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Azam
Kamguian
What
I am going to talk about is Islam; contemporary political Islamic movement in
Iran. I will describe some episodes of Islamic carnage and pass you briefly
through what happened and still is happening in Iran. I will talk about those
who have nurtured Islamic movements or have tried to justify Islam. I will
conclude by emphasizing the urgency of achieving the victory of humanity over
Islam and the practical steps that should be taken to achieve this.
The
final decades of the 20th century witnessed another Holocaust - an
Islamic one, in which millions have been and continue to be shot, decapitated
and stoned to death; in which people have been slaughtered
and displaced by Islamic states, political Islamic movements and Islamic
terrorists in Iran, the Sudan, Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Central
Asia, and now in America. Any voice of dissent or freedom has been silenced on
the spot.
The oppression maintained by Islamic movements primarily takes the form of
opposition to the freedom of women, by crushing women's civil liberties, by
curtailing freedom of expression in the cultural and personal domains, by
enforcing brutal laws and traditions, and by the mass killing of people from
young children to the elderly.
Essentially,
Islam is a set of beliefs and rules that militate against human prosperity,
happiness, welfare, freedom, equality and knowledge. Islam and a full human
life are contradictory concepts, opposed to each other. Islam under any kind
of interpretation is and always has been a strong force against secularism,
modernism, egalitarianism and women's rights. Political Islam, however, is a
political movement against secular and progressive movements for liberation,
and against cultural and intellectual advances.
Violence
and disregard for human dignity are inherent in the manifestos of political
Islamic groups. This movement was supported and nurtured by Western
governments to be used in the conflicts and tension of the Cold War and in the
fight against progressive and egalitarian movements in the region.
After
political Islam took power in Iran, creating an Islamic Republic, this
movement came out of the margins in other Middle Eastern countries. It was in
Iran that political Islam first organised itself into a government and thus
turned into a major force in the region.
In Iran, under an Islamic state, violence has had another dimension:
one that is based on Islam. The very statement that an Islamic Republic exists
somewhere means that brutal violence exists within it. The mere fact that
people are forced to abide by laws based on something some god is believed to
have said somewhere, or that some prophet has said, itself represents a form
of violence. If anyone protests against such laws, they are subject to
punishment and suppression. Islam means the worst and the most ferocious kind
of violence. Iran is the most transparent picture of what Islam is capable of.
I will try to pass you briefly through this period of violence, atrocities,
and misogyny - a bloodbath committed by Islam
in power.
In
Iran, I lived through thousands of days when political Islam shed blood. Since
1979, a hundred thousand men, women and children have been executed in the
name of Allah. I have lived through days when I, along with thousands of men
and women throughout the country, looked for the names of our lovers,
husbands, wives, friends, daughters, sons, colleagues and students in
newspapers which daily announced the names of
the executed. Days when the soldiers of Allah attacked bookstores and
publishing houses and burned books. Days of armed attacks on universities,
killing students all over the country. Weeks and months of bloody attacks on
workers' strikes and demonstrations. Years of assassination of opponents
inside and outside Iran. Years of suppression and brutal murder of atheists,
freethinkers, socialists, trade union leaders and activists, Marxists, Bahais,
women who resisted the misery of hijab and the rule of sexual apartheid, and
many others who were none of these, who were arrested in the streets and then
executed simply because of their innocent non-Islamic appearance. And to the
hundred thousand murdered in Iran must be added the millions who have died in
Algeria, the Sudan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. A silent holocaust
about which the civilised world does nothing.
I,
along with thousands of political prisoners, was tortured by order of the
representative of Allah and Sharia; tortured, while the verses of the Koran
about nonbelievers were played in the torture chambers. The voice reading the
Koran was mixed with our cries of pain from lashes and other brutal forms of
torture. They raped women political prisoners for the sake of Allah and in
expectation of his reward. They prayed before raping them. Thousands were shot
to death by execution squads while Koranic verses were recited. Prisoners were
awakened every day at dawn to the sound of gunshots aimed at their friends and
cellmates. From the numbers of shots you could work out how many had been
murdered that day. The killing machine did not stop for a minute. The fathers
and mothers, husbands and wives who received the bloody clothes of their loved
ones had to pay for the bullets. They created an Islamic Auschwitz. Many of
the best, the most passionate and progressive people were massacred. The
dimensions of the horror are beyond imagining.
From
that time, love, happiness, smiling, any free human interaction was
forbidden. Islam took over completely. This is what happened to my
generation. But it was not limited only to my generation, It had bloody
consequences for our parents’ generation and for the next generation. During
those years, millions of children were brainwashed and manipulated. The crimes
committed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and political Islam in the region
are comparable to the crimes committed by Fascism in the 1930s and early
1940s, and to the genocide in Rwanda and
Indonesia.
Yet
these are events that humanity around the world has been largely unaware of. A
Holocaust which, if humanity knew of its dimensions and intensity, would
certainly cause it to weep. With the downfall of such regimes, the world will
finally be given an opportunity to know the truth - victims will speak out,
prisons and torture chambers will be exposed, torturers will make
heart-wrenching confessions, Islamic prosecutors and judges will reveal what
they did to their victims behind prison walls. Then people all over the world
will see what a despicable phenomenon Islam is.
They will finally find out the truth about those governments that backed the
Islamic movements and the Western mainstream media that deliberately blocked
people's access to the truth.
The
aftermath of September 11
exposed some of the reality of what is happening to people living under
the constant terror of Islam. It exposed something of the tragedy that befell
women under the Taliban. It revealed, to some extent, the true substance of
Islam. But it became plain to see that this carnage is Islamic. It became
evident that it is all about Islam.
When
I came to the West in the beginning of the 1990s, I was faced by the fact that
the majority of intellectuals, the mainstream
media, the academic world, and many feminists,
in the name of respecting other cultures and religions, were trying to justify
Islam by dividing it into fundamentalist and moderate, progressive and
reactionary, Medina's and Mecca's, folksy and non-folksy, poisonous
and edible.
For people like me, first-hand victims of the Islamic Holocaust, it was
suffocating to listen to and to have to refute
endless tales to justify this terror, atrocity and misogyny. Parallel to this
Islamic carnage, apologists
for Islam try to divert people's righteous loathing for Islam and for the
political Islamic movement, to limit it to a hatred of fundamentalism'. They
attempt to reduce the anti-Islamic struggle to anti-fundamentalism. They keep
telling us that what we loathe is fundamentalism, not the 'true', the 'real'
Islam. They pledge 'reform in Islam' and the application of a 'positive
interpretation of the Koran' to women's rights by ‘linguistic turn’. They
raise the idea of Islamic feminism and try to attach a human face to the
monstrous face of Islam against women.
The
truth should be spoken. We shouldn't let apologists for Islam play with
people's lives any more. We should say clearly and loudly that it is all about
Islam. What we have seen is the reality of Islam in power. The fact is that
Western liberal and left-wing intellectuals feel guilty about past colonial
history and are apologetic to the ‘Third World’. They consider the 'Third
World' a given entity, where people are keen to suffer under the rotten rules
of Islam, where people are happy to be deprived of the achievements of human
civilization in the 21st century. According to them, women desire
sexual apartheid, girls love to be segregated from boys, and people hate civil
rights and individual freedom. In their view, people are the allies of Islamic
movements and Islamic governments. This is indeed a distorted image of the
realities. This is an inverted colonialism. In this picture, people who are
fighting for civil rights, secularism and against political Islam do not
exist. This self-centered mentality in which everything should revolve around
the guilt of Western pseudo-intellectuals is appalling. The rights of freedom
of expression, equality of men and women, and a secular state apply to people
in the 'Third World' too. Isn't it shameful that we have to argue about it?
Contrary
to this view, there is a fight going on - and it has been going on for over 20
years - between progressive movements in the
Middle East and in the West on the one side,
and political Islam on the other. The records of the daily struggle of people
and the non-Islamic opposition in Islam-ridden countries, and the news of the
daily resistance of the youth and women in Iran, demonstrate the reality of
peoples' demands in the 'Third World'. Since 1979, Iranian society has changed
dramatically and deeply. The movement for secularism and atheism, for modern
ideas and culture, for individual freedom, for women's liberation and civil
liberties has been widespread and deep. Disgust for religion and the backward
culture of those in power is immense.
Secularism
must be defended actively and resolutely in Islam - ridden countries.
Universal human and civil rights must be the standard. Secularism is not only
realizable, but also, after the experiences of Iran, Afghanistan, the Sudan
and Algeria, is an urgent and pressing need and demand of the people of the
region. The demand for secularism must push for absolute and complete
separation of religion from the State; complete separation of religion from
education; freedom of religion and atheism; laws free of religious content;
and for religion to be declared the private affair of individuals. A conscious
struggle must be conducted against the power of organised religion. All
religious denominations and sects should be officially registered as private
enterprises, subject to regulations and laws.
To
realise these ideals and demands, we need a massive joint force. Despite the
struggles of the non-Islamic opposition in the
Middle East and in the West in the past
decades, all that has been visible has been occasional reports of the
barbarity of political Islam and the reactions of Western governments, media
and 'intellectual' apologists for Islam. But, there is a third force, a
sleeping giant who can turn the situation around. If this giant awakes, this
era could see the beginning of positive changes and the realisation of ideals
that were almost abandoned during the final decades of the 20th
century. Humanity must rise up and defend itself against the barbarity of
Islam.
The
ranks of civilised humanity form a massive force that has, so far, sadly been
silenced. It can come to the fore. If there is to be a future, it is in the
formation of a progressive and freedom-loving policy at the forefront of the
ranks of the people. Otherwise, the stage is left open to terrorism and
barbarism. I
finish my speech with the hope that in the coming years of the 21st
century, we will witness the victory of humanity over Islam. All
freedom-lovers and secularist forces around the world should come together in
a joint effort to combat political Islam; to promote secularism,
egalitarianism and freedom, in the societies that Islam oppresses.
Adapted
from the speech delivered at the session on Islam at the International
Humanist & Ethical Union World Congress 2002.
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