Double Bind: The Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights

by Meredith Tax

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?

These are some of the questions raised in Double Bind: the Muslim Right, the Anglo-American Left, and Universal Human Rights, a book just published by the Centre for Secular Space. It can be ordered through your local bookstores or purchased online at lulu.com.

Taking the UK organization Cageprisoners as an example, it shows how to distinguish between organizations that stand for universal and inseparable human rights, and those that use the language of human rights for other purposes. It discusses “five wrong ideas about the Muslim Right”: that it is anti-imperialist; that “defence of Muslim lands” is comparable to national liberation struggles; that the problem is “Islamphobia”; that terrorism is justified by revolutionary necessity; and that any feminist who criticises the Muslim Right is an Orientalist ally of US imperialism.

Double Bind will be launched in the UK on Feb. 11 and in the US on March 1. 2013

Genres: Politics, Islam, Nonfiction

123 pages, Paperback

First published January 16, 2013

About the author

Meredith Tax has been a writer and political activist since the late 1960s. She was a member of Bread and Roses, an early socialist-feminist group in Boston, and her 1970 essay, “Woman and Her Mind: The Story of Everyday Life,” is considered a founding document of the US women’s liberation movement. She was active in the antiwar movement and the left in the Seventies, when she worked in several factories and as a nurses’ aide in Chicago and was active in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union.

See author's blog for more: http://www.meredithtax.org/biography/bio

Reviews

[Redpoet · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing much wrong with it, but just nothing much to it. Someone should do a more deep analysis, more updated as well, of the same subject. That would be interesting. If someone has, let me know.