In this week’s issue of Pambazuka News, activist Nawal El Saadawi writes about the inter-relationship between the power of the military, the police, capitalist markets and media, and religion, both at a global and local level. El Saadawi recently founded the Global Solidarity Movement for Secular Society, ‘to save women and men, globally and locally, from unjust laws forced on them under the name of God or religion.’ Religion is ‘a very personal individual private matter’, argues El Saadawi, and should be ‘totally separated from public life.'

cc US president Barack Obama might seem more human than his predecessor George W. Bush, cautions Nawal El Saadawi, but in a world ruled by a capitalist patriarchal religious system, politics is 'a game based on how to use beautiful words to cover ugly actions' and has 'nothing to do with humanity'. The real goal of Obama's Cairo speech, says El Saadawi, is 'to mobilise Muslim countries against Islamic extremists', 'to open the markets of Islamic countries to American goods' under the banner of development and partnership, and 'to guarantee Saudi and Gulf oil and other American interests' in the Middle East.