Women Against Fundamentalism

Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) was founded in 1989 as a feminist, anti-racist and anti-fundamentalist group as a direct response to the Satanic Verses Affair. It emerged out of a meeting on 8 March 1989 co-convened by Southall Black Sisters and the Southall Labour Party’s Women’s Section. WAF was officially founded on 6 May 1989, issuing a statement later published in The Times and joining the counter-demonstration in London on 27 May 1989 against an anti-Rushdie protest. A foundational moment, the demonstration featured in Gita Sahgal’s film Struggle or Submission. WAF also supported Taslima Nasreen when she was issued with a fatwa and exiled for her novel Lajja.

Bringing together a range of voices and political views, the organization was underpinned by shared solidarities that shored up the organization as an activist and political force. Its objective was to challenge fundamentalisms across the religious spectrum. Its broad-based membership was drawn from wide-ranging backgrounds who grouped themselves around a shared position as feminists. The organization defined fundamentalism as the instrumentalization of religion by political actors to come into, retain and consolidate political power. Established as a women-only organization, it championed women’s rights in a contestation of imposed norms and strictures justified through religion, culture and tradition. It also sought to challenge attempts to stifle dissent through community spokesmanship and leadership. While the group was critical of religion as a tool for power, it did not reject it outright. However, they saw the need to defend secular spaces as central to securing and maintaining equality.

The organization’s main objectives included alerting society to the rise of fundamentalism across the religious spectrum, campaigning for women’s rights and control over their own bodies and lives, and an opposition to Christian privilege in state institutions and demands for the extension of religious accommodation.

From 1994 onwards, the organization published its own journal, Women Against Fundamentalism, with a frequency of six issues a year. Based in London, the organization later set up a branch in the north of England and developed partnerships and solidaric alignment with other feminist and anti-racist organizations across the UK, including Catholics for Free Choice, Women Living under Muslim Laws and the Association of Women in Development, and Women in Black, Women United Against Racism.

In 1996, the organization went on a hiatus, though group members continued their activist work through other groupings and campaigning organizations, including Southall Black Sisters and Women in Black and refuge and migrant campaign charities. The group revived its activities in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the increasingly polarized political landscape and debates on fundamentalisms. WAF saw the importance of arguing against both the so-called War on Terror and fundamentalism. In 2014 the organization formally ended, though individual activists continue their campaign work through other organizations.

WAF responded to complex local, regional, national and global contexts, building broad-based coalitions although it found them organizationally difficult to maintain. WAF highlighted the importance for an intersectional feminist activism that is committed to anti-racism and anti-fundamentalism.