7-18-05,9:30am

‘Imperialism generates the conditions in which religious fundamentalism can thrive and spread’, Avtra Sadiq of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) told a well-attended seminar at the weekend.

‘US and British governments back corrupt Arab governments which themselves have encouraged Islamic fundamentalists to attack democratic and left forces, leaving the fundamentalists with their anti-poverty and anti-corruption appeal as the only political alternative’, he told the meeting at Ruskin House, Croydon.

‘Yet they have no real alternative programme to unite people against landlordism and exploitation, nor any vision for the future’, Mr Sadiq declared.

Navid Shomali of the Tudeh Party of Iran reminded the audience that the US Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s MI6 had played a central role in bringing down the democratic, secular and nationalist government of Mossadeq in Iran in 1953.

‘This cleared the way for the brutal regime of Western puppet-shah Pahlavi and his SAVAK secret police, where the mosque was the safest place to build opposition’.

Mr Shomali pointed to Israel’s defeat of Arab nationalist regimes in the Seven Day War of 1967, Ayatollah Khomeini’s seizure of power in Iran in 1979, and US support for Bin Laden and the Mujahadeen’s war against the progressive, pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan from the late 1970s as key events in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Mary Davis, editor of the Communist Party of Britain’s theoretical journal Communist Review, argued that religious ideas tend to mask class analysis and class contradictions - often unwittingly - and so helped maintain the ruling class in power. Although many people with religious convictions play a progressive role in political struggle, the combination of religious dogma with state power was invariably a recipe for the deepest reaction, she insisted, whether in the United States, Iran or Israel.

Avtar Sadiq identified the main characteristics of religious fundamentalism as intolerance, hostility to minorities, severe restrictions on free speech and other civil liberties, anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and the use of violence.

Mary Davis and speakers from the floor also illustrated how the fundamentalism of all world’s main religions threatened women’s rights in particular, demonstrating their backward-looking character.

Rashid el-Shekh of the Sudanese Communist Party asked who had benefited from the slaughter of 27 children in Bagdad in the name of Iraqi resistance to foreign occupation, or when the bomb outrages in London diverted attention from the issues and results of the G8 summit.

Navid Shomali urged progressives to draw optimism from the struggles against both imperialism and religious fundamentalism, pointing to recent mass mobilisations by the democratic and working class movement in Iran. Avtar Sadiq described how the Communists in India had helped build a broad, secular alliance to defeat the Hindu fundamentalist and semi-fascist BJP government.

For Britain, Mary Davis called for a campaign to defend secularism, particularly in education where New Labour policies and Christian fanatics in the Blair government were handing over schools and colleges to religious fundamentalists.

‘We need the full separation of church and state, with religion regarded as an entirely private matter where everyone is free to hold or not hold religious beliefs’, she declared.

The seminar on Imperialism and Religious Fundamentalism was organised by the Co-ordinating Committee of Communist Parties in Britain, which intends to hold similar seminars in other towns and cities, and to publish the main papers presented to them.