A politics of emancipation must confront both imperialism and the religious-Right. The attempt to subordinate one to the other is a form of political erasure. This essay takes up Azar Majedi and Homa Arjomand’s response to my earlier piece and defends the third pole against those who have abandoned it.
Gaza: The Principled Position
Opposing the Israeli state's genocide in Gaza is a moral and political necessity. But progressive politics does not end with denunciation of one pole of power. It interrogates all dominant forces, including those within societies facing imperialism and occupation.
Islamism is not merely a religious ideology. It is a form of political rule, organising society through religious authority, suppressing working class organisation, enforcing patriarchal control, and crushing secular and emancipatory movements. Its hostility to labour, to women, and to dissent is structural.
A principled position names both the Israeli state's genocide and Hamas's terrorism simultaneously, not as a concession but as a refusal to subordinate one form of domination to another. This is what makes it possible to oppose both without collapsing into civilisational binaries. That Western governments also condemn Hamas does not make our condemnation a Western project, any more than Western governments' condemnation of the Iranian regime makes opposition to the Islamic regime by civil society a Western project.
This was the shared position of Majedi and Arjomand as signatories to the Third Camp Manifesto in 2006. To treat one reactionary camp as primary in a way that renders the other secondary is to abandon that method, and to abandon those who live under both simultaneously.
Imperialism Is Not the Only Reality
There is no serious socialist politics that denies imperialism. US militarism has devastated the Middle East and the world. None of this is in dispute. But Majedi and Arjomand’s argument leaps from the empirical claim that Western military power is larger, to the analytical claim that Western domination is therefore primary, to the practical conclusion that other forms of domination are secondary and deferrable. These are three separate claims.
A political movement can prioritise the campaign against the state with the greatest capacity to wage genocide without conceding that other forms of domination are analytically less real or structurally derivative. The woman imprisoned in Iran for burning her hijab does not become a secondary victim because the US military is larger. The labour organiser tortured in Evin does not become a secondary casualty because Washington has more bombs. Domination must be analysed where it operates, not ranked against a global ledger of military force. The scale of power does not determine the legitimacy of resistance to it.
Islamism was fostered in specific historical conditions such as the US Cold War strategy to create an Islamic belt around the Soviet Union and the West’s role in the expropriation of the Iranian revolution by Islamism. These origins are relevant. But causation is not exoneration. Whatever the origins, Islamism has its own institutions, its own coercive apparatus, and its own governing programme. It is an independent political force with its own logic of rule. The Islamic regime of Iran, brought to power in conditions shaped by US imperialism, is not reducible to Washington’s power. Hamas, enabled by Israel as a counterweight to the secular PLO, is not reducible to Israeli strategy. To explain them as secondary displaces the social relations through which domination is exercised.
Majedi and Arjomand ask: “Do you really believe that Islamic terrorism has the same weight and power of state terrorism in the international geopolitics?” But that is not the question. The question is whether the victims and survivors of both forms of domination deserve a politics that confronts both.
The Politics of Enforced Binaries Is Eurocentric
Their politics is clear: political positions must align with one of two opposing camps; critique becomes illegitimate if it risks benefiting the other. Dissent is judged not on its truth but on its geopolitical alignment. This is the politics of enforced binaries. It is also Eurocentric. By centring Western power as the organising axis, it renders all other forms of domination derivative. People living under the rule of the religious-Right cease to be political subjects. Their struggles are acknowledged only insofar as they fit the dominant anti-imperialist narrative. When they do not, they are minimised or erased. Exploitation, domination, and resistance, however, must be analysed where they occur, in their material conditions, and in the actions of those who struggle against them.
The late Marxist leader Mansoor Hekmat named the ideological cover for this as "petit-bourgeois anti-imperialism," used to justify Islamic terrorism by reference to Western government crimes. He insisted there was:
not the slightest real and justified relationship between the sufferings of the deprived people of Palestine and the terrorism of Islamic or non-Islamic organisations attributed to these people.
A left that refuses to analyse Islamism as a form of reaction ends up with less ground to confront reaction anywhere. The far-Right and Islamism are not opposites. They belong to the religious-Right; they feed off each other.
The practical consequence of Majedi and Arjomand’s method leads to absurdities: anti-war protests flying the flags of Hamas and the Islamic regime of Iran; sections of the Western Left marching for women's rights while defending a regime that has made women's subordination a cornerstone of its rule. This is the logical outcome of a framework that grants full political agency to those resisting Western imperialism, while denying it to those resisting other forms of power.
The Hamas Question: What Kind of Society?
Majedi and Arjomand invoke the African National Congress (ANC) during apartheid South Africa as precedent and argue that condemning Hamas in the current context aligns with imperial narratives. But what kind of society does Hamas seek to build?
Hamas is not simply a “resistance” force. It is a governing apparatus, institutional, coercive, and theocratic, that has displaced the Palestinian Left, suppresses secular organisation, and reorganises Palestinian social life around religious fundamentalism.
Israel enabled Hamas’s rise as a deliberate strategy to divide and weaken the secular PLO but Hamas is responsible for its own crimes. Hamas governs, disciplines, and coerces. Its victims are primarily Palestinians. Patriarchal controls such as dress codes, restrictions on public movement, and the subordination of women’s testimony and inheritance rights within a Sharia framework are central mechanisms of social discipline. A liberation movement that subordinates women is not a liberation movement.
On October 7th, Hamas killed at least 828 civilians, including 36 children. The UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred during those attacks. Hostages were taken. A progressive position cannot ignore sexual violence or the killing of civilians regardless of political context. The right to resist occupation has never included the right to rape, massacre civilians, or take hostages. Questions about Israeli intelligence failures on that day do not alter what Hamas did, who the victims were, or what a principled politics must say about it.
Moreover, the ANC comparison does not hold. The ANC’s Freedom Charter was committed to a non-racial, secular society with universal rights, linking national liberation to social emancipation. Hamas’s founding charter articulates a theocratic political project. These are not analogous.
The 1979 Iranian revolution provides a clear historical example. Islamism came to power in conditions engineered in significant part by Cold War strategy, fostering Islamism as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and Left. Then, too, sections of the Left subordinated their criticism of Islamism to their opposition to the Shah, treating the clerical movement as a lesser enemy to Western imperialism. A politics unable to confront multiple forms of domination simultaneously has no ground from which to resist.
The “Clash of Civilisations” Inversion
Majedi and Arjomand use the discussion on Gaza to attack the ex-Muslim movement. They claim it was “created to serve as a weapon against Islam… a piece of the puzzle of the ‘Clash of Civilisations.’” Their argument reproduces the Clash of Civilisations thesis, which denies internal complexity by essentialising people and society into civilisational blocs. Dissent from religion is explained not as a social phenomenon but as an extension of Western power. In this framework, criticism cannot originate within society itself but must be attributed to external forces. This is the standard accusation of theocratic regimes, that apostates, secularists, and feminists are agents of foreign powers. The Islamic regime of Iran has used it for decades to imprison, torture, and execute opponents.
Ex-Muslims, however, are the product of material conditions in which belief is enforced through state, law, family, community, and violence. They emerge wherever the freedom to believe or not believe is denied. Their existence is not explained by imperialism but by the contradictions within societies governed by religious fundamentalism.[i]
The reduction of dissent to an instrument of Western power means no criticism is valid if it can be appropriated by a dominant power. That would render all emancipatory politics impossible.
Collective Blame and the Denial of Agency
The same logic that reduces dissent to imperial instrument also reduces dissenters to a homogeneous bloc serving a single geopolitical function.
Civil rights movements emerge from material conditions, not from imperial design. The gay rights movement was not created by Western state power. It was created by people persecuted for who they are. The women's liberation movement was not a geopolitical instrument. It was built by women who refused subordination. The ex-Muslim movement was established for the right to apostasy and blasphemy because those rights are denied. It brings together people across a wide political spectrum, united by opposition to apostasy and blasphemy laws, not by shared ideology. Its members hold widely different political views, as do Muslims. To say ex-Muslims serve imperialism is the same as saying Muslims serve Islamism. It erases individual agency, social movements, and class politics. It imposes a fixed collective identity carrying collective blame, guilt and punishment.
Provocation, Civil Disobedience, and Who Decides
If political legitimacy is determined by which camp you are aligned with, then forms of resistance that do not conform to it are recast as illegitimate.
Majedi and Arjomand characterise CEMB’s fast-defying protests as “provocative and hostile”[ii] and ask what they achieve. The question itself is revealing; effectiveness is recognised only when resistance aligns with their framework. In Morocco, Ibtissame Betty Lachgar and MALI organised a public picnic during Ramadan. Lachgar is currently serving two and a half years in prison for wearing an Allah is Lesbian t-shirt. In Iran, women burn their hijabs, people sing and dance at funerals, acts of collective presence in public space that the state has criminalised, making coercion visible and contesting it.
Civil disobedience has always worked this way, from Montgomery to Tehran, by asserting the right to act against unjust authority, exposing the mechanisms of control, and shifting what is considered permissible. Its effectiveness lies precisely in making visible what power seeks to normalise.
Topless protest is another example. There is a difference between the commodification of women's bodies, which serves domination, and their autonomous use as instruments of resistance, which challenges it. Conflating the two reproduces the terms through which women's bodies are policed, now in the name of political propriety rather than religion, but with the same effect.
Like Majedi and Arjomand, the powerful have always described resistance as provocation. Refusing compulsory veiling is framed as offence. Eating during Ramadan is framed as subversion. Dissent from apostasy laws is framed as incitement. In each case what is treated as the problem is not the coercion but the refusal of it.
None of this is new. In 2012, Majedi dismissed the Nude Photo Revolutionary Calendar, made in solidarity with Aliaa Magda Elmahdy as “idiocy” and “buffoonery,” and criticised acts of bodily defiance as aiding reaction. The same argument is repeated here.
Insinuation, Antisemitism, and the Collapse of Evidence
Once dissent is treated as illegitimate, it can be easily discredited. In a video interview, Majedi claimed, without evidence, that feminists and secularists who declined her conference did so because their organisations were funded by Soros and "effectively corrupt." In an article, she says that Soros "was a Jewish Nazi collaborator in Hungary, during the war." Independent fact-checking has shown this to be false.
In a separate interview, Majedi references Jews "eating babies' blood" in connection with a synagogue tunnel incident. The Associated Press documented that the incident involved an unauthorised tunnel built by a religious faction over an internal dispute, with no evidence of any crime. Blood libel is one of the oldest antisemitic fabrications in recorded history.[iii]
This is where the logic of enforced binaries leads. When alignment becomes the criterion of truth, evidentiary standards collapse, and what would otherwise be immediately challenged passes in the name of anti-imperialism.
The Third Pole: From Principle to Necessity
What emerges across these arguments is a consistent political method: the subordination of one form of domination to another, the delegitimisation of dissent, and the erosion of evidentiary standards. The question that follows is what kind of politics can oppose this.
Hekmat articulated the third pole as a material necessity: a force rooted in workers, women, secularists, and dissidents, standing against both poles of reaction simultaneously. It is not a position of balance but one grounded in the struggles of those subjected to multiple forms of domination.
This was the shared position of Majedi and Arjomand as signatories to the Third Camp Manifesto in 2006. That manifesto was an insistence that the working class and the oppressed have no camp among reactionary powers, that their interests are served neither by US-led imperialism nor by Islamism, and that building an independent force against both is a precondition of any meaningful emancipatory politics.
To treat one reactionary camp as primary in a way that renders the other secondary is to abandon that method, and to abandon those who live under both simultaneously.[iv]
Conditions have changed since the manifesto was published but the necessity for a third pole has not. If anything, it has become more urgent with perpetual wars in the Middle East between reactionary forces.
Conclusion: No Liberation Through Erasure
A politics that subordinates one form of domination to another does not clarify the world. It obscures it. It does not strengthen opposition to oppression. It leaves those who confront multiple forms of domination without a politics that represents them. There is no emancipation in ranking oppressions or deferring struggles.
This is the practical consequence of the method they defend. By treating imperialism as the organising axis of all analysis, it renders other forms of domination secondary or derivative. By treating dissent as alignment, it delegitimises those who refuse that framework. By replacing analysis with insinuation, it lowers the standard of political argument itself.
The alternative is not a false choice between competing powers, but independence from them. A third pole confronting both imperialism and the religious-Right simultaneously.
This requires opposing genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran without qualification. It requires naming US militarism and Israeli occupation as structural forms of domination. It requires refusing to treat Islamism as anything other than a reactionary political project that suppresses workers, subordinates women, and eliminates dissent. It requires defending the right to leave religion without coercion or punishment. It requires a politics that does not ask any section of the oppressed to wait.
The third pole does not disappear because it is denied. It exists wherever people confront multiple forms of domination simultaneously. This is the condition of any politics of emancipation.
References
The practical consequence of Majedi and Arjomand’s method leads to absurdities: anti-war protests flying the flags of Hamas and the Islamic regime of Iran; sections of the Western Left marching for women's rights while defending a regime that has made women's subordination a cornerstone of its rule. This is the logical outcome of a framework that grants full political agency to those resisting Western imperialism, while denying it to those resisting other forms of power.
The Hamas Question: What Kind of Society?
Majedi and Arjomand invoke the African National Congress (ANC) during apartheid South Africa as precedent and argue that condemning Hamas in the current context aligns with imperial narratives. But what kind of society does Hamas seek to build?
Hamas is not simply a “resistance” force. It is a governing apparatus, institutional, coercive, and theocratic, that has displaced the Palestinian Left, suppresses secular organisation, and reorganises Palestinian social life around religious fundamentalism.
Israel enabled Hamas’s rise as a deliberate strategy to divide and weaken the secular PLO but Hamas is responsible for its own crimes. Hamas governs, disciplines, and coerces. Its victims are primarily Palestinians. Patriarchal controls such as dress codes, restrictions on public movement, and the subordination of women’s testimony and inheritance rights within a Sharia framework are central mechanisms of social discipline. A liberation movement that subordinates women is not a liberation movement.
On October 7th, Hamas killed at least 828 civilians, including 36 children. The UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict concluded there are reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape occurred during those attacks. Hostages were taken. A progressive position cannot ignore sexual violence or the killing of civilians regardless of political context. The right to resist occupation has never included the right to rape, massacre civilians, or take hostages. Questions about Israeli intelligence failures on that day do not alter what Hamas did, who the victims were, or what a principled politics must say about it.
Moreover, the ANC comparison does not hold. The ANC’s Freedom Charter was committed to a non-racial, secular society with universal rights, linking national liberation to social emancipation. Hamas’s founding charter articulates a theocratic political project. These are not analogous.
The 1979 Iranian revolution provides a clear historical example. Islamism came to power in conditions engineered in significant part by Cold War strategy, fostering Islamism as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and Left. Then, too, sections of the Left subordinated their criticism of Islamism to their opposition to the Shah, treating the clerical movement as a lesser enemy to Western imperialism. A politics unable to confront multiple forms of domination simultaneously has no ground from which to resist.
The “Clash of Civilisations” Inversion
Majedi and Arjomand use the discussion on Gaza to attack the ex-Muslim movement. They claim it was “created to serve as a weapon against Islam… a piece of the puzzle of the ‘Clash of Civilisations.’” Their argument reproduces the Clash of Civilisations thesis, which denies internal complexity by essentialising people and society into civilisational blocs. Dissent from religion is explained not as a social phenomenon but as an extension of Western power. In this framework, criticism cannot originate within society itself but must be attributed to external forces. This is the standard accusation of theocratic regimes, that apostates, secularists, and feminists are agents of foreign powers. The Islamic regime of Iran has used it for decades to imprison, torture, and execute opponents.
Ex-Muslims, however, are the product of material conditions in which belief is enforced through state, law, family, community, and violence. They emerge wherever the freedom to believe or not believe is denied. Their existence is not explained by imperialism but by the contradictions within societies governed by religious fundamentalism.[i]
The reduction of dissent to an instrument of Western power means no criticism is valid if it can be appropriated by a dominant power. That would render all emancipatory politics impossible.
Collective Blame and the Denial of Agency
The same logic that reduces dissent to imperial instrument also reduces dissenters to a homogeneous bloc serving a single geopolitical function.
Civil rights movements emerge from material conditions, not from imperial design. The gay rights movement was not created by Western state power. It was created by people persecuted for who they are. The women's liberation movement was not a geopolitical instrument. It was built by women who refused subordination. The ex-Muslim movement was established for the right to apostasy and blasphemy because those rights are denied. It brings together people across a wide political spectrum, united by opposition to apostasy and blasphemy laws, not by shared ideology. Its members hold widely different political views, as do Muslims. To say ex-Muslims serve imperialism is the same as saying Muslims serve Islamism. It erases individual agency, social movements, and class politics. It imposes a fixed collective identity carrying collective blame, guilt and punishment.
Provocation, Civil Disobedience, and Who Decides
If political legitimacy is determined by which camp you are aligned with, then forms of resistance that do not conform to it are recast as illegitimate.
Majedi and Arjomand characterise CEMB’s fast-defying protests as “provocative and hostile”[ii] and ask what they achieve. The question itself is revealing; effectiveness is recognised only when resistance aligns with their framework. In Morocco, Ibtissame Betty Lachgar and MALI organised a public picnic during Ramadan. Lachgar is currently serving two and a half years in prison for wearing an Allah is Lesbian t-shirt. In Iran, women burn their hijabs, people sing and dance at funerals, acts of collective presence in public space that the state has criminalised, making coercion visible and contesting it.
Civil disobedience has always worked this way, from Montgomery to Tehran, by asserting the right to act against unjust authority, exposing the mechanisms of control, and shifting what is considered permissible. Its effectiveness lies precisely in making visible what power seeks to normalise.
Topless protest is another example. There is a difference between the commodification of women's bodies, which serves domination, and their autonomous use as instruments of resistance, which challenges it. Conflating the two reproduces the terms through which women's bodies are policed, now in the name of political propriety rather than religion, but with the same effect.
Like Majedi and Arjomand, the powerful have always described resistance as provocation. Refusing compulsory veiling is framed as offence. Eating during Ramadan is framed as subversion. Dissent from apostasy laws is framed as incitement. In each case what is treated as the problem is not the coercion but the refusal of it.
None of this is new. In 2012, Majedi dismissed the Nude Photo Revolutionary Calendar, made in solidarity with Aliaa Magda Elmahdy as “idiocy” and “buffoonery,” and criticised acts of bodily defiance as aiding reaction. The same argument is repeated here.
Insinuation, Antisemitism, and the Collapse of Evidence
Once dissent is treated as illegitimate, it can be easily discredited. In a video interview, Majedi claimed, without evidence, that feminists and secularists who declined her conference did so because their organisations were funded by Soros and "effectively corrupt." In an article, she says that Soros "was a Jewish Nazi collaborator in Hungary, during the war." Independent fact-checking has shown this to be false.
In a separate interview, Majedi references Jews "eating babies' blood" in connection with a synagogue tunnel incident. The Associated Press documented that the incident involved an unauthorised tunnel built by a religious faction over an internal dispute, with no evidence of any crime. Blood libel is one of the oldest antisemitic fabrications in recorded history.[iii]
This is where the logic of enforced binaries leads. When alignment becomes the criterion of truth, evidentiary standards collapse, and what would otherwise be immediately challenged passes in the name of anti-imperialism.
The Third Pole: From Principle to Necessity
What emerges across these arguments is a consistent political method: the subordination of one form of domination to another, the delegitimisation of dissent, and the erosion of evidentiary standards. The question that follows is what kind of politics can oppose this.
Hekmat articulated the third pole as a material necessity: a force rooted in workers, women, secularists, and dissidents, standing against both poles of reaction simultaneously. It is not a position of balance but one grounded in the struggles of those subjected to multiple forms of domination.
This was the shared position of Majedi and Arjomand as signatories to the Third Camp Manifesto in 2006. That manifesto was an insistence that the working class and the oppressed have no camp among reactionary powers, that their interests are served neither by US-led imperialism nor by Islamism, and that building an independent force against both is a precondition of any meaningful emancipatory politics.
To treat one reactionary camp as primary in a way that renders the other secondary is to abandon that method, and to abandon those who live under both simultaneously.[iv]
Conditions have changed since the manifesto was published but the necessity for a third pole has not. If anything, it has become more urgent with perpetual wars in the Middle East between reactionary forces.
Conclusion: No Liberation Through Erasure
A politics that subordinates one form of domination to another does not clarify the world. It obscures it. It does not strengthen opposition to oppression. It leaves those who confront multiple forms of domination without a politics that represents them. There is no emancipation in ranking oppressions or deferring struggles.
This is the practical consequence of the method they defend. By treating imperialism as the organising axis of all analysis, it renders other forms of domination secondary or derivative. By treating dissent as alignment, it delegitimises those who refuse that framework. By replacing analysis with insinuation, it lowers the standard of political argument itself.
The alternative is not a false choice between competing powers, but independence from them. A third pole confronting both imperialism and the religious-Right simultaneously.
This requires opposing genocide in Gaza and the bombing of Iran without qualification. It requires naming US militarism and Israeli occupation as structural forms of domination. It requires refusing to treat Islamism as anything other than a reactionary political project that suppresses workers, subordinates women, and eliminates dissent. It requires defending the right to leave religion without coercion or punishment. It requires a politics that does not ask any section of the oppressed to wait.
The third pole does not disappear because it is denied. It exists wherever people confront multiple forms of domination simultaneously. This is the condition of any politics of emancipation.
References
[i] Secular conference manifestos from CEMB and One Law for All condemn all religious-Right movements, including Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, and Islamic. The charge of double standards on Judaism is contradicted by a consistent public record.
[ii] CEMB’s fast-defying actions take place in front of the embassies of Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. They target states that imprison, flog, and kill people for eating during Ramadan. The solidarity action is with those persecuted during this month.
[iii] Links to statements are available here.
[iv] Majedi and Arjomand say: “8 months into a genocide… Ex-Muslim had not even whispered a word against this genocide…” For context: I refused to sign their March 2024 statement on “Genocide in Gaza, Where Does the Women's Rights Movement Stand” precisely because it condemned genocide without one word against Hamas. I supported Feminist Dissent’s April 2024 statement, which named both. The October 2024 statement by a number of ex-Muslims named both as well. The timing of a response is not analysis. It does not show that Islamism is politically secondary, that criticism of Hamas is illegitimate, or that the third pole should be abandoned. It establishes only a demand for silence on one form of domination in the name of another. On the December 2023 conference co-organised by CEMB and Laiques sans Frontiere, the conference was specifically about laïcité and the separation of religion and state.
[ii] CEMB’s fast-defying actions take place in front of the embassies of Iran, Pakistan, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. They target states that imprison, flog, and kill people for eating during Ramadan. The solidarity action is with those persecuted during this month.
[iii] Links to statements are available here.
[iv] Majedi and Arjomand say: “8 months into a genocide… Ex-Muslim had not even whispered a word against this genocide…” For context: I refused to sign their March 2024 statement on “Genocide in Gaza, Where Does the Women's Rights Movement Stand” precisely because it condemned genocide without one word against Hamas. I supported Feminist Dissent’s April 2024 statement, which named both. The October 2024 statement by a number of ex-Muslims named both as well. The timing of a response is not analysis. It does not show that Islamism is politically secondary, that criticism of Hamas is illegitimate, or that the third pole should be abandoned. It establishes only a demand for silence on one form of domination in the name of another. On the December 2023 conference co-organised by CEMB and Laiques sans Frontiere, the conference was specifically about laïcité and the separation of religion and state.
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| Maryam Namazie is a is a British-Iranian secularist, communist and human rights activist, commentator, and broadcaster. |
