Marieme Hélie-Lucas: friend and hero.

We are completely heartbroken that Marieme Hélie-Lucas, our hero, mentor, friend and comrade, is no more. Words cannot express what she meant to us, politically and personally. We consider ourselves fortunate to have been touched by her life.

We were meant to visit her in France in June. She was so excited about the visit. She insisted on picking us up from the airport and repeatedly reminded us to bring our swimming suits. Between all the planned activities, she looked forward to discussing her new ideas about setting the world right. Sadly, a week before our flight, we had to cancel our visit when she became gravely ill. We never got to see her again.

Marieme taught us so much of what we know about the rise of religious fundamentalism and the Religious Right. A stalwart in the struggle for women’s liberation, she was analysing and warning about these developments long before many others recognised their political significance. Born in Algiers in 1939, Marieme’s world view was shaped by the Algerian struggle against French colonialism and the war of independence. She experienced both the enormous hope that national liberation brings but also the reality that women’s liberation can quickly become subordinated or postponed. She later witnessed the growing power of Islamic fundamentalism and the dangers it posed to women, minorities, dissenters and civilians.

Marieme refused to accept that fundamentalist movements can be defended merely because they oppose imperialism or Western powers. She challenged the Left to oppose colonialism and imperialism while also confronting the Religious Right. She never accepted the false choice between fighting racism or fighting fundamentalism.

Marieme worked tirelessly to support feminist struggles worldwide and encouraged others to do the same. She thought and acted internationally. She founded Women Living Under Muslim Laws, the international feminist network, and later Secularism Is A Women’s Issue.

She helped build an international feminist politics capable of confronting religious fundamentalism without capitulating to racism, and defending universal rights without forgetting colonial history. She insisted that women could not be sacrificed to culture, community, religion, nationalism, or anti- imperialism.

She challenged the assumption that everyone born into a Muslim family belonged to a homogeneous “Muslim community”. Even the name Women Living Under Muslim Laws, rather than “Muslim women”, expressed something fundamental to her politics: where you are born and the laws imposed upon you do not determine what you believe, who you are or who has the right to speak in your name.

This made Marieme particularly important to the ex-Muslim movement. She defended the political spaces in which atheists, secularists, apostates and dissenters from Muslim backgrounds could exist and speak for themselves. She stood for freedom of conscience, freedom of expression and the right to leave and criticise religion. In her later years, she said the ex-Muslim movement had become a political home for her.

Across more than six decades, Marieme did what she demanded of others: she thought internationally, documented resistance, connected struggles and turned solidarity into action. Our work, and that of countless others, has consistently drawn upon her clarity of vision, incisive analysis, internationalism and fearless spirit.

We will miss her more than words can express. We will miss her urgency and relentless commitment. Despite her advancing age, she bombarded us daily with a dozen or more emails reminding us of another struggle, another injustice, another person who needed solidarity. We struggled just to keep pace with her.

We will always regret that we never made that final visit. But we know that planning it brought her and us joy. We never got to hear her new ideas, but it is entirely characteristic of Marieme that, even near the end of an extraordinary political life, she still thought about how to make the world a better place.

Goodbye, dear friend. We will ensure that your spirit and legacy live on.

Pragna Patel and Maryam Namazie