You get a (more or less) secular state in predominantly religious society only if you severely limit democracy, via the military (e.g., of the Turkish military, the Ba'ath Party of Syria, the Ba'ath Party of Iraq, the FLN of Algeria) or confessional power-sharing (e.g., Lebanon after its civil war).
Social democracy becomes secular and gender-egalitarian if social democracy arises and develops in a society that gets richer, more secular, and more gender-egalitarian. "Left social democracy" that Tariq Ali hails in Latin America is not exactly secular nor is it particularly gender-egalitarian: the FSLN and the FMLN voted for a total ban on abortions, even when a woman's life is at risk, which makes abortion laws in Nicaragua and El Salvador more repressive than those in Iran, Iraq (before the US invasion), Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries where abortion to save a woman's life is permitted.
Abortion in Nicaragua: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6161396.stm>
Abortion in El Salvador: <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html>
Abortion in Iran: <http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/abortion/doc/iran.doc>
If you do not favor severe limits on democracy by the permanent rule or periodic interventions by the secularist military, you will have to wait for a war of position in a society, led by women themselves, inside and outside the existing institutions to gradually change things better for women.
On 11/27/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> The "populist"
> component - in the economic sense - of the Iranian regime is
> Ahmadinejad's contribution, not the long-reigning mullahs'.
Clerics in Iran, or anywhere else for that matter, do not come in just one variety, whether you look at their thought and practice with regard to economics or women's rights or anything else. Khamenei, a majority of the Guardian Council, a majority of the Assembly of Experts, and so on are to the right of Ahmadinejad but to the left of reformist politicians, clerical or non-clerical, in Iran, when it comes to economics.
On 11/27/06, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> I haven't seen any of the material of the movement, except indirectly, but I
> think it's a good guess that the model the Sadrists have in mind most
> closely approximates the Islamic Republic of Iran.
I'll see if I can get things at <http://www.muqtada.com/news/>, etc. translated into English.
The Sadrist movement is unlikly to be as good as the Iranian Revolution, for it has no competition from a sizable organized Marxist left in Iraq, unlike religious revolutionaries in Iran who had to compete with -- and absorbed many of their social, economic, and political ideas from -- Marxists as well as the examples of state socialism abroad which was held in relatively high regard back then in the developing world.
Moreover, Iran had the first (liberal and Islamic) and last (populist, nationalist, and Islamic) revolutions in the Middle East (the last one is the only instance of the predominantly urban social revolution that has endured in the world to this day), with Mohammed Mossadegh's oil nationalization frustrated by the Anglo-American coup against it between the two revolutions. Who else has such a remarkable revolutionary history in the Middle East? I think of the Iranians as the French of the Middle East: no socialism yet, but many revolts and revolutions, still untamed by urbanization. :-> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>