It’s true that creating atheists and radicals was never the Vatican’s intention. But it has certainly been among its major effects and we would be churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth. The Catholic church has done more than Richard Dawkins, Ian Paisley, humanist societies and Marxist materialists put together to discredit the whole idea of organised religion, and there will be many who feel that it deserves our heartfelt thanks for its endeavours.

The British left has also numbered some prominent lapsed Catholics among its members, which is not as surprising as it may seem.

The category of ‘lapsed’ Catholic, by the way, is just a cunning ruse on the part of the church to prevent anyone from ever leaving it. Rather than being expelled or resigning, you are simply shifted from one category to another, like someone who becomes a country rather than town member of the Athenaeum. In fact, in some respects ‘lapsed’ is a higher distinction than ‘loyal’ (think of Graham Greene), though not quite as high as ‘saint’.

As far as saints go, there is a problem in Anglo-Saxon nations such as Britain. When someone is up for canonisation (ie being made a saint), they need to have performed at least one miracle from beyond the grave in order to make the grade; and in the geographical distribution of miracles, Britain comes dismally low on the scale. This is because we are a godless, sceptical bunch compared, say, to Spaniards and Italians, where the miracle count, like the number of sunny days, is a good deal higher.

Cardinal Newman is currently up for canonisation, but it is proving embarrassingly difficult to scrape together the requisite number of miracles. The commonsensical British simply aren’t superstitious enough. There are far fewer weeping statues, bleeding icons, roses that never wither and old ladies whose cancerous tumours disappear without trace on kissing a portrait of Pope Pius XII (the one who fervently supported the Nazis). As one moves northwards from Naples to Newcastle, the problem becomes glaringly apparent. Perhaps the Pope can fix this spot of local difficulty when he arrives.

Ex-papist left

So, to resume, why is it not surprising that so many leftists should be former papists?

For one thing, Catholicism teaches you to think in communal, institutional terms. Liberal or Protestant individualism is alien to this. You just don’t grow up thinking in those terms. It is also true that the great majority of Catholics in Britain stem from working-class Irish immigrant stock, and are thus more likely to incline to the political left than, say, middle-class Anglicans.

For another thing, Catholics are properly unafraid of rational analysis. They are taught that reason is not at odds with faith, and they believe, unlike postmodernists, that the truth is vitally important. This is why, like leftists and unlike liberals, they are not particularly nervous of ideas and doctrines. They see them simply as a distillation of what millions of common men and women over the centuries have found themselves able to believe.

Finally, the Catholic church has a vigorous tradition of social thought, some of it anti-capitalist. You are urged to think of religious faith in terms of the practical social world, not in terms of some individual inner light.

It’s no accident, for example, that so many nurses, medics and community workers in the global South are Irish in background. The Irish Catholic church has a vile and disgusting record of child abuse yet an honourable one of nursing and educating the sick and deprived in the non-European world. This tradition of sending out missionaries dates back to the early Middle Ages, and Bono and Bob Geldof are among its latest examples. Both men are self-advertising versions of Irish missionaries. That they both hail from Dublin may be coincidental, but I don’t think so. They would have attended schools that drummed the notion of social conscience and responsibility into their skulls.

Making priests marry

One suggestion for tackling the child abuse problem is that when the Pope arrives in Britain, he should hold public ceremonies in which thousands of Catholic priests are forcibly, simultaneously married, as the Moonies do. Those who refuse to be married should be poisoned on the spot. Gay members of the clergy would be allowed to opt for civil partnerships, but nobody could remain celibate. The marriages, to be sure, would be rather hard on the women involved, so each wife would receive some modest compensation (let’s say £10 million apiece) by the Vatican selling off its treasures under pain of being dissolved.

This is not in fact the smartest of ideas. Most women would rather marry a badger than a Benedictine, and are curiously averse to being coerced into marriage, even for a constructive end. In any case, this wouldn’t end the abuse of small children. For one thing, quite a few Catholic clergy ignore their vow of celibacy. For another thing, it is not celibacy but paedophilia that drives these men to commit the crimes they do.

Here, perhaps, we should pause for a moment to take thought. Why have so few commentators raised the question of why paedophilia is so rampant among the Catholic clergy? Why don’t you find the same fearful epidemic of it in say, Lloyds Bank or the BBC?

It’s true that working as a priest in a parish gives paedophiles some access to children, but this can be much exaggerated. Clerics don’t spend all their time rehearsing boys’ choirs or visiting the junior school. It’s also true that the clerical collar traditionally conferred on these men a status above suspicion. But this is the exact reverse of the truth today. In Ireland nowadays, some people might cross the street when they see a priest approaching. In the old days it used to be a British landlord.

The point, surely, is that training of Catholic priests has been traditionally designed to ensure their sexual infantilisation. It is the kind of background geared to churning out young men incapable of grown-up relationships, who then turn to children instead. Children don’t make mature emotional demands you can’t fulfill.

Fortunately, this problem looks like solving itself in the long run. Last year, the number of clerical students in Ireland who were ordained to the priesthood was in single figures. Some decades ago it would have been in the hundreds. The Catholic priesthood is dying on its feet, and the latest scandals to afflict it are likely to help it to its grave. At one level, the church will no doubt patch up the situation and bounce back. At another, deeper level, it will never recover. And there are a great many men and women, some of them permanently traumatised, whose only prayer will be one of gratitude for that fact.

Terry Eagleton’s latest book is On Evil (Yale University Press)

When Shariati raised the banner of ‘Red Shi’ism’, it was not intended to suggest that the revolution was Marxism cloaked in a Shia rhetoric, as a few in the west may assume. Shariati was contrasting the revolutionary ethos that he and his colleagues were projecting with that which he termed ‘Black Shi’ism’ – the Shi’ism of ‘mourning’, as he called it.

‘Black Shi’ism’ was the dead hand of static, hidebound passivity: the Shi’ism that had sold out the people for a comfortable place under the establishment sun. It was the Shi’ism of ‘quietism’ and passivity that advised the people to bear the travails and deprivations of today and to await the reward in Paradise tomorrow.

The Shi’ism of transformation

‘Red Shi’ism’ was the Shi’ism of transformation; it was dynamic, and it made the radical assertion that people’s day-to-day needs were not just a call upon the state – they were a prime responsibility of Islam. Imam Khomeini thus endorsed not just material welfare but good education and healthcare for all the people as a pre-eminent responsibility of Islam, rather than one appertaining to the state alone.

Shi’ism, in the course of the revolution, was being transformed. After years as a static force of waiting and enduring, it became again a dynamic movement for political, social and economic change – and social justice. It was a return to Shi’ism’s true roots, which had always been planted in the bloodstained soil of a search for justice, Shari’ati and his colleagues believed.

Thirty years on and still this aspect is misunderstood. The Iranian revolutionaries are widely seen, in the west, to have been a coalition of forces, in which leftists played a major part, that overthrew an autocratic Shah. And that was it – full stop.

While Shariati was no doubt aware that the ‘Red Shi’ism’ tag would appeal to leftist components in Iranian society, and help unite the coalition, the adjunct attack on ‘Black Shi’ism’ was far from irrelevant. A major, if not the essential, component of the revolution was a struggle of ‘religion versus religion’. It was not just a struggle against the US; it was not just a struggle against secularism – it was a struggle against the more dangerous foe of clerical conservativism that had emptied Shi’ism of its fundamental commitment to justice.

Indeed, according to Imam Khomeini’s son, Ahmad, ‘What made him [revered by the people as their] “Imam” and led to the historic and victorious Islamic movement, was the fact that he fought the backward, stupid, pretentious, reactionary clergy.’

It is, in a sense, a continuation of this same struggle that is taking place in Iran today in the wake of the recent presidential elections. As a leading Shia cleric said to me, ‘No revolution can stand still; either it goes forward, or [effectively] it goes backward.’ He was expressing his concerns that the forces of passivity, of ‘Black Shi’ism’, and of the closed, security mindset, were again imposing stasis.

What is confusing in present events is that some of the forces that are being accused of holding back the progress of the revolution represent some of its very pillars from 1979. Should, therefore, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani really be called a ‘reformist’, as much of the western press likes to label him? Do these labels make sense now, in the wake of the election? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s so-called ‘conservative’ platform was essentially the complaint that some of those clerical pillars of 1979 – the circles and family around former presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani – had pursued self-interest and self-enrichment at the expense of the people. Ahmadinejad seeks to break the hold some of these hugely wealthy clerics, through their charitable foundations, have on the controlling heights of the economy. Should he more appropriately, then, be labelled a ‘reformist’?

Ahmadinejad, in accusing Rafsanjani, reputedly one the wealthiest of Iranians, was effectively likening the ex-president to a Gamal Mubarak, the ‘businessman’ son of President Mubarak of Egypt. Not surprisingly, Rafsanjani, already bitter at his defeat at the previous election, became enraged at the implied threat to his position, and determined to neutralise it.

Western governments like to project their policies as supporting ‘reformists’. But what does this mean? Was Mir Hossein Mousavi a reformist while in office as prime minister? I believe that much of the confusion among some western policy-makers about what is happening in Iran stems from their fixation on seeing Iran through a cold war prism.

There is an influential current in the west that sees the Iranian revolution as little more than a hollow tyranny that is resented by a majority of Iranians, who still yearn for freedom. Basically, this is the ‘colour revolution’ narrative transposed from the cold war. It implies that given a solid poke from the west, the vacuous edifice of the Iranian state would implode, together with Islamist resistance more generally.

This optic is wrong. Iran is not facing a popular uprising by the people against the revolution. It is more complex than this simplistic template. There are divergent Iranian views, which cut across institutions and classes, about how to resolve the present stasis and recover the momentum of revolution, and there are forces of passivity and entrenched interest at play. There are going to be difficult decisions, but none of this is likely to pose a threat to the revolution itself. Those opposed to the revolution represent a small minority, even within the Mousavi camp, and are mostly drawn from one segment of Tehran. As events have shown, the opposition did not have legs: it did not broaden, it shrunk.

This cold war-esque misreading of events suggests that 50 years after the first Islamist revolutionary resistance movement was formed in Najaf in Iraq, the Islamist revolution is still barely understood in the west. Many remain bemused. Why is there an Islamist resistance at all? ‘Against what are Muslims in revolt?’ westerners ask.

Even now, there seems little clarity about the causes and thinking behind the Iranian revolution. Was it nothing more than a populist kick against power and the Shah’s heavy-handedness that was hijacked by the ayatollahs, as many assert? Do they really imagine that it was this, and this alone, that mobilised tens of millions and remains an inspiration for many movements today? Such explanations, rooted in western historicism, seem blindingly inadequate. In Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution, I argue that the revolution was essentially a grand ‘refusal’ to accept an understanding of the self or of the world about us dominated, for the past 300 years, by a particular western consciousness, and to evolve the Islamist alternative.

Islamism, in short, is not irrational – it is no whimsy of divine caprice. It is accessible to reasoned explanation, and it is grounded in a profound difference of view with contemporary understanding of the human being and with the Cartesian notions of procedural rationality and dualism.

Twin pillars of modernity

Western modernity has stood on two pillars. The first has been described by historians as the ‘great transformation’. It began in Europe in the 18th century, and was based on a moral philosophy that saw human welfare yoked to the efficient operation of markets. Humans, pursuing private desires and needs, would intersect with others, through the market mechanism, to maximise not just individual welfare, but community wellbeing too.

Closely associated with this was another idea, taken up by English Puritans, that had its roots deep in Anglo-Saxon history. It saw the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence also at work in politics to bring about another ‘ideal’ outcome. This view held that the jostling and hurly-burly of political contention between the Anglo-Saxon tribes in the earliest of their societies had given rise to a spontaneous harmony and political order. From this political ‘market’, English Puritans believed that the Anglo-Saxon institutions, representing the epitome of personal freedom and justice, had spontaneously arisen.

Such key ideas about politics and economics were transported to the Americas with the Pilgrim Fathers to become, for those such as Thomas Paine, the archetype for the US system of government. The concept of the nation-state, democracy and human rights all flowed from this Protestant current. These powerful ideas have dominated western thinking for more than 300 years. By the 1920s, they had brought Islam to the brink: it was in crisis – and holding on by its fingernails.

Of course the ‘great transformation’ did not come about either naturally or spontaneously: The wish to create efficient markets had required massive state intervention and the subordination of other important social, communal and political objectives to this overriding end. Making markets ‘free’ was, and is, an artefact of state power. Historians describe it as a utopian project that would be incompatible with any contemporary form of democracy. The transformation had brought stresses that took 19th-century Europe to the brink of revolution – and beyond.

In the century leading up to Islam’s crisis in the 1920s, the transformation had been exported to the Muslim world. There was a rush by the west to create ethnically unitary nation states in the former western provinces of the Ottoman Empire. A powerful nation state with a monopoly of violence was seen as the only structure with enough instrumental power to force through the social changes required to impose market liberalisation on Muslim societies.

As in Europe earlier, the impact of transformation was truly traumatic. Approximately five million European Muslims were driven from their homes between 1821 and 1922 – as the west created nation-states in former Ottoman provinces.

The Young Turk determination to emulate Europe’s secular liberal-market modernisation in Turkey came at terrible cost. One million Armenians died, 250,000 Assyrians perished, and one million Greek Orthodox Anatolians were expelled. Kurdish identity was suppressed, and finally Islam was demonised and suppressed by Kemal Ataturk. Islamic institutions were closed and the 1,400-year-old caliphate was abolished.

Islam was in crisis. Disorientated and demoralised, under siege from enforced secularism in Turkey, Iran and elsewhere, and with Marxism enticing away its younger members, it began a journey of discovery. It sought a solution to its problems by finding a new ‘self’.

Islamists returned to the Qur’an in search of the insights that would help them to find the solutions to their problems. The Qur’an is no blueprint for politics or a state; in fact it takes a jaundiced view of theological speculation. It is, as it states frequently, nothing new. The Qur’an is intended as a ‘reminder’ of old truths, already known to us all. One of which is that for humans to live together successfully they must practice compassion, justice and equity towards each other. This insight lies at the root of political Islam.

Complete inversion

It is a principle that represents a complete inversion of the ‘great transformation’. Instead of the pre-eminence of the market, to which other social and community objectives are subordinated, the making of a society based on compassion, equity and justice becomes the overriding objective – to which other objectives, including markets, are subordinated. It is not, therefore, a form of social democracy. Social democracy accepts the principle of market efficiency but attempts to mitigate its effects on those who are its victims. Islamism, by contrast, seeks to invert the market paradigm completely.

It is revolutionary in another aspect. Instead of the individual being the organisational principle around which politics, economics and society is shaped, the western paradigm is again inverted. It is the collective welfare of the community in terms of such principles – rather than the individual – that becomes the litmus of political achievement.

In short, Islamists are re-opening an old debate, one that is at the root of both western and Islamic philosophy. It was originally posed by Plato when he questioned the ends and purpose of politics. Is politics no more than a race by politicians as to who can claim to satisfy human appetites, desires and wants more fully, or is there ‘telos’, a ‘higher purpose’, to politics – such as justice, for example?

Some westerners are troubled that after two centuries of settled opinion, their vision is being questioned anew. One US conservative commented to me recently that with Descartes, the west had discovered ‘objective truth’ through science and technology. It had made ‘us’ rich and powerful and Muslims could not bear that, he believed. They knew that ultimately they would be forced to acquiesce to western ‘truth’. But what is happening is very far from this simplistic vision.

Islamists see all too clearly the limitations to the Cartesian process of thinking: its internalisation of the moral order within the ‘self’; its displacement of any wider external ‘order’, with Cartesian ‘reason’ emerging as the power to ‘make’ rational ‘order’ according to correct procedural standards; and the notion of the vantage point of ‘I think’ somehow placing the mind and ‘self’ outside the world about us – detaching us from both things and feelings.

Descartes separated the material world of ‘real’ things – which could be touched, tasted, felt or viewed, and were to be explained and classified through scientific rationality – from the world of ‘ideas’ associated with fantasy, superstition, magic and illusion. There was ‘reality’ and, separate to it, the make-believe and illusionary figments of human thinking unrestrained by reality. This narrow duality formed the stepping stone to modern notions of the western ‘self’ and individualism in its many variants.

This duality also gave the west its concept of the ‘rational order’ – a moral order – that is ‘made’ by humans through the exercise of internal human will and action. Until this time, most humans held to a ‘rational’ and moral order to the world about us that was external to ourselves. This order was to be ‘discerned’ from a contemplation of the signs in nature and within us.

The Islamist revolution, therefore, is much more than politics. It is an attempt to shape a new consciousness – to escape from, and challenge, the most far-reaching pre-suppositions of our time. It draws on the intellectual tradition of Islam to offer a radically different understanding of the human being, and to escape from the hegemony and rigidity of Cartesian literalism. It is a journey of recovery of insights from that ‘other history of Being’, as the French philosopher Henri Corbin termed it, that is far from over.

Free to think again

It has many shortcomings and setbacks – as recent events in Iran have shown – but its intellectual insights offer Muslims (and westerners too) the potential to step beyond the shortcomings of western material consciousness. This is what excites and energises. A Hezbullah leader, when asked what the Iranian revolution had signified for him, replied unhesitatingly that Muslims felt themselves free to think once again.

It is not possible, therefore, to make sense of the Iranian or wider Islamic resistance without understanding it as a philosophic and metaphysical event too. It is the omission of this latter understanding that helps explain repeated western misreadings of Iran, its revolution and other events in the region.

Hezbullah is using techniques that stand outside of the usual repertoire of western politics in order to transform Muslims. It is not because Hezbullah provides better community services that its leader, Seyed Hassan Nasrallah, is revered throughout the Muslim world.

Hezbullah is using myth, archetypal narrative and symbolism to explode the Cartesian severance between subject and object, and between objective reality, on the one hand, and fantasy, make-believe and superstition on the other. Hezbullah uses these means to re-ignite creative imagination. The opening of this intermediary layer in Cartesian dualism allows people to begin imagining themselves in a new way; and by imagining themselves differently, to begin to act differently. As they begin to imagine themes differently and act differently, the way they see the world about them changes also.

Of course there is another side to Islamism. Islam, like Christianity, has witnessed, from the outset, a struggle between a narrow, literalist and intolerant interpretation in opposition to the intellectual tradition grounded in philosophy, reasoning and in transforming knowledge. It is the latter that informs movements such as Hezbullah and Hamas.

Perversely, for the past 50 years, it is to the literalists, often called Salafist, that the west has looked to circumscribe ‘threats to its interests’ in the Middle East in a repetition of cold war containment thinking. Western commercial ties and its hold over the region seemed threatened by the upsurge of revolutionary spirit among Islamists.

The US and Europe turned to a more docile and apolitical variant of political Islam, which they believed would be more compliant. But in so using the literalist puritan orientation, the west has misunderstood the mechanism by which some Salafist movements have migrated through schism and dissidence to become the dogmatic, hate-filled and often violent movements that really do threaten westerners, as well as their fellow Muslims.

This transformation of a narrow literalism into a more dangerous form occurs because the west has tried to use a particular puritan current – Saudi-orientated Salafism – for its political ends. Salafists of this type – that is, those who follow a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an and certain sayings attributed to the Prophet, and who try to practice an exact imitation of the conduct of the early Muslim believers – are for the most part, peaceful, pious and reformist Islamists who stand aloof from politics and from national and local elections. They are properly ‘apolitical’.

But the US and Britain have primarily used this current to try to contain an Islamist resistance that has unsettled its protégés and frightened Israel.

A coincidence of interest over oil and military matters has given rise to a 50-year Saudi-western alliance; but also – more importantly – to one of the two flawed premises underlying the moderate/extremist template of today. By this way of thinking, if apolitical, docile Islam is the moderate element to be supported, then Hamas and Hezballah by definition become the ‘extremists’ to be opposed and ultimately eliminated.

Wrong side of the divide

The west is situated on the wrong side of the divide – backing narrow literalism and dogma versus intellect. It is perhaps not surprising that a literalist and dogmatic west has contributed to literalism in Islam also. But by holding on to this flawed perception that it is supporting docility and ‘moderation’ against ‘extremism’, paradoxically the west has left the Middle East a less stable, more dangerous and violent place.

Traditionally, those on the left in Europe have assumed a cautious, if not jaundiced view of the Iranian revolution, retaining a suspicion of all religiously-inspired movements. Michel Foucault, the celebrated French philosopher, came close to censure and ejection from intellectual life after writing a series of articles from Tehran describing the sense of freedom generated among Iranians inspired by the revolution that caused outrage on the left. To a certain extent, his reputation never fully recovered.

The 1979 revolution was an event that has never conformed easily to western notions of what ‘a revolution’ should be. I have tried to show in this short article that the Iranian revolution should not be dismissed as some discontinuity of history, an aberration to be explained away rather than to be understood.

The wider Islamist revolution faces a huge struggle against a burgeoning, western-backed, narrow, intolerant, reductive, anti-heterodox Islam that is pumped up with petro-dollars. But this should not be allowed to obscure the fact that political Islam of the Hezbullah, Hamas and Iranian variety is founded on one central principle – the struggle for justice, placing equity, compassion and social justice as its overriding objectives, to which other objectives should be subordinated.

Ali Shariati was clear that the ‘prophetic function’ of the Shia religion ‘acted as a vehicle of protest against accepted values and present policies of the dominant society’. He might well have added the rider, ‘whoever they may be’. Given that he saw the ‘true’ function of religion as a struggle against ‘religion misused in support of the status quo’, there can be little doubt that Shariati, were he alive today, would be reminding some of those pillars of ’79 of those original ideals for which they all risked life and liberty.

Alastair Crooke is the author of Resistance: the Essence of the Islamist Revolution (Pluto Press, 2009)

To begin with, he reduces the 1979 revolution to a religious uprising whose demands and aspirations, he claims, were to establish an ‘Islamic alternative’ with an ‘understanding of the self or the world’ different from ‘a particular western consciousness’ imposed on them for 300 years. One has to assume that he is not aware of the fact – and hence admonishes those who are – that the revolution was essentially against the Shah’s dictatorship and US dominance, and for political freedoms, democracy and social justice. He further reduces the religious inspiration of the revolution to the thoughts of Ali Shariati.

We read that ‘it is 30 years now since the Iranian revolution, and it is approximately 30 years since Ali Shariati … coined the term “Red Shi’ism” to describe the ideas propelling the upheaval that was to mobilise and energise tens of millions in Iran.’ Some factual errors merit correction here.

First, Shariati, who died two years before the revolution, was one among several major Shi’i voices which participated in the anti-Shah movement. They included Seyyed Mahmood Taleghani, Mehdi Bazargan, Morteza Motahari, not to mention Ruhollah Khomeini. While to some outsiders, all these clerical and lay Shi’i figures may seem similar, they were in fact very different and each had their own separate and significant followings. Second, Shariati’s concept of Red Shi’ism was coined much earlier before the time of the revolution.

Crooke grieves that Red Shi’ism is still ‘misunderstood’ and says ‘the Iranian revolutionaries are widely seen, in the west, to have been a coalition of forces, in which the leftists played a major part.’ This is an established historical fact, only denied in the formal history of the Islamic regime. The revolution was indeed an informal ‘coalition of forces’. This included the secular left and liberal, religious and non-religious intellectual women and men, artists, poets, lawyers, students, workers and civil servants, and other elements of the new and traditional middle classes.

As an example, the workers’ showras (councils) that were formed in private and public institutions prior to the Shah’s downfall, crippling the country’s economy by shutting down the national oil company, major industrial plants, factories, educational institutions and ministries, were predominantly formed by left and liberal individuals. In the Union of the Councils of the largest public conglomerate of the country (IDRO, the Industrial Development and Renovation Organisation of Iran, with over 110 major state industries), of the 16 co-founders from different industrial units, none, including the present author, was religious. In fact, we had to actively solicit and recruit a few religious people to join the founding body.

Crooke’s portrayal of Shariati’s relations with the left is also problematic. We read, ‘Shariati was no doubt aware that the “Red Shi’ism” tag would appeal to leftist components in Iranian society, and help unite the coalition.’ This is puzzling, for a few lines above Crooke had taken to task those who misunderstood the revolution as consisting of a ‘coalition of forces’, yet here he offers that Shariati wanted to ‘unite the [non-existent] coalition’.

The main problem, however, is that one of the concerns for Shariati and other Muslim reformers at the time (unlike the new genre of Muslim reformers discussed below) was to counter the political influence of the socialist left among youth and students. It is true that Shariati’s anti-clericalism and anti-Shah stances had gained the respect of the left, but Shariati was no friend of the left and never wanted to ‘unite the coalition’.

Backward and reactionary

Crooke also has serious misconceptions about Khomeini. Linking Khomeini to Shariati’s Red Shi’ism, he writes, ‘Khomeini thus endorsed not just the material welfare, but good education and healthcare for all the people, as a pre-eminent responsibility of Islam.’ In fact, Khomeini’s focus was cultural ‘purification’ of society; and his famous saying, ‘economy is for donkey[s]‘ (eghtessad mal-e khar-e), points to the fact that material welfare was never his priority. Neither was education on his agenda (especially in the case of women).

Crooke tries to substantiate his claims about Khomeini by quoting none other than the Ayatollah’s son, Ahmad, who stated that the reason why his father became an ‘Imam’ and popular with the masses was that ‘he fought the backward, stupid, pretentious, reactionary clergy’. The fact, however, is that Khomeini himself was the embodiment of the backward and reactionary clergy.

It is with this flawed understanding of the Iranian revolution that Crooke ventures into his analysis of the recent electoral coup and we learn of his support for Ahmadinejad. In the same manner that he failed to recognise any significant roles played by non-religious or non-Islamist forces during the 1979 revolution, he contends that the recent upheavals reflect clashes between the ‘red’ and the ‘black’ Shia.

He bemoans the fact that some of the pillars of the revolution, such as Hashemi Rafsanjani, are ‘holding back the progress of the revolution’ in pursuit of ‘self-interest and self-enrichment’. Granted that Rafsanjani and many other clerics opposing Ahmadinejad are corrupt. But so are many of the clerical and non-clerical supporters of Ahmadinejad. On corruption, lies and false qualifications, both sides can compete very effectively.

Claiming that ‘Ahmadinejad seeks to break the hold of some of the hugely wealthy clerics’ does not add up unless Crooke can provide at least some instances when Ahmadinejad actually dealt with such corruptions during his presidency.

Crooke boldly declares that ‘Iran is not facing a popular uprising … and those opposed to the revolution represent a small minority.’ He conveniently concludes that events have shown that ‘the opposition did not have legs: it did not broaden, it shrunk.’ An interesting choice of analogies given the way in which the current regime broke the legs, limbs, backs and heads of the peaceful demonstrators on the street and in prisons.

The world saw millions of Iranians frustrated with 30 years of this ‘Islamic alternative’, waging nonviolent demonstrations. The Islamic Guards and Basijis under the direct order of the Supreme Leader Khamenei and President Ahmadinejad ruthlessly suppressed the opposition. They killed, detained and gang-raped young women and men. Hundreds were brutally tortured, mutilated and murdered in the name of the ‘revolution’s progress’. The demonstrations shrunk, but not the opposition, which has actually expanded, particularly after the disgusting news of systematic rape and beating to death of detainees in different prisons.

The real rationalists

Moving on to discuss Islam and Islamists in general, Crooke argues that Islam, like Christianity, has witnessed both literalist and rationalist traditions. He is absolutely right. But the analysis becomes absurd and tragically funny when to him the champions of the rationalist trends in Iran are the likes of Khomeini, Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.

Leaving aside the obvious flaws in this argument, one can hardly accept as ‘rational’ some of the bizarre actions of the present state under Ahmadinejad. This includes dropping a copy of some government policies and programmes into a well in Chamkaran, where he believes the 12th Shia Imam is in occultation, for his approval. Or his claim of having seen a halo around his head while speaking at the UN general assembly.

Can we imagine putting this sort of ‘rationalism’ in the category of great Islamic rationalists such as Al-Kindi, Razi, Farabi, Biruni, Avicenna, Averros and countless others? A very minimal knowledge of the Islamic traditions of thought would show that Khomeini and Ahmadinejad, and their counterparts in Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine, are the continuation of literalist, anti-rationalist traditions. An Islamic rationalist trend does exist in present day Iran through the likes of Mohammad Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar, Reza Alijani and others, who live under constant threat and harassment by Crooke’s heroes.

These rationalists do not seek a ‘radically different understanding of the human being’. They do not reject modernity. Unlike their predecessors, they believe in the separation of religion and state, are against the establishment of an Islamic state, and thus cannot be identified as ‘Islamist’ anymore. We can see the same trend in other Muslim-majority countries, from Turkey, Sudan, and North Africa to Indonesia.

Crooke is right in criticising the west for its one-sided support of Israel and siding with the Salafis of Saudi Arabia. But Khomeinists, Hezbullah and Hamas are not the alternative solution to the problems of the Middle East and the so-called Muslim world.

On the contrary, the future of Muslim-majority countries is in the hands of the educated secular men and women, both religious and non-religious citizens, who want to live and love like their western counterparts. They don’t want an ‘Islamic alternative’. What they want is a democratic society, where everyone is free to believe in any religion or ideology, free to choose their dress, what to eat and drink, and who to love. These are human needs, rights and desires.

Saeed Rahnema is professor of political science at York University, Toronto

Ali Shariati, a mediocre writer-thinker influenced by Frantz Fanon’s ideas on post-colonialism, was never considered the ideologue of the 1979 revolution. In 1970s’ Iran, leftist ideas were much more popular than Shariati’s complaints about the ‘invasion’ of western ideas and lifestyles. Shariati’s main concern was not social and economic injustices and inequalities but rather the development of modern trends and the influence of western lifestyles and culture. He was more enraged by the breakdown of traditional social mores and the growth of women’s participation in economic and social life. His vision was not forward looking but very backward, traditionalist and misogynist.

The 1979 revolution began as a wave of protests by different sections of the society against the dictatorship, for more freedom, greater economic equality and socio-economic justice. These protests soon developed into a mass movement against the regime.

In the midst of the cold war, the fear of an increasingly popular leftist movement in Iran brought the western states around the table in a summit held in Guadeloupe to change the course of events in Iran. In a short time, to our shock and bewilderment, the Islamists, who were marginalised in the initial phase of the protests, took over the leadership of the anti-monarchist movement. Khomeini, who was no more than an exiled clergyman, hardly known by the majority of the population, became the leader of the mass movement as a result of careful planning by western powers. Overnight, he became an international media celebrity. A ‘leader’ was born. A revolution for freedom, equality and justice was aborted. This was the beginning of 30 years of bloodshed, oppression, misogyny, gender apartheid, stoning, mutilation and a most heinous political system.

Khomeini, contrary to Crooke’s assumption, did not, in any meaningful practical sense, endorse either ‘the material welfare’ or ‘good education and healthcare for all the people’. It seems that Crooke has accepted the demagogical populist rhetoric of Khomeini and the like as actual facts. Indeed, the gap between rich and poor has become much wider under the Islamic regime; real wages have fallen significantly. According to official estimates, around half of the population lives under the poverty line.

The Islamic Republic has faced opposition to its rule from the outset. The first mass protest was organised by women against the forced veiling ordered by Khomeini on 8 March 1979. This protest led to a week of rallies, meetings and sit-ins in defence of women’s rights, which resulted in a temporary retreat by the regime. The regime was only able to begin its forced veiling and gender apartheid after the brutal clampdown on all opposition groups. In June 1981, it organised a coup d’état-like assault in which thousands were arrested, brutally tortured and summarily executed. It is estimated that there were in the region of 150,000 political executions during the 1980s.

The women’s question has haunted the Islamic regime from the start. The Islamic Republic has been in continuous conflict with the women’s liberation movement, which has grown considerably in the past decade in opposition to the misogyny and gender apartheid of the Islamists. Despite brutal assaults on this movement, the regime has not succeeded in silencing it.

The current mass unrest is proof of people’s hostility to the repressive ideology of the Islamists in Iran. Just as the coming to power of an Islamic regime in 1979 created a renaissance of Islamism as an ambitious political movement, its overthrow will help marginalise political Islam. The left should be clear which side it is on.

Azar Majedi is a writer and chair of the Organisation for Women’s Liberation – Iran. www.womensliberation.net

Maple has been compared to one of Saatchi’s most famed discoveries, Tracy Emin, as her work provocatively and honestly explores themes of sexuality, feminism, religion and culture through the lens of a woman investigating her British-Muslim identity. After the opening of her controversial show last year, the gallery was vandalised, Maple and gallery staff received threats and SaLon was put under police protective surveillance.

The piece that caused the most controversy was the painting Haram, which depicts Maple in a headscarf cradling a tiny piglet. The work was condemned as blasphemous by sections of the Muslim community, while the international media leapt on the story, simultaneously praising Maple’s insight and discrediting her as a sensationalist attention-seeker.

Other pieces in the SaLon exhibition included a painting of a woman, presumably Maple, in a burqa wearing a button on her chest proclaiming ‘I love orgasms’ and a series of photographs entitled Salat, in which Maple is pictured in daily prayer. In some photos she wears a headscarf, in some she is without, and throughout the series are pictures of her wearing costume masks or bunny ears – all as if to question the ritual’s meaning and purpose.

I was able to sit down with Sarah Maple to discuss her art, the controversy surrounding it, and what it feels like trying to be a ‘good Muslim in the west’. Sitting in front of Maple at SaLon, with her Haram piece looming over us, I found myself questioning how this modest young woman with a pink-lucite ‘MAPLE’ necklace and a baby blue ‘Smiths’ t-shirt could be responsible for offending so many people.

You look extensively at gender, sexuality and religion in your art. Can you talk a little about how those themes play into your work?

They’re the things that mean the most to me; that affect my life. These kinds of issues have made me what I am, I suppose. It’s natural for me discuss them. Because a lot of my work is quite cathartic it gives me the opportunity to explore the sorts of things I wouldn’t explore in my actual life. I can use art as an outlet – especially with sexuality.

Do you find that your western/Muslim identities battle for your attention? Or do you feel like you’ve found harmony for them now?

I do feel like they’re in harmony now. But when I was growing up it was more of an issue for me. Obviously growing up in the south of England it was very white with not very many Muslims. The only Muslims I knew were my own family, and I think that this was a huge part of how I feel about it now. I didn’t feel like I fit in at all. And I didn’t really, but I wanted to. I wanted to explore that cultural side, but I never got to. And I think that when I did meet other Muslim people it was like I had grown up so much that I no longer fit in. I couldn’t even fit in if I tried.

You’ve talked about being a ‘good Muslim in the west’ and wanting to fuse those two identities together. Do you think it can it be done?

That’s the main thing in my work-I just don’t know. I think I always believed that it could, and then I suppose from looking at other Muslims and speaking to them, they look at the religion very differently than I do. And what I perceive to be a good Muslim isn’t what other people perceive. That’s when I started questioning it. Not the religion but the way people interpreted it and practiced it.

I get the sense from talking to young Muslims here that there’s a big disconnect as to what people, especially women, are expected to do in public versus how they act in private. I feel like I see that a lot in your art – with I Love Orgasms, for example. It seems as though you play with putting these roles together.

Yeah. It’s definitely about what you see on the outside, and what’s actually on the inside. And I think it’s not about displaying and showing everyone that I can wear a hijab, so I’m a good Muslim. It’s about what you believe in your heart, I think. But you know many people would disagree with that, so …

Was humour always a goal of your work?

Yeah, definitely. I was always interested in comedy. When I was growing up, my brother and I always watched sitcoms together. And I just love toilet humour and silly things like that, and I think I approach my work in that way. I approach very serious things in a really humorous and lighthearted way. I think that it’s a good way to get the message across, but I also think that in a way it has been detrimental. A lot of people think that I’m mocking when that’s not my aim. And people also think that I’m not taking the subject seriously when it’s a very serious subject. But I’ve approached things in a tongue-in-cheek way, and some people can’t grasp that.

Do you have a favourite piece right now? Or a least favourite one?

This is my least favourite [pointing at Haram], because it’s given me hassle. I like the way that I’ve painted it, but I think my favourite ones are Islam is the new Black and Tony Blair [entitled Don't Mention the War]. I really like Tony.

Did you think that Haram would cause so much controversy?

Not really. I thought it would be more that one [pointing to the Salat piece]. And it’s crazy how people have reacted to it, because I suppose that I didn’t think people would care.

What do you think it is about the work that stirs up so much emotion?

I think people think I’m doing it deliberately just to try and get attention, or just to piss people off or something, and it’s not that. When you describe the image it sounds worse than what it is. When you actually look at it you kind of get more of the feel of what it’s about. I suppose the reaction highlights the point of it. Because the point of it is, I was thinking about how people think the pig is a really hated thing, and Muslims are brought up to hate pigs and find them really offensive in every way. But the Koran just says don’t eat pork, it doesn’t say anything about hating the animal because it’s still a creature of God, you know? And so I was kind of playing on that. Again it’s a comment on the difference between culture and religion and people get the two confused, I think.

The media has tended to portray your work as being seen negatively by the Muslim community at large? Do you think that’s true? Are you getting positive feedback too?

It’s very 50-50. I get a lot of emails that are really positive as well. But I usually skip those, and go right to the horrible ones. A lot of people say they relate to me, which is really good. But the better emails are the ones when they say: ‘I looked at it and I didn’t like it, but then had a look again and now I like it.’ Which makes me think that people have actually considered it, and that’s really good. I really like that.

But also what’s good is that on Facebook there’s this group called ‘I hate Sarah Maple’ and I saw it and was like: ‘Oh my God!’ And at first people were saying, ‘Oh she’s a slut’ – really horrible things. One said ‘I want to strangle the bitch’ or something. It was really bad.

But then my fans started commenting, and started talking about the religion, and people were arguing back. It’s now developed on from that initial ‘I hate Sarah’ to debating more about the religion and the culture. So that’s a good outcome.

Do you think the controversy surrounding your work is going to help open dialogue between western and Muslim cultures? Or in the Muslim community in general?

I really hope so. I really would like that, but then I don’t want it to become a fight between ‘I’m right’ and ‘You’re wrong’. I don’t want to cause more problems. It would be nice if people looked at my work and thought: ‘You know, Muslims aren’t all bombers and psychos.’ You know, that’s what people think. We’re not all like that. So it’s from that perspective as well. People can see Muslims in a lighthearted way.

Do you think that art can change the world?

Hmm … Yes. I think so. Yeah.

In a big way? In a little way?

In a big way. Art is seen as something really elitist, isn’t it? People think: ‘I don’t know anything about art.’ I want to make art for everyone, so people don’t think: ‘Oh, it’s above me’ or ‘I don’t get it’. I think anyone can have a go at getting this.

Does the business side of the art world ever get in the way of making your art? Or does the system fuel it?

I find the business side really difficult. It’s such a different thing from the creativity. I’m glad I’ve got people here that can kind of do that more for me. It’s interesting how the art is sort of now more about pricing and investing. The more expensive it is the more validation it gets. I just think it’s bizarre. It never used to be like that.

Do you have different reasons for using different media?
I think the good thing about taking up photography was that it helped me to expel my ideas a lot quicker. And also I’ve started to use photography like a sketch book, so it’s helped me to come up with ideas. So I don’t draw anymore. I just take pictures of things. Also, a lot of it is gut instinct. So with this one [pointing at Haram] I was going to take it as a photograph, and it didn’t feel right. I thought it would be much more powerful as a painting.

Tracy Emin is the big name that comes up when people are talking about you. But your work reminds me a lot of Cindy Sherman’s look at performance. Why do you like self-portraits so much?

Yeah, it’s funny, the Cindy Sherman thing because everyone says Cindy Sherman to me and I’ve never looked at her work. I know of her because everyone keeps saying Cindy Sherman, Cindy Sherman. So I’ve looked at her and now I quite like it. People think I’m trying to copy her, but I’m not. I’m not really even familiar with her work.

It felt natural to use myself in the work because it’s about me, essentially, even though it reflects on wider political issues. But it’s essentially me and my life. It feels natural to use myself in the images. And it’s important to point out that it is me, because a lot of people just say ‘Oh you’re using a woman in a hijab.’ But no, it’s me. I’m talking about myself.

What else influences you?

Loads of things. Least of all art. I think everything. My friends. Things that people just say randomly, and I’ll pick up on something in conversations, comedy, music.

What kind of music?

I really like the Smiths [pointing to her Smiths t-shirt], Patrick Wolf, I really like people that have really raw talent. That’s really exciting. I like Debbie Harry. People like that.

What’s next? What can we expect from you in the coming months?

Initially I was going to move on to more works with feminism. And then, I think because of all this – this whole offence thing – how it’s become such a huge thing, it will influence the work I make. So I think the work will also be about this experience.

Anikka Weerasinghe is a Canadian freelance writer currently living in the UK. She writes for art and politics blog Art Threat, which first published a version of this interview.

Sarah Maple graduated from Kingston University in 2007 and is currently based in Brighton. Her website is at www.sarahmaple.com

Today, there are many more groups opposing Israeli policies and criticising or rejecting Zionism. They include Jews for Justice for Palestinians, Peace Now UK, Independent Jewish Voices, Jewdas and at least five or six others. Although the Jewish establishment and right-wing pro-Zionist groups would prefer it if most of these groups ceased to exist, the increasing number of Britain’s Jewish population of 300-330,000, not known for departing from the communal consensus, who have gravitated towards them is a sign of a significant change. Just how effective they are, however, is now being severely tested following Israel’s decision to launch a war on Gaza on 27 December 2008.

There is no doubt that despite policy differences between these dissident organisations on the nature of any final peace arrangements between Israel and Palestine, their opposition to Israel’s Gaza war has been unanimous. Those groups with active websites have issued strong statements. Letters have been sent to the press and to politicians and public figures. Members went onthe anti-war demonstrations in January in London.

Despite what appears to be a mounting level of action, it also seems clear that there is a deep sense of frustration as to how to mould these various initiatives into an effective response rather than just a cry of anger and pain. While the expression of such emotions is important, since one of the purposes of these groups is to be an outlet for the reactions and feelings of Jews who simply want to speak out on these issues as Jews, achieving the goal of influencing opinion, provoking a reaction from community leaders, politicians and Israeli officials, and demonstrating to the wider world that Israel’s actions run counter to progressive Jewish values are also a high priority. Three factors are hampering success.

Polarisation of opinion

Growing support for a critical stance towards Israel was partly a reflection of the severe polarisation of opinion among Jews, which has been developing since the turn of the century. The collapse of the Oslo accords, 9/11 and the beginning of the Bush-Blair war on terror, the increased anti-Jewish hostility some commentators link to intensified extreme criticism of Israel, and the coming to power of the Sharon government led some Jews to a more definitive and open opposition. But it led others, especially a hitherto rather muted conservative Jewish leadership, to move in the opposite direction.
This loyalist backlash, although rather inchoate at first, eventually resulted in the creation of a much more defensive, fearful, ethnocentric atmosphere in the organised Jewish community. It was based on alarm at the so-called ‘new anti-semitism’ (defined as vilification of Israel), characterised Muslims as a threat to Jews and rallied around an Israel whose existence was perceived as under threat from, among other things, suicide bombings, rockets fired from Gaza and the power of Hizbollah in Lebanon.

Those behind this increasingly organised and determined effort, who had excellent relations with the Blair government and the support of some high profile columnists, succeeded in creating an impression that most Jews have no truck with the critical stance of the dissidents. So, even as critical groups were gaining more adherents, barriers to having a greater impact on the organised community were raised.

Lack of coordination

Producing a response that reflects the potential of the enlarged critical sector has also been handicapped by the lack of coordination among the groups. This is partly because of the organic way they have developed – often triggered by violent crises – and the nature of some of the people involved, who tend to be rather independent minded and reluctant to make long-term organisational commitments. But it’s also partly because of political differences.

Some groups support pressurising Israel to change course through various forms of boycott. Others oppose such measures. Some take a critical Zionist stance and fully accept Israel’s legitimacy. Others are ready to countenance a questioning of that legitimacy and see a one-state solution as reasonable. Some are ready to use the word ‘apartheid’ to describe Israel’s policies in the occupied territories. Others find such language unacceptable.

The fact is that views on these issues are strongly held and make practical cooperation on policy difficult. Many in the dissident groups are aware of this problem and have been trying to find ways of producing common platforms based on principles or of reaching common, minimal positions. But if the common denominator is too low, while the strength of feeling about Israel’s actions is very high, everyone is left dissatisfied.

The media war

The third factor limiting an effective response to the Gaza war is the unprecedented, tightly coordinated, relentless public relations campaign being waged by Israeli spokespeople. This is being backed up in the UK by BICOM, the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre, a well-funded media-focused organisation.

In the past Israel has often put out confused messages about its intentions, delivered by people with poor media skills who were liable to be derailed at the first incident of major civilian casualties, especially where children were involved. The current effort has been rigorously planned over the past few years and the Israeli message heavily dominates the media. In these circumstances, with alternative voices – whether Palestinians caught up in the conflict, representatives of the PLO or Hamas, local Muslim writers, academics – fighting for space, it’s not surprising that dissenting Jews find it difficult to get attention.

At the time of writing, the war continues. Depending on the direction it takes, further opportunities may arise for critical Jewish groups to make their voices heard. If doubts are sown in the wider Jewish community as a result of more incidents like the killing of people seeking shelter in a UN school, or mounting Israeli military casualties, there may be greater readiness to listen to the arguments of dissenting Jewish groups, if they are couched in language that does not alienate those very many Jews who are reluctant to listen to the truth.

Remarkable change

Given that the pro-Israel consensus among the organised Jewish community in the UK was so robust from the 1960s through the early 1980s, the current, far more fragmented picture represents a remarkable change. The organised dissident groups are only one part of the story. Although it is not easily quantifiable, there is growing anecdotal evidence that many Jews are deeply uncomfortable with the way Israel treats the Palestinians, but do not feel that they can find the space or the language for exploring their concerns. It’s one of the challenges facing Jewish groups critical of Israel: to find a way of giving such Jews a voice. The war on Gaza may well be another bloody milestone on the path to this aim.

Antony Lerman is the former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London.

To help roll back the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, the Bush administration spent over $1 billion on abstinence-only programmes. In 2006 alone, it spent $200 million on domestic ‘abstinence-until-marriage’ programmes, in addition to funding various church groups for the same purpose. Thousands of sermons, workshops and other propaganda reinforced the message. Under the pithy slogan ABC (Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms), ultra-conservative religious groups, such as Focus on the Family, the American Family Association and Concerned Women for America, promote marriage as a solution to everything from suicide to poverty and lack of self-worth.

‘In the last three years, Bush pushed the most grotesque message of abstinence,’ says Dagmar Herzog, a professor of history at the City University of New York. ‘How could an aggressive minority successfully push this issue, and why are 95 per cent of Americans who claim to have had premarital sex unable to admit it publicly?’

Cultural wars

Herzog became interested in the topic from her studies in European history that revealed that far from discouraging sex, the Nazis promoted it among both married and unmarried Aryans. At the same time, they targeted Jews, who supposedly engaged in ‘dirty sex’, and ‘immoral’ supporters of the Weimar Republic – enlisting German protestants and catholics to clean up the ‘sex mess’.

‘The conservative evangelical sexual politics of the 1990s and early 21st century were totally new,’ Herzog found. ‘Premarital sex was perfectly normal in the south when I grew up. It was a very sensual environment. The churches weren’t hung up on sex back then, so I knew that this sexual repression was recent.’

In Sex in Crisis, the New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (Basic Books), Herzog illustrates how the origins of today’s anti-tax, anti-government movement began during the civil rights era, when the government revoked the tax-exempt status of the religious-oriented Bob Jones University, which first denied admission to African Americans and then banned interracial dating. The strategy to begin the ‘cultural wars’ also coincided with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and gays and lesbians coming out of the closet. Her findings surprised her.

Illegitimate child of the sexual revolution

Far from being anti-sexual, today’s evangelicals push a hyper-sexualised message, complete with Christian pornography and bragging about having better sex than non-believers. Evangelical sex advice books emphasise the dangers of sex outside marriage, but revel in titillating sexual details. Even if they aren’t interested, Christian wives are told to be ‘available’ to their husbands at all times, especially for ‘quickies’, to make them feel like ‘real men’.

‘Although the evangelical movement is contradictory and hypocritical, it’s important to understand that it’s pro-sex, a kind of illegitimate child of the sexual revolution,’ says Herzog. ‘The evangelicals promise physiological orgasms, called ‘soulgasms’, which combine psychological orgasms, a close emotional connection with the spouse and the blessing presence of god in the bedroom. At the same time, they’re homophobic and hostile to all sex outside marriage. They take up aspects of the old sexual revolution but twist them.’

In 1992, homosexual rights first became a major theme in a presidential election when Bush and the Republicans proposed rescinding gay rights and disparaged gays as potential sex offenders and child abusers. Pat Robertson’s and Ralph Reed’s Christian Coalition distributed 40 million voter guides opposing abortion and homosexuality. In 1994, leaders of the most powerful Christian political groups met in Colorado to further develop a strategy with a focus on state and local legislation that targeted homosexuals and anyone who supported gay rights.

A meeting of the leaders of Focus on the Family, the Eagle Forum, the Traditional Values Coalition, the National Legal Foundation and others led to a shift in tactics away from strictly religious messages, such as ‘save your soul’, and ‘go to heaven’, to adopt the secular language of fermenting fear and disgust of disease. Subsequently, religious conservatives turned their attention to pushing abstinence. Their message would adapt to the ‘new age’ and human potential movements with talk of self-help, individual empowerment, self-improvement and perfection. Such tactics allowed them to redirect the national conversation about sexuality.

The Christian Sex Education Project, True Love Waits, Silver Ring Thing and others began teaching that promiscuity and abortion lead to drinking, disease, depression and suicide. Playing on increased primal sexual anxieties that include confusion about the relationship between sex and love, and doubts about one’s own attractiveness to one’s partner – doubts that increased with exposure to internet porn and Viagra – with adolescents and adults becoming targets of a relentless no-sex-outside-marriage programme.

Assault on sexuality

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services issued sex-education guidelines that mandate teaching about ‘the potential psychological side effects’ of adolescent sexual activity and teenage non-marital sex. Bush funded abstinence education to discourage sex among all unmarried Americans between the ages of 19 and 29. Moreover, Bush’s family planning appointee, Susan Orr, accused contraceptive users of supporting ‘a culture of death’.

The problem with this assault on sexuality is that it doesn’t work. According to surveys conducted by evangelicals, 95 per cent of adults admit to having premarital sex. Seventy per cent of Christian men ‘struggle with porn’ in their daily lives and 50 per cent of them claim to be addicted to it, along with 20 per cent of Christian women. Meanwhile, adolescents who take the abstinence pledge wait 18 months longer to have sex, but they are a third less likely to use contraception when they do. Only 12 per cent of those who promise to ‘wait until marriage’ keep their promise.

Compare our attitudes to those common in Europe, where teenage sex is seen as natural, healthy and pleasurable. Teenagers get free contraceptives, medical care and counselling. (One German billboard promotes condom use with a sign, ‘Having an affair? Take me with you.’) Despite what Americans would call a permissive, some claim sinful, society in Europe, American teenage girls are three times more likely to get pregnant than those in Sweden and four times more likely than those in Germany. American teens are 70 times more likely to get gonorrhoea than those in France or the Netherlands.

Threatening descriptions of premarital sex as ‘risky behaviour’ hide an intrusive and insidious attack on sexuality. Far healthier is recognition of human autonomy and self-determination of sexual expression. America needs comprehensive sex education, contraceptive distribution and counselling to overcome the destructive social and personal effects of ignorance and repressive religious sexual morality.

‘Reproductive rights and sexual self-determination are human rights,’ Herzog says. ‘We need to affirm humans’ rights to sexual expression, sexual pleasure, and the freely chosen formation of intimate relationships.’

Don Monkerud is an Aptos, California-based writer who follows cultural, social and political issues. You can reach him at dissent[at]rattlebrain.com

The change began before the horrors of Gaza. Obama’s election had a real effect. A large political fact that went largely unreported – certainly it went unreported in the US – is the extent to which the Obama-McCain race was about the role of neoconservatism in our foreign policy. McCain was all mobbed up with neoconservatives. Obama had his share too, but far fewer, and certainly he dislikes neoconservative ideology. He would talk to Iran, for example. The neoconservatives rallied around McCain desperately, against all hope – they have always been visionaries and dreamers – although some of the shrewder of them made the migration to Obama, as shrewd neocons had in past phases of their lunacy migrated from Democratic Party to Republican Party, and back again, depending on who they thought was better for Israel.
Almost immediately after the election, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the central hive of neoconservatism, began purging neocons. It was a beautiful thing to watch. The AEI is based near the White House -Dick Cheney and his wife used to hang out there. Now feverish ideologues who had been granted status by the conservative think-tank, supported by oil men and hedge fund kings, were turned out into the street. They have had to do what we on the left have done and start blogs on a shoestring, so that they will have a place to replay their arguments for the Iraq war for the rest of their lives.

At the same time as the AEI did its purge, Foreign Policy magazine began hiring realists; the school that says that we must talk to Hamas and talk to Iran. Obama also said we must talk to Iran. Not Hamas, mind – or at least not yet, and not directly. Obama had promised the Israel lobby that he looked on Hamas as a terrorist organisation.

Space for dissent

So much for the larger factors at work. What is it like here on the ground, for someone like me, a leftist Jewish dissenter? What space exists in Jewish and American life for a unorthodox view of Israel? The answer here is finally somewhat encouraging. Little by little, the space is growing. Not that we are asked to contribute to op-ed pages; no, the New York Times still turns to Israelis to interpret what is happening in Israel. But our voices are beginning to be heard in regional newspapers – I’ve just been quoted in the Los Angeles Times – and we are all over the blogosphere. What’s more, there are three or four Jewish organisations that are responding to this anti-Israel feeling and not trying to excommunicate dissenters for once.

Gaza has only accentuated trends that have been evident for a couple of years – for instance the pro-Israel community’s concern about the growing alienation of young Jews from Israel. These Jews did not grow up with heroic battles interrupting their high school classes, but with photographs of Israeli shoulders firing on Palestinian demonstrators in front of the hateful wall. A recent study by pro-Israel sociologists said this alienation was sharpest among intermarried Jews; and 62 per cent of American Jews under 35 have married gentiles (including me).

That alienation has become more and more visible in ways that I could not have imagined a few years ago when I first got into these issues and felt pretty lonely. Every day during the two weeks of the Gaza slaughter, young Jews, and some older ones, have come forward to speak out against disproportionate violence and the damage to Jewish life. A lot of them have broken a personal or professional seal in doing so. My favourite is Rabbi Marc Gopin, who in a conference call with the media said that Jews who are disturbed by the violence must stop arguing with the right-wing members of their family and spend that mental energy instead on meeting and talking to Palestinians.

Many Jewish families have smouldered over these questions for years without the fight breaking out. To get a pass from a rabbi to essentially break with family over the slaughter was for me somewhat mentally liberating. My usual load of anguish over my stance has lessened.

Angry response

Dissenters have met with an angry response from the ethnocentric. One of the leading editors in the country is 70-year-old Marty Peretz of the New Republic. I knew him when I was young; he gave me work in a magazine that was extremely helpful to my making a career. Lately he has attacked the young Jewish journalists who have broken with Israel over the slaughter as ‘haters of their inheritance’, a fancy new way of saying self-hating. Peretz’s anathema is very much in line with a recent report for the American Jewish Committee decrying the new wave of anti-Zionist Jews as anti-semitic.

The pushback was inevitable. I don’t think it’s easy for Europeans to understand how solemn are the duties of the Israel lobby – how responsible American Jews feel for Israel’s well-being and very existence. Most American Jews have never been to Israel, but between 1917, when the Brits issued the Balfour Declaration, and 1948, when they stepped out of Mandate Palestine, the US became the superpower upon whom Israel is dependent.

That statement is the sum and substance of the Israel lobby’s identity: Israel has always been dependent on the fierce support of a western power because it has been contemptuous of the opinions of its neighbors. The result is that American Jews feel that they hold the lifeline for Israel. If they let go, the country goes down the tube. It hardly matters that, as playwright Tony Kushner once said to me, the American Jewish idea of Israel is a ‘delusion built on top of a fantasy’ – this is a keen responsibility, tinged with Holocaust shadows. ‘Never again’ has come to mean ‘never quit loving Israel’.

I am moving now away from the grassroots and into the organisational level of Jewish life, and here too there have been significant fractures. Till a year or so back, Jewish leadership was united around a neoconservative agenda. Even the Reform Jews, the most liberal and assimilated branch of the Jewish church, shamefully supported the Iraq war and worried about Islamic jihad. This combined with a tendency even in supposedly liberal political precincts of a Jewish flavour, such as prestige newspapers and the Brookings Institution and other think-tanks, to overlook the endless occupation of Arab lands as irrelevant to American foreign policy.

Of course there were Jews who were against the occupation, but they were on the margins. And the dreaded AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said nothing about the occupation at all. Israel was happy to get out of those lands, AIPAC said, if it could obtain peace, but it couldn’t.

Breaking with the Israel lobby

Many blows were struck against that complacence: the Iraq war, the writings of Jimmy Carter and the realist scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the desperate cries from the Israeli left. And a year ago, Jews who saw what the occupation was doing to Israel – basically turning it into an apartheid state – at last broke with the leadership and formed their own organisation, J Street, the so-called alternative lobby.

J Street’s heresies so far have been very mild indeed. (I’m not a member, but I’ve been supportive in my way.) It has been tepid on dividing Jerusalem and abandoning the settlements. It didn’t take on the neoconservatives frontally; no, the neocons are, as Gilbert and Sullivan would say, their sisters and their cousins and their aunts. Still, J Street broke with the mainstream, and this has been a giant symbolic strike against the Israel lobby. For a lobby works by insisting on the urgency of its message. If suddenly that message is bifurcated, the lobby loses its threat.

J Street’s bravest moment has come with the Gaza attacks, which it has condemned (mildly) as disproportionate and ill-advised. Still: it has condemned the attacks, and had the support of three other liberal Jewish groups in doing so. The response from the Zionist elders (sorry) has been swift and furious. Rabbi Eric Yoffie of the Reform Jews has called J Street ‘morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve’. The battle has been joined. Lately, an ally of J Street, Daniel Levy, has said that all Jews are being tested by the Gaza attacks and Yoffie’s call was ‘terribly wrong’.

I believe that J Street has taken its stand partly because the ethnocentric walls of Jewish life in the US have been breached, and the organisation knows that non-Jewish Americans have reacted in horror and even anger to the images from Gaza. The interest among ordinary Americans in the issue gives all of us heretics more room to run. And lo, for the first time mainstream publications are questioning whether the ‘special relationship’ with Israel is in America’s interest.

Of course it is horrifying to consider that Palestinian slaughter night be the price of a shift in American Jewish consciousness, but for myself this has been the most gratifying period of working on this issue in nearly three years. A couple of my own family members have expressed distress over Israel’s behaviour and perhaps even conceded that I am not crazy. Many of the neocons have folded their tents. The others are screaming on street corners.

Suddenly I have company all around me. I am even getting a little employment. Maybe even mainstream publications will begin to question the wisdom of Zionism when the whole philosophy has been turned on its head – Jews are so empowered in the west and so endangered in their ‘homeland’.