Read full piece in The Freethinker: Feminism and religion are incompatible, 19 November 2024
This is an edited version of Maryam Namazie’s contribution to a Cambridge Union debate: ‘This House Believes Feminism is Incompatible with Religion’, held on 14 November 2024. Others speaking in Proposition: Phyllis Zagano, Annie Laurie Gaylor, and Pollyanna Greene Wright. Those speaking in Opposition: The Rt Revd Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Rabbi Charley Baginsky, Peter Hitchens, and Lindsay Hansen Park. The debate can be viewed here.
Religion and feminism are incompatible. What I mean by religion is organised religion and not personal belief. People are very often born into a religion due to a lottery of birth and they mostly pick and choose and adapt it to 21st century lives. It is possible, therefore, for a believer to be a defender of women’s rights or a secularist. When talking about the incompatibility of religion and feminism, I am talking about organised religion—religious thought and tenets and their dire consequences for women’s freedom, rights, and equality.
In religions, women are seen to be subservient to men; in fact, the woman is a deviant form of man. Men and women are unequal—‘complementary’ is the euphemism. Religion is built on and reproduces discrimination and violence against women. Inequality is inherent to religions and their institutions. Feminism, on the other hand, sees women and men as equals and strives for an end to discrimination and inequality. This is the crux of the incompatibility.
The fact that we all know many great religious people, like my parents, doesn’t make religions good. That you become less ‘selfish’ when you turn to religion, or that you want more women in leadership roles in patriarchal institutions, does not make religions good. This line of non-reasoning is only ever deemed acceptable because religion has a privileged position, beyond human accountability.
Let’s not even look at what the Islamists, Christian Right, Jewish Right, Hindutva, Sikh Right, and Buddhist Right are doing across the globe. Right here in Britain, institutionalised religions can organise religious courts like Sharia and Sikh Courts and Beth Din that violate women’s rights. They can do what they want in faith schools, enforce veiling and religious symbols on small children, cover up sexual abuse of children for decades on end, intimidate and threaten people for cartoons and articles, mutilate children with circumcision and female genital mutilation, preach hatred against women, ex-Muslims, apostates, gay people… And that’s just these past few weeks, and still they are mostly free to do as they please…
Read full piece in The Freethinker: Feminism and religion are incompatible, 19 November 2024