conservative identities influenced by the resurgent and increasingly transnational nature of Islamist politics. But this phenomenon is also mirrored in Hindu and Sikh diaspora populations in the UK that are similarly influenced by and connected to Hindu and Sikh fundamentalist and ultra nationalist movements in the Indian Sub-Continent. More disturbingly, this de-secularisation of public policy and political activism has also been spearheaded by many feminists who have displaced a rights based discourse of feminism with a discourse based on illiberal religion and forms of piety.

Question: Has the once transformatory nature of the feminist project now become a vehicle for reinvigorating patriarchy and fascism? 

Spaces opened up by the State in pursuit of austerity have also allowed the forces of the Religious Right to posit themselves as community activists, providers of welfare services and as arbitrators of justice with devastating consequences for women who are on the front line of a great many assaults by fundamentalist forces.

But it would be wrong to see religious fundamentalism as the only threat to secular, plural democracy. The use of majoritarianism to promote a vision of secularism that is imbued with racist, nationalist and far right imperatives is equally problematic. We also need to address the relationship between the rise of political authoritarianism and the neo-liberal economic order with its attack on the rights of citizens to employment, housing, health, education, welfare support, protection and justice. Underlying this is a fear of migrants, women, the poor and the marginalised.  I have seen the havoc that this has wrought in my own work at SBS. The collapse of the welfare state and the privatisation of public education and the law has encouraged the spread of religious fundamentalism and the de-politicisation of NGOs.

How did we sleep walk into this crisis of democracy? The task before us is urgent on many fronts. None of us have a blueprint for progress but I do believe that if feminism is to retain its validity it must grapple with all of this.

If see ourselves as feminists and left progressives, we have to find a way out of the cul de sac of identity politics into which we have uncritically entered. Seeing the world entirely through the prism of identity has led us to a race to the bottom as each group vies for the status of ultimate victimhood – a process that cuts off possibilities of alliances and solidarities. This is true of religious identity as it is of those who hijack gender to reinforce essentialist identities that shore up the patriarchal order.  Even the now fashionable term intersectionality has been reduced to a mechanical understanding of multiple stereotypical and reified identities rather than an understanding of how different linked systems of power structures intersect, as the late, great Cynthia Cockburn described it, to institutionalise powerlessness, inequality and discrimination. Although the idea of victimhood is seductive, it has also helped to create unholy alliances between the Left and the Right and even between feminists and the Religious Right. 

Not even the American Civil Rights movement argued that identity politics held the key to liberation. The author Terri Muray writes that Bayard Rustin, one of Martin Luther King’s key political strategists and a chief organiser of the March on Washington (mostly unknown because of his homosexuality) argued that the African-American community was threatened by the appeal of identity politics, particularly the rise of ‘black power’. He thought this position repeated the political and moral errors of pervious black nationalists, while alienating white allies needed by the African- American community. Rustin argued that the relevant question was

“…not whether a politician is black or white, but what forces he represents…what I am saying is that if a black politician is elected because he is black and is deemed to be entitled to a slice of the pie, he will behave in one way; if he is elected by a constituency pressing for social reform, he will, whether he is white or black, behave in another way. “

June Jordan put it another way when she said something like: identity politics might have been important to get something started but nowhere near enough to get anything finished.

We have to nurture a simultaneous politics of dissent and hope based on our common humanity. Drawing inspiration from the women of Rojava (who urgently need our solidarity in the face of the current Turkish onslaught) and thousands of ordinary people standing up to authoritarian and fundamentalist forces around the globe, we must utilise all the cultural, social, legal and political spaces at our disposal to mount a robust defence of human rights and to safeguard secular democratic spaces; spaces that protect the ideas of unity and plurality and the principles of the universality and non-divisibility of human rights. History has shown that the alternative is despotism, tyranny and fascism.

Thank you sisters.