Washing Our Linen: One Year of Women against Fundamentalism

The Ayatollah's fatwa against Salman Rushdie, in February 1989, has had as equally unsettling effects on the left as on the mainstream of British politics. The campaign against the Satanic Verses has revealed an increasingly confident and militant section of the Asian community, marching under the banner of Islam rather than of antiracism. Socialists long unused to the passions aroused by religion were taken by surprise. Feminists, beginning to absorb the emphasis that Black feminists were placing on cultural autonomy in the face of racism, were equally puzzled by the metamorphosis of'culture' into a celebration of masculinity on the streets. Though uneasy in the knowledge that the defence of free speech has traditionally been the onus of radicals, both movements left the defence of Rushdie largely to his peers in the liberal literary establishment. On International Women's Day however, at the height of the post-fatwa furore, Southall Black Sisters (SBS) and Ealing Labour Party Women's Section held a public meeting in defence of Rushdie which was to help dissipate such confusion. SBS, now a mainly Asian advice and campaigning centre in West London, was formed ten years ago in the heat of Black and antiracist political ferment. Its decennial report, Against the Grain (SBS, 1990), gives an eloquent account of its evolution and present concerns. Organizing against domestic violence has brought them into conflict with local community leaders and the antiracist left. Accused, in common with other Black and ethnic minority feminists, of 'washing our dirty linen' at the expense of antiracist unity, they have countered with a spirited attack on the politics of multiculturalism, which views minority communities as homogeneous entities at the expense of class and particularly of gender conflict (Sahgal, 1989).