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my travels/troubles with religion – some autobiographical reflections

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Notes

  1. My work there was terminated after less than 24 hours when I got into a discussion with the commanding officer on the morality of obstructing the free movements of all Israeli Arabs even if they were not suspected of being hostile to the state – my gut universalist response brought me into a whole month of security interrogations and eventually a classification as a ‘security risk’ and a move to work for the rest of my military service as a typist in the army garage. For the more detailed story of my journey to anti-zionism, please see my other autobiographical paper, ‘The Contaminated Paradise’ (2002).

  2. The traditional text (which varies somewhat in different Jewish diasporic traditions) all Jews read and sing around the dinner table during the Seder celebration.

  3. This was years before and has nothing to do with Giddens’, Blair's and Clinton's ‘Third Way’.

  4. So much so that I eventually circulated a notice inviting everyone from the ‘old’ WAF and some new kindred spirit women, to come to my home the first Monday of each month where I would prepare a vegetarian soup, to discuss ‘WAF’ related issues. After more than a year of ‘soup kitchen’ existence, the organization returned to the public arena and has organized since then public meetings, commission submissions and other forms of related public activities independently and in coalition with other political bodies.

  5. Fundamentalist movements all over the world, with all their heterogeneity, are basically political movements that have a religious or ethnic imperative and seek in various ways, in widely differing circumstances, to harness modern state, weaponry and media powers to the service of their creed. This creed, which can be based on certain sacred texts or evangelical experiential moment linked to a charismatic leader (like the Jewish Lubavitche Rebbe or the Iglesia ni Cristo in the Philippines), is presented as the only true and valid form of the religion and/or the ethnic culture. Religious fundamentalist movements, therefore, need to be differentiated from liberation theologies, which, while deeply religious and political, see themselves as part of a pluralist society rather than attempt to impose an absolutist truth. See WAF website, http://www.womenagainstfundamentalism.org.uk/.

  6. I have no space here to expand on this, but please see, for example, the submission by Women Against Fundamentalisms and Southall Black Sisters in January 2007 to the Commission on Integration and Cohesion, as well as my forthcoming book The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations, Sage.

  7. See, for example, the recent establishment of the ‘International Bureau of Laicite’, http://www.wluml.org/node/5768.

  8. Please see http://www.uel.ac.uk/cmrb/index.htm.

  9. This is also why we object to the new Equalities Bill, which, while including a lot of important and positive new legal regulations, also establishes ‘religion’ (rather than discrimination against people because of their religious origin) on the same ontological bases as race, gender, age and disability – rather than an ideological or political belief. As such, this part of the Bill is more like a more universal version of the old blasphemy law that favoured Christianity in Britain than an anti-discrimination legislation.

  10. Please see http://www.uel.ac.uk/ipsa/.

  11. I obviously miss the ‘soup kitchen days’ of WAF…

  12. See my forthcoming monograph on The Politics of Belonging, Sage.

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Yuval-Davis, N. my travels/troubles with religion – some autobiographical reflections. Fem Rev 97, 130–141 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.31

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