Pakistan

Fascism rises in Pakistan. Support the left!

Protester against the Sialkot atrocity. PTI in the sign refers to prime minister Imran Khan's party Left and human rights activists in Pakistan have taken to the streets to denounce a lynching by the Islamist extreme right. On 3 December Priyantha Kumara, a Sri Lankan Christian working as a factory manager in the Pakistani city of Sialkot was murdered and his body burned by a mob after he was accused of removing stickers from the fascist Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) party which included Quranic verses. Founded in 2015, TLP is an alarming development even in the decades-long context of the...

Educating women, changing mindsets

According to UNESCO estimates, globally, 132 million girls are out of school, including 34.3 million of primary school age, 30 million of lower-secondary school age, and 67.4 million of upper-secondary school age. UNICEF reports 15 million of those girls come from the East Asia/Pacific region. Every fifth girl in the region was unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 according to 2020 figures. The pandemic has also caused increases in gender-based violence, early marriage and teenage pregnancy. One way of pushing for increased education for girls is through projects such as PAWA...

A feminist speaks from inside Afghanistan

Demonstrations started in the first week of full Taliban rule, particularly in Herat in the west of Afghanistan and in Kabul and other major cities. In these cities at least women before the collapse of the old government had some basic rights, like having jobs and going to school and university.

The hijab and the Saudi factor

Sadia Hameed is a spokesperson for the Council of ex-Muslims in Britain , and a director of Gloucestershire Sisters, a women's organisation working in minority communities, particularly around tackling harmful traditional practices. She was interviewed by Sacha Ismail for Solidarity . See here for wider debate in Solidarity on the ban of the hijab in schools . We need to question the idea of multiculturalism. Diversity of culture is a great thing, but harmful ideas and practices need to be challenged and criticised. Multiculturalism should be about taking the wonderful parts of all cultures...

The Satanic Verses thirty years on

It is thirty years since the publication of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, partly based on the life of the founder of Islam, Muhammad, sparked protests across the Muslim world, with riots in India and Pakistan in which dozens of Rushdie's fellow Muslims were shot dead, book burnings on the streets of Britain, and ultimately an Iranian death sentence which sent its author into hiding under armed police guard. In BBC Two's The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On , radio presenter and journalist Mobeen Azhar travels around the country, speaking to protagonists in what became known as the...

Pakistan: Khan is no alternative

Pakistan can be added to the list of countries whose politics have been dramatically shaken up in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The Movement for Justice party — PTI from the initials of its Urdu name – led by former cricketer and multi-millionaire Imran Khan, got 0.8 percent of the vote in 2002, boycotted the elections in 2008 and rose to 16.9% in 2013. This time it got 31.9% and a near majority in the national assembly, with Khan looking set to become prime minister. The traditional parties of the Pakistani ruling class, the openly conservative Pakistan Muslim League and the...

A discussion with Pakistani socialists

In December, Farooq Tariq, a leader of the Awami Workers’ Party in Pakistan, visited London, and during his visit talked with activists from Workers’ Liberty. Martin Thomas reports. We started by saying we appreciated the strong socialist line he had taken against Islamic-fundamentalist politics in his speeches during his visit, but questioning the uncritical praise for Fidel Castro in AWP statements after Castro’s death on 25 November. Farooq replied straightforwardly that it was an AWP decision to be uncritical of Castro and Cuba. For that decision, he gave two reasons. One, that politics in...

Kashmir repression boosts sectarianism

On 8 July 2016, a young Kashmiri commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen (HM) was killed by the Indian Army. The killing of Burhan Wani has become a symbol of Indian repression in Kashmir, the major Muslim-majority area kept by India in the 1947 India-Pakistan partition. The HM receives much of its support from the Pakistan government and has strong links to the Pakistani secret service ISI and the Islamist group Jamaat-e-Islami. Unlike the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, HM is for Kashmiri secession to Pakistan and promotes the further Islamisation of Kashmir. Wani had a strong social media...

Abolish the death penalty!

Saudi Arabia has executed 99 people during 2016, more than at the same point last year. Crimes punishable by beheading, stoning or firing squad in Saudi include blasphemy, drug offences, adultery, murder, and “false prophecy.” Excluding China – whose regime keeps the number of state killings a close secret – 90% of known executions during 2015 were carried out by Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Iran executes more people than any other state. Last year Iran killed nearly one thousand prisoners, many for drug-related convictions. Iran also executes juvenile prisoners. In the US 28 prisoners...

A fighter for freedom

When it was revealed on 11 October that Malala Yousafzai, the teenage girl that captured the world’s imagination after being shot by a Taliban rifleman, was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, it came as a relief. Malala no doubt deserved it more than any other person in the world, but to tarnish her name by giving her the same prize given to such renowned peacemakers as Henry Kissinger and Menachem Begin would have been a disservice to everything she had stood for. The memoir of the young girl who had been standing up for her and her schoolmates’ right to an education since she was 11 is not...

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